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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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Sign O’ the Times

Prince

51

Prince embraces his contradictions on one of the most comprehensive albums in pop.

Sign O’ the Times isn’t just the most comprehensive album in Prince’s catalogue, it’s one of the most comprehensive albums in pop. Everything he explored in his first 10 years as an artist is here: R&B, soul, rock and gospel, Beatles-like vignettes (“Starfish and Coffee”, “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”) and carnal funk (“U Got the Look”)—all without backing band The Revolution. He’s as contemporary and politically charged as rap (“Sign O’ the Times”) and as classic as a doo-wop ballad (“Adore”), and in both discovers the minimal but highly expressive sound that makes Prince Prince.

Celebratory, intimate, playful, serious—as sacred as “The Cross” and profane as “Hot Thing”—he doesn’t try and resolve his contradictions, he embodies them. And in doing so, he makes a space for the full breadth of his personality. Black men weren’t allowed to be so sensitive and weird, and, for that matter, neither were white men. Sign O’ the Times is, in essence, his magnum opus—the sound of a superstar at the peak of his powers.

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Hounds of Love

Kate Bush

50

Nothing else has ever come close to its mix of pop hooks and avant-garde sound-sculpting.

If Kate Bush’s first two albums were steeped in the art-rock of the ’70s, then the British singer-songwriter’s fifth LP in 1985 didn’t just reflect its era—it helped define it. Few songs are more evocative of the sound of mid-’80s pop than the eternal “Running Up That Hill”, with its gated drums, quasi-dance beat, eerie vocal effects and instantly recognisable synthesiser melody. Likewise, few albums did more to take the ambition of progressive rock and port it into the digital era.

“Her voice was so beautiful, to the point where I really believed that if I could sing along with her and hit the same notes that I had a tiny chance to be able to be a legit singer at some point.”

Alanis Morissette

Split across two side-length suites, the album grapples with big themes—the gulf between men and women, the fierceness of a mother’s love, the nature of dreams—with Bush’s voice an instrument of breathtaking power, capable of both tenderness and force. In 1985, there was nothing else like it out there. And in some ways, nothing since has ever come close to its mix of pop hooks and avant-garde sound-sculpting. But Hounds of Love also opened an entire world to be explored, with generations of musicians—Björk, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Joanna Newsom, to name just a few—following in Bush’s wake.

Hounds of Love by Kate Bush