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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1

George Michael

91

The sound of an artist reaching towards something profound and quietly radical.

After proving the depth, scope and maturity of his songwriting with an unassailable solo debut, George Michael released his second album, which feels like a pointed gear change. True, there is “Freedom! ’90”, a bright, piano-driven single designed to deftly skewer both the emerging age of music video culture and Michael’s own conflict about the way the Faith era had almost turned him into a piece of caricatured public property.

Nonetheless, the pervading mood of Listen Without Prejudice is one of subtlety, political consciousness and emotional desolation. Woodwinds evoke sparse battlefields (“Mothers Pride”), echo adds ghostly desperation (most notably on the spine-tingling Stevie Wonder cover “They Won’t Go When I Go”) and wind-blown acoustic guitar nods to folk (“Something to Save”). Crowned by the grand Lennon-ian sweep of “Praying for Time”, it is a quietly radical, deeply affecting creative progression—the sound of an artist retreating from pop’s synth-driven orthodoxy into something touched by timelessness, profundity and, in almost every sense, real soul.

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Back in Black

AC/DC

90

Out of tragedy came one of the biggest, brashest rock albums ever made.

When impish AC/DC singer Bon Scott died on 19 February 1980, the band’s career—one that had, after years of hard touring, made a huge leap in America on the back of 1979’s Highway to Hell—seemed destined to go with him. But after Scott’s father pulled Angus and Malcolm Young aside at the funeral and gave his blessing for the band to continue, the brothers began working on new music—at first as a way of mourning, but soon as a chance at rebirth. Six weeks later, Brian Johnson was in, and AC/DC were back. (Yes, they’re back.)

Despite its backstory, Back in Black is imbued with the same good-time riffs and grooves of the band’s previous output. Johnson proved himself cut from a similar cloth as Scott, imbuing songs such as “You Shook Me All Night Long” with double entendres (“She told me to come/But I was already there”) and an otherworldly rasp. Released five months after Scott’s passing, Back in Black became nothing less than one of the biggest-selling albums of all time and the blueprint for hard rock’s commercial domination through the ’80s.
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Back in Black by AC/DC