The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

“We were kids with long hair and plaid shirts playing Mexican folk instruments,” said Los Lobos’ Louie Perez. But the band, lifelong friends from East L.A., became a surprise success, mixing traditional Mexican sounds with blues and rockabilly for tough, whomping roots rock like “I Got Loaded” and “Don’t Worry Baby.” There are excellent songwriting moments, too, like “A Matter of Time,” a tender, moving dialogue between a young married couple with dreams of immigrating to find a better life.

Elvis Costello on the fuel for his debut: “I spent a lot of time with just a big jar of instant coffee and the first Clash album [see No. 102], listening to it over and over.” The music is more pub rock than punk rock, but the songs are full of punk’s verbal bite. The album’s opening lines — “Now that your picture’s in the paper being rhythmically admired” — and the poisoned-valentine ballad “Alison” established Costello as one of the sharpest, and nastiest, lyricists of his generation.

The Four Tops were the most dramatic of the Motown singing groups, driven by the towering vocals of Levi Stubbs. Reach Out has overwrought classics like the title track, the goth-soul tsunami “7 Rooms of Gloom,” and “Bernadette,” on which lust and paranoia spontaneously combust. They also branch out into rock and folk with covers of the Monkees and Tim Hardin. It was the last Motown album for the label’s definitive songwriting team Holland, Dozier, and Holland.

These three Minneapolis dudes played savagely emotional hardcore punk that became a key influence on Nirvana, among others (Hüsker Dü guitarist Bob Mould was an early candidate to produce Nevermind, before the job went to Butch Vig). Mould and the band created a roar like garbage trucks trying to sing Beach Boys songs, especially on the anthems “Celebrated Summer” and “Perfect Example,” and on the wondrous “Books About UFOs,” drummer Grant Hart gets on the piano and plunks out a jaunty love song to an amateur astronomer.

Green was absolutely fearless at this point, an innovator willing to try any crazy idea — country ballads, jazz chords, even a gospel tune. Producer Willie Mitchell and his studio band of virtuoso Memphis R&B pros create the sultriest grooves south of the Mason-Dixon line. Green testifies to the glories of love in “Call Me” and “Have You Been Making Out O.K.” When he reaches up for that falsetto growl at the end of “Your Love Is Like the Morning Sun,” it’s like he’s bringing down the sugar walls of Jericho.

In 1988, this album didn’t make sense. It was twangy, but it wasn’t country. It rocked, but it wasn’t rock. It was blue, but wasn’t the blues. Williams hadn’t released an album in eight years, perhaps worn down by the lack of attention her music received. That began to change with this self-titled LP, recorded with a taut three-piece band. Her consistent theme is longing (“I Just Wanted to See You So Bad,” “Passionate Kisses”), but there’s also defiance and desperation in “Changed the Locks,” later covered by Tom Petty.

Simon’s first solo effort after the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel had plenty to prove, and it did, with a tour de force of songcraft, virtuosic guitar picking, upper-register vocal dazzle, and vivid storytelling about sex (“Duncan”), politics (“Peace Like a River”), and everyday life in New York (“Paranoia Blues”). The album also laid a blueprint for the fluid international fusion Simon explored further on Graceland — from the reggae of “Mother and Child Reunion” to the samba-inflected “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.”

Burrowing into the studio with the Dust Brothers, Beck came back with a Technicolor version of his Woody Guthrie-meets-Grandmaster Flash vision, demonstrating to all his rock peers on “Devil’s Haircut” and “Where It’s At” that turntables had a brighter future than refried grunge, while reminding listeners of the Sixties and his own folk roots with the shabby, lovely “Jack-Ass.” As he told Rolling Stone in 1997, “I’m a traditionalist in a lot of ways. A lot of what my generation is into, what it represents, I’m totally against.”

In rock, as in life, breakups get all the attention; successful marriages tend to generate fewer headlines. But Yo La Tengo — the long-married couple of Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan, plus bassist James McNew — is a testament to figuring it out together. The band’s 1997 masterpiece is indie rock at its most joyfully exploratory, with deeply catchy fuzz-jams, some Casio-keyboard bossa nova, a cover of the Beach Boys’ “Little Honda, and “Autumn Sweater,” a stone-cold classic that turns organ, percussion, and shy murmuring into something mesmerizing and beautiful.

“I mumble things into the microphone,” Gaye said. “I don’t even know what I’m saying, and I don’t even try to figure it out. If I try, it doesn’t work. If I relax, those mumbles will finally turn into words.” On this album, those words turn into meditations on the gap between sex and love and how to reconcile them. Songs like “Just to Keep You Satisfied” and “You Sure Love to Ball” are some of the most gorgeous music of his career.

