The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

Recorded on a four-track in Springsteen’s bedroom, Nebraska’s songs were stark, spooky acoustic demos that he decided to release “bare,” packed with hard-luck tales of underdogs. “I wanted black bedtime stories,” he said in his memoir, and he wrote the LP under the influence of John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson, but also Flannery O’Connor and James M. Cain, creating a cross between the blues and pulp-noir novels. “Down here it’s just winners and losers,” he sings in “Atlantic City,” and these 10 songs live on the wrong side of that line. Yet, Springsteen ends the album with “Reason to Believe,” one of those songs where his search for faith inspires faith itself.

When John Prine resigned from his job as a USPS mailman, his supervisor snickered, “You’ll be back.” Instead, Prine became a revered folk-country-rock songwriter, starting with this first album, which is loaded with enduring gems, including “Angel From Montgomery,” “Hello in There,” and a song that regularly returns to relevance, “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore.” Prine seemed like a Zen sage. He filled his songs with an uncynical live-and-let-live morality, and wrote in a colloquial voice that showed a love of the way Americans speak. His closest parallel isn’t another songwriter, it’s Mark Twain.

On Channel Orange, Frank Ocean became one of music’s most elusive superstars — shy about speaking in public, impossible to pin down musically. He emerged from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, writing pop tunes for the likes of Brandy and Justin Bieber. But he stepped into his own avant-soul territory with Channel Orange, his official debut. Soon after coming out of the closet — still a rarity in R&B at the time — Ocean had a hit with the falsetto slow jam “Thinkin Bout You.” He mixes up genres and vocal personae, with guest shots from André 3000 to John Mayer. The peak: the spacey 10-minute suite “Pyramids,” an Egyptian fantasy starring Cleopatra as an around-the-way girl. Years later, Channel Orange still sounds like the future.

In an era when love was an unpopular song topic, Buckley was a swooning romantic. He was the son of the late 1960s cult singer Tim Buckley, but identified himself as “rootless trailer-trash born in Southern California.” On extended slow-burning ballads like “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and his cover of “Hallelujah,” Buckley used unrestrained amounts of falsetto and vibrato to create an unearthly longing. His music had a smattering of grunge, a plateful of Led Zeppelin III (check the fierce rocker “Eternal Life”), and an opulent sense of tragedy. Grace is the only album Buckley released in his lifetime; he died in 1997 after going for a swim in a Memphis river known for its unpredictable currents.

Here’s where punk and New Wave broke through to a mass U.S. audience, thanks to the Number One hit “Heart of Glass,” also known to Blondie fans as “The Disco Song.” “I was trying to get that groove that the drummer for the Bee Gees had,” said Blondie drummer Clem Burke, who credited Kraftwerk and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack as influences on “Heart of Glass.” Parallel Lines is a perfect synthesis of raw punk edge, Sixties-pop smarts, and the cool New Wave glamour that Blondie invented. Debbie Harry, of course, invented a new kind of rock & roll sex appeal that brought New York demimonde style to the mainstream. Madonna was surely watching.

Chris Rock joked that the world was so crazy, “the best rapper is a white guy,” referring to Eminem. He’d been accused of corrupting the nation’s youth by fostering misogyny on his major-label debut, and to say he doubled down on playing with offensive ideas only exaggerates his joyful commitment to earning more denunciations. “The Real Slim Shady” and “Bitch Please II” vaulted Eminem from a shock rapper with a sense of humor to the voice of a generation. And in “Stan,” he created a verb and a meme to describe extreme fandom in our era.

The last great Led Zeppelin album is — like most 1970s double LPs — a bloated beast. But its self-indulgent swagger is the very unifying thing that makes it so much fun — and one of the heaviest records of the Seventies. Physical Graffiti is the ultimate in Zeppelin’s attempts to fuse East and West, exploring the Arabic and Indian sonorities of “Kashmir” and “In the Light.” It’s Zeppelin’s most eclectic album, featuring down-and-dirty blues (“Black Country Woman,” “Boogie With Stu”), pop balladry (“Down by the Seaside”), metal riffs (“The Wanton Song”), and the 11-minute “In My Time of Dying.” An excessive album from the group that all but invented excess.

