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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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Blonde

Frank Ocean

5

Sprawling and minimalist, direct and oblique—the definitive statement by a generational artist.

In the four years between Frank Ocean’s debut album channel ORANGE and his second, blond, he had revealed some of his private life—he published a post on social media about having been in love with a man—but still remained as mysterious and sceptical towards fame as ever, teasing new music sporadically and then disappearing like a wisp on the wind. Behind great innovation, however, is a massive amount of work, and so when blond was released one day after a 24-hour streaming performance art piece (Endless) and alongside a limited-edition magazine entitled Boys Don’t Cry, his slipperiness felt more like part of a carefully considered mystique. Even the apparent indecision over the album title’s official spelling can be seen in hindsight as being characteristically mischievous.

Endless featured the mundane beauty of Ocean woodworking in a studio, soundtracked by abstract and meandering ambient music. blond built on those ideas and imbued them with more form, taking a left-field, often minimalist approach to his breezy harmonies and ever-present narrative lyricism. His confidence was crucial to the risk of creating a big multimedia project for a sophomore album, but it also extended to his songwriting—his voice surer of itself (“Solo”), his willingness to excavate his weird impulses more prominent (“Good Guy” and “Pretty Sweet”, among others).

Though blond packs 17 tracks into one quick hour, it’s a sprawling palette of ideas, a testament to the intelligence of flying one’s own artistic freak flag and trusting that audiences will meet you where you’re at. They did. And Ocean established himself as a generational artist uniquely suited to the complexities and convulsive changes of the second decade of the 21st century.

“I always tell him I like [Blonde] way better than channel ORANGE—and don’t like comparing. But the looseness of structure and the chords and s**t on Blonde speaks to me more.”

Tyler, The Creator

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Purple Rain

Prince

4

Baby, he’s a star.

You can’t very well tell a story about a troubled artist whose difficult personality belies his musical genius without, you know, actual musical genius. In this sense, the soundtrack to Purple Rain began life with the highest degree of difficulty imaginable; the impossibility that its success could ever have been in doubt is the project’s greatest legacy.

“He got an Oscar for Purple Rain. There’s no way your work can be more political than doing that, because he did it all the way his way.”

Pharrell Williams

With half its tracklist comprising Top 10 singles, the soundtrack is what truly turned Prince Rogers Nelson from just big enough to get to star in a summer blockbuster based on his life to one of the most instantly recognisable and distinctive pop artists ever. This is no slight to the movie, which has its charms (shout-out Morris Day), as much as it’s a testament to Prince’s all-engulfing star power and genre-fluid/gender-fluid virtuosity—nine perfect, definitive pop-soul-dance-rock-R&B-funk-whatever-else songs that couldn’t help but swallow everything in their orbit.

The brilliance of Purple Rain is how it stirs seemingly contradictory moods—lust, devotion, intimacy, alienation—into a brew where nothing can be separated from anything else. Prince makes trauma sound erotic (“When Doves Cry”) and salvation sound reckless (“Let’s Go Crazy”). His sexual escapades are spiritual, disorienting and almost psychedelic (“Darling Nikki”, “Computer Blue”), while his spiritual journeys are grounded in the mechanics of a guitar solo (“Purple Rain”). The album broke records and brains: Tipper Gore’s overreaction to the image of Darling Nikki masturbating to a magazine begat a congressional witch hunt debating the morality of pop music. Prince often drew comparisons to Jimi Hendrix for the way he mixed music that felt Black and white, sacred and profane. The reality is that he had no precedent then and no comparison now.

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Purple Rain by Prince