What’s the opposite of a girl next door? Perhaps it might be a radicalized, globalized pop star like M.I.A., an English-Tamil writer who provocatively questioned and deconstructed ideas about power and rebellion throughout her first album. She raps and cajoles in hard-chopping cadences (“I bongo with my lingo,” indeed), and mixes jokes, disses, and political insight about the abuse of authority over electronic beats that can sound like New York City electroclash or Brazilian funk. And her hipster hit “Galang” hit as hard as any hip-hop around at the time.

Before he got into African thumb piano and otherworldly philosophizing, founder Maurice White was a session drummer at Chess studios (that’s him on Fontella Bass’ “Rescue Me”). He stayed behind the kit as he led EWF. Their sixth album is make-out music of the spheres, incorporating doo-wop, jazz, and African music into a sound that’s sleek but never too slick; the title track is one of funk’s most gorgeous ballads, and “Shining Star” is a Seventies self-help seminar delivered over one of the decade’s sweetest grooves.

Eric Church emerged in the mid-2000s as one of country music’s best new singer-songwriters, and his third album rolled all of his gifts into a tight package that was rock-influenced, rough around the edges, and catchy as hell. “Hungover & Hard Up” shows the North Carolina native’s abiding gift for drowning his sorrows in booze and melody, and on the classic “Springsteen,” he invokes Bruce’s music as a way to access the passion of youth. The songwriting is so confident, even the ballads swagger a bit.

Mark Knopfler started writing “Money for Nothing” when he overheard a New York appliance salesman’s anti-rock-star, anti-MTV rant. The song, of course, became a huge MTV hit, and this album shows off Knopfler’s incisive songwriting and lush guitar riffs on hits like “Walk of Life” and “So Far Away,” as well as hidden gems like the Dylanesque blues “The Man’s Too Strong” and “Why Worry,” where Knopfler’s clear, subtle playing flows by like a cool brook over slick pebbles.

Ornette Coleman’s sound was so out there, one audience at an early gig threw his tenor sax over a cliff. He switched to alto and pioneered free jazz: no chords, no harmony, any player can take the lead. It’s still a jarring sound to encounter for the first time, but Coleman’s freedom was grounded in the cathartic release of the gospel and blues of his native Texas. On his first album for Atlantic Records, his music can be just as lyrical as it is demanding, particularly on the haunting “Lonely Woman.”

The Nineties’ alternative-rap scene hit its high-water mark as an album-length art form with this love letter to black music in the late 20th century. That theme is most explicit on on “Act Too (The Love of My Life),” a tender dedication to hip-hop’s redemptive power, but it’s also there in the playful way Black Thought and Malik B bounce rhymes off each other and in the beats that riff affectionately on everyone from Sly Stone to Schoolly D in a kaleidoscopic celebration of musical soul.

The Meters were the house band for New Orleans’ genius producer Allen Toussaint and played on Seventies landmarks such as LaBelle’s Nightbirds, while also running off a series of their own rock-solid LPs. These instrumentals — sampled by rappers including Nas and Salt-N-Pepa — are funk of the gods; tight, cutting, but also relaxed and inviting, with Art Neville’s lyrical Hammond B3 organ adding chill texture to George Porter Jr.’s monster bass and the off-the-beat Second Line swing of drummer of Ziggy Modeliste.

Nobody thought a disco band was supposed to make a brilliant third album — but Chic always thrived on defying the odds. On Risqué, the dynamic duo of guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards fuse sleek tropical R&B, Anglophile New Wave, and NYC club flash for a sound that’s been the blueprint for pop radio ever since. “Good Times” is Chic’s most prophetic groove — the story of hip-hop on wax begins here, with the Sugarhill Gang rhyming over it for “Rapper’s Delight.”

Cosmo’s Factory was CCR’s third classic album in under a year. John Fogerty began it with the seven-minute power-choogle “Ramble Tamble,” raging against “actors in the White House.” The hits include the country travelogue “Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” the Vietnam nightmare “Run Through the Jungle,” the Little Richard tribute “Travelin’ Band,” and the Stax-style ballad “Long as I Can See the Light.” But the triumph is CCR’s 11-minute cowbell-crazed jam on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” proof these guys could mix hippie visions with populist grit.

Motown at its most debonair and sexy. Smokey Robinson works his sweeping soul falsetto over unbelievably sad ballads, including “The Tracks of My Tears” and “Ooo Baby Baby,” as the Miracles sob along. Robinson made it seem effortless to write a constant string of hit singles for the Miracles, as well as the rest of the Motown roster, but this album also has some of his finest deep cuts, especially the helpless yearning of “Choosey Beggar.”

The blood and glory of 1997’s Time Out of Mind had raised the bar: This was the first Dylan album in years that had to live up to fans’ expectations. He didn’t just exceed them — he blew them up. Dylan sang in the voice of a grizzled drifter who’d visited every nook and cranny of America and gotten chased out of them all. Love and Theft was full of corny vaudeville jokes and apocalyptic floods, from the guitar rave “Summer Days” to the country lilt of “Po’ Boy.”