The third Velvet Underground album doesn’t have any songs about S&M or drug deals, and there’s no wailing feedback. But quieter beauty was just as revelatory. Lou Reed sang poignant folk-rock tunes that describe loss (“Pale Blue Eyes”) or spiritual thirst (“Jesus”). And because the Velvets liked it when people danced at their shows, there are two great uptempo numbers, “Beginning to See the Light” and “What Goes On,” where Reed and Sterling Morrison entwine their guitar licks and sustain a joyful minimalist groove that creates a blueprint for generations of bands, including everyone from the Modern Lovers to the Feelies to Parquet Courts.

Bruce Springsteen wrote most of these songs in a fit of inspiration that also gave birth to the harrowing Nebraska [see No. 150]. “Particularly on the first side, it’s actually written very much like Nebraska,” he said. “The characters and the stories, the style of writing — except it’s just in the rock-band setting.” It was a crucial difference: The E Street Band put so much punch into the title song that millions misheard its questioning allegiance as mere flag-waving instead. The immortal force of the album is in Springsteen’s frank mix of soaring optimism and the feeling of, as he put it, being “handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper’s Ford.”

The Pixies’ second full-length album proved that noisy, arty college rock could be just as fun as anything else on MTV. With his antic vocal style and free-associative lyrics, singer-guitarist Black Francis seemed detached from humanity, but the rest of the Pixies grounded him. Bassist Kim Deal adds tart harmonies that feel like sarcastic asides, drummer David Lovering powers the loud-quiet-loud dynamic that influenced Nirvana and many others, and guitarist Joey Santiago tosses out concise, buzzing riffs. The Pixies’ second album is loaded: With “Debaser,” “Here Comes Your Man,” “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” “Hey,” and “Gouge Away,” it’s the college-radio version of a greatest-hits album.

This was the album that introduced the whole world to Bob Marley, expanding his audience beyond Jamaica without diluting his bedrock reggae power. At the time, the Wailers were truly a unified band, fronted by three extraordinary singers in Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingston. The rhythm section of drummer Carlton Barrett and his brother, bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett, defined the reggae beat. Producer and label boss Chris Blackwell subtly overdubbed and remixed the original Jamaican sessions for international ears, but the Wailers’ ghetto rage comes across uncut in “Concrete Jungle” and “Slave Driver.”

If you think Ozzy’s enduring fame is impressive, try taking a time machine back to the early Seventies and telling rock critics they’ll still be writing about Paranoid 50 years after its release. But Sabbath ruled for bummed-out kids in the Seventies, and nearly every heavy-metal and extreme rock band of the past three decades — from Metallica to Nirvana to Mastodon — owes a debt of worship to Tony Iommi’s crushing, granite-fuzz guitar chords, the Visigoth rhythm machine of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, and Ozzy Osbourne’s agonized bray in “Paranoid,” “Iron Man,” and “War Pigs.”

Like the 1987 remix album, You Can Dance, this is a perfect Madonna CD: nothing but good songs. You get timeless pop such as “Holiday,” provocations like “Papa Don’t Preach,” dance classics like “Into the Groove,” and a new Lenny Kravitz-co-produced sex jam, “Justify My Love,” which samples Public Enemy.

“Pain is art” may be a cliché, but for Adele, it rang especially true. Her debut album, 19, was a polite, tasteful set of soul-inflected pop. Its follow-up was something else again. Chewing over a tumultuous affair, she dug deep and came up with a modern masterpiece of post-breakup soul music. She’d actually cut an entire album with producer Rick Rubin but wound up preferring earlier demos of songs like “Rolling in the Deep,” “Someone Like You,” and “Set Fire to the Rain,” and mostly used those instead. The switch-up made for an even rawer and more emotional experience that clearly connected: 21 sold more than 30 million copies and swept the 2012 Grammys.