After Pet Sounds and the aborted Smiley Smile, what was left for the Beach Boys to do? Invent the idea of DIY pop. Ditching the opulent and intricate arrangements of those two albums, Wild Honey returned them to their days as a spunky, self-contained band. In 24 concise but utterly winning minutes, they romp through set of low-fi sunbaked melodies and R&B and soul homages — all suffused with warmth, sly hooks, and a sense of band unity, even as a frazzled Brian Wilson was starting to pull back.

“We weren’t feeling like an experimental music group, but were feeling more like a good old band,” Jerry Garcia said. The Dead stripped down for Workingman’s Dead, with eight spooky blues and country songs that rival the best of Bob Dylan, as in the morbid “Black Peter” and “Dire Wolf.” Garcia and Robert Hunter proved themselves one of rock’s sharpest songwriting teams, with the acoustic hymn “Uncle John’s Band.” Hunter said, “It was my feeling about what the Dead was and could be. It was very much a song for us and about us, in the most hopeful sense.”

Neither punk nor metal, Motörhead played rock & roll nastier, grittier, and snarlier than their forebears on Ace of Spades. Amid a miasma of hypercharged guitar riffs and death-rattle drumming, frontman Lemmy Kilmister, splits his time between sleazy come-ons (“Love Me Like a Reptile”), war stories (“(We Are) The Road Crew”), and underdog maxims (“Live to Win”). The blazing title track epitomized the Motörhead experience: “You know I’m born to lose, and gambling’s for fools,” Lemmy growls, “but that’s the way I like it, baby, I don’t wanna live forever.” He meant it, too.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse hadn’t been together for more than eight weeks when they cut this album. It’s down-home hippie-grunge with the feel of a jam session conducted by master jammers. Both sides of the album end in monster, 10-minute guitar excursions, especially “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” and “Cinnamon Girl” was Young’s first big solo single, three minutes of crunching distortion featuring a one-note guitar solo for the ages — “the closest thing Crazy Horse had to a hit,” Young said.

“It started with the title,” Stephin Merritt said of 69 Love Songs, which he imagined in the Sinatra-era tradition of “theme” albums. A tour de force of pop mastery, his three-disc splurge had everything from lounge jazz to Podunk country to punk parody, peaking with sidelong standards like “Papa Was a Rodeo” and “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side.” God-level moment: “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure,” which is titled after a French linguist and rhymes his name with closure, bulldozer, and classic Motown songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland, hooking it all to an unforgettable tune.

This collection of Sixties garage rock, compiled by rock critic and soon-to-be Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye, became a touchstone for Seventies punks and, years later, for the aftershock of post-punk. The 27-track, two-LP set was a radical idea in 1972: While rock was getting bigger, Nuggets established a new canon out of forgotten AM-radio hits — brutally simple singles like the Standells’ “Dirty Water,” the Shadows of Knight’s “Oh Yeah!” and the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction.” Rhino expanded Nuggets into a sprawling four-CD box in 1998.

Before releasing Rapture, her breakout album, Anita Baker spent months “going to every publishing house in Los Angeles” hunting for what she described as “fireside love songs with jazz overtones.” She found eight songs that satisfied her requirements and polished them until they gleamed, combining an unpredictability that hinted at jazz with reassuring, unimpeachable hooks to create an album of deep romantic intimacy that sounded like little else in Eighties pop but still went multiplatinum.

“I feel like I got my whole style from Ghostface,” Kanye West has said. Lavishly unhinged and viciously hard-hitting, Ghostface Killah’s second solo album helped revive the Wu-Tang franchise, marinating lines like “Ghost is back, stretch Cadillacs, fruit cocktails/Hit the shelves at Paul’s pastry rack,” in serrated Seventies-soul samples. On “Nutmeg” he drops a mind-boxing cluster of psychedelic bullshit, then simply stands back during the chorus, letting the tape roll as he mocks all comers — an untouchable champ at the top of his game.

The title track is a 13-minute odyssey that epitomizes Nigerian funk king Fela Kuti’s knack for channeling fearless social commentary into body-moving grooves; the Africa 70 horns blare out infectious riffs as peerless drummer Tony Allen keeps up an indefatigable shuffling pulse, while Fela calls out the “fools” who would “use your shit to put you for jail.” Side Two’s “Water No Get Enemy” slows things down to a celebratory strut, concluding a short-yet-sweet effort that plays like a primer on the joys of Afrobeat.

“We’re gonna shoot the tube!” Debbie Harry promises on “In the Sun,” hanging 10 on the Bowery. Blondie had a hard time getting taken seriously in the CBGB punk scene. But while the band’s debut celebrates Sixties rock & roll at its campiest — girl groups, garage trash, surf bubblegum — Harry’s heart-on-sleeve swoon during “In the Flesh “ sincerely updated the Shangri-Las for the Lower East Side circa 1977, and the gritty “Rip Her to Shreds” showed Blondie could get down with the tough guys, too.