“Play like your mama just died,” bandleader/genius George Clinton said to guitarist Eddie Hazel. That morose instruction worked; nothing has ever sounded like the 10 minutes of anguished, fuzzed-up blues Hazel plays on the title song. (Clinton likened the playing to “a silver web.”) Clinton was a funk surrealist and a provocateur, but he’d also been in a doo-wop group and had written songs for Motown — he balanced multicolored futurism with old-school R&B chops on the swinging “Can You Get to That,” the psychedelic “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,” and “Super Stupid,” another showcase for Hazel’s dense, distorted riffing. As Clinton later asked defiantly, “Who says a funk band can’t play rock?”

“America’s the promised land to a lot of Irish people,” U2 singer Bono told Rolling Stone. “I’m one in a long line of Irishmen who made the trip.” On U2’s fifth full album, the band immerses itself in the mythology of the United States, while guitarist the Edge exploits the poetic echo of digital delay, drowning his trademark arpeggios in rippling tremolo. While many of these songs are about spiritual quests — “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” — U2 fortify the solemnity with the outright joys of rock & roll, although one of the most moving songs is “Running to Stand Still,” a stripped-down slide-guitar ballad about heroin addiction.

The East Coast and West Coast were in an arms race to see who could be more hardcore when the Fugees snuck up from behind and slayed everyone with a feather. The trio of Wyclef Jean, Pras, and Lauryn Hill blended rap, R&B, and reggae into an intimate, widescreen sound, using panache, a teasing sense of humor, and a forthright intelligence. Their second album was both an underground and mainstream hit, thanks to the singles “Fu-Gee-La,” “Ready or Not,” and their breakbeat cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly.” Hill lays out the highbrow-for-lowbrows battle plan: “And even after all my logic and my theory/I add a ‘motherfucker’ so you ignant niggas hear me.”

After redefining the possibilities of singer-songwriter music in the early 1970s, Mitchell set herself an even more ambitious challenge with Hejira, her ultimate jazz-folk statement. Setting her restless-soul visions to slippery instrumentals with help from bassist Jaco Pastorius, she weighed the costs of dedicating her life to fearless self-expression where others might have settled for mere happiness (“Amelia,” “Song for Sharon”). Getting to the point where she could make an album this singularly brilliant might have been a lonely enterprise, but it was worth it for the rest of us.

“I’m a rolling stone, all alone and lost,” Hank Williams sang in “Lost Highway,” “for a life of sin I have paid the cost.” When he died on New Year’s Day 1953 at age 29, in the back seat of a Cadillac while en route to a gig in Canton, Ohio, Williams was the biggest star in country music, a charismatic songwriter and performer equally at home with lovesick ballads like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and long-gone-daddy romps such as “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave).” Williams left his stamp on the decades of country and rock & roll that followed him, from the rockabilly of Elvis Presley to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” to the lovesick ballads of Beck and Jason Isbell’s mordant depictions of life.

It’s difficult to sustain, over an entire album, something as vague as ambiance, but Portishead did it on their debut. Along with fellow Bristol, England, innovators Massive Attack, they headed up the trendy mid-Nineties trip-hop movement. Long after the genre petered out, their debut remains immersive and haunting, built on skittering break beats, jazzy samples, spare arrangements, and discomforting pauses. But it’s singer Beth Gibbon’s brooding, pop-cabaret vocals that make it feel classic, hinting at real pain below trip-hop’s stoned exterior. The result was cinematic enough to recall John Barry’s lustrous scores for James Bond films.

“I didn’t want to do a double album,” Prince said, “but I just kept on writing. Of course, I’m not one for editing.” The second half of 1999 is just exceptional sex-obsessed dance music; the first half is the best fusion of rock and funk achieved to that date, and it lays out the blueprint for Prince’s next decade. Except for a few background hand claps and vocals, Prince plays most every instrument himself and creates a relentless, irresistible musical sequence of apocalypse (“1999”) and the raunchy sex that he proposes as the only possible response — “Little Red Corvette,” “Let’s Pretend We’re Married,” “Delirious,” and, well, just about every other song on the album.

Pink Floyd’s most elaborately theatrical album was inspired by their own success: the alienating enormity of their tours after The Dark Side of the Moon [see No. 55], which was when bassist-lyricist Roger Waters first hit upon a wall as a metaphor for isolation and rebellion. He finished a demo of the work by July 1978; the double album then took the band a year to make. Rock’s ultimate self-pity opera, The Wall is also hypnotic in its indulgence: the totalitarian thunder of “In the Flesh?”; the suicidal languor of “Comfortably Numb”; the Brechtian drama of “The Trial.” Rock-star hubris has never been more electrifying.

“Queen will be the Cecil B. DeMille of rock,” proclaimed singer Freddie Mercury, and this far-ranging, rococo album is the group’s ready-for-my-close-up moment. Bassist John Deacon wrote the melodic highlight “You’re My Best Friend,” a bouncy bit of Paul McCartney-esque pop; Mercury wrote the brutal rocker “Death on Two Legs,” about the band’s former manager; and guitarist Brian May wrote “The Prophet’s Song,” a doomy portent of a flood that runs 8:21 and includes a vocal canon from Mercury. But the coup was “Bohemian Rhapsody,” an opera buffa in which Mercury combined three different songs he’d been writing into a suite that took weeks to record.

Country and soul were deeply entangled Southern traditions and had been cross-pollinating for years. But Modern Sounds was still the audacious boundary smasher its title promised, with Ray Charles applying his gospel grit and luscious soul-pop strings to standards by Hank Williams (“Half as Much,” “You Win Again,” “Hey, Good Lookin’”) and Eddy Arnold, whose lover’s lament “You Don’t Know Me” is recast as a parable about race relations in light of the civil rights struggle. Modern Sounds became the most popular album of Charles’ career and includes the hits “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Born to Lose.”

The crucial development on Mary J. Blige’s second album is her emergence as a songwriter; in lyrics and interviews, she began to describe the traumas she’d had, both as a child growing up in the projects and as an adult. For fans, that intimacy turned her from a beloved singer to a member of the family. “Down and out, crying every day,” she sings on the title song. There’s plenty of thematic contrast — the playful bedroom come-on “Mary Jane (All Night Long),” a smashing cover of the 1970s funk ballad “I’m Going Down” — but the strongest impression from the album is that Blige had been through it, and her hopefulness was hard-won.

“I went to this party in Los Angeles,” recalled Adam Horovitz, “and they were playing this music, like … four breakbeat records playing at the same time.” The party soundtrack consisted of tracks by the Dust Brothers, who ended up co-producing this entire second record from the Beasties, providing the rap trio with some of the best samples ever put on wax, including the Ramones, Mountain, and the Funky 4 Plus 1. Paul’s Boutique is also an extended goof on Abbey Road [see No. 5], which was Paul McCartney’s boutique — and like that record, it ambitiously stitches together song fragments in a way rarely heard before or since.

After fostering a solemn public image for years, U2 loosened up on Achtung Baby, recorded in Berlin with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. They no longer sounded like young men sure of the answers; now they were full of doubt and longing. “It’s a con, in a way,” Bono told Rolling Stone about the album in 1992. “We call it Achtung Baby, grinning up our sleeves in all the photography. But it’s probably the heaviest record we’ve ever made.” “One” may be their most gorgeous song, but it’s a dark ballad about a relationship in peril and the struggle to keep it together. Yet the emotional turmoil made U2 sound more human than ever.

This album — recorded on the fly while the band was touring — opens with one of the most exhilarating guitar riffs in rock & roll: Jimmy Page’s searing stutter in “Whole Lotta Love.” As Page told Rolling Stone, “On the second LP, you can hear the real group identity coming together,” by which he meant the unified might of his own white-blues sorcery, John Bonham’s hands-of-Zeus drumming, Robert Plant’s love-god howl and surprisingly tender lyrics (the gorgeous “Thank You”), and John Paul Jones’ firm bass and keyboard colors. Other great reasons to bang your head: “The Lemon Song,” “Heartbreaker,” and “Ramble On.”