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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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My Life

Mary J. Blige

86

Gospel, grace and grit fuel the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul’s soul-baring masterpiece.

With Mary J. Blige’s first album, What’s the 411?, the emerging “Queen of Hip-Hop Soul” had imbued diaristic R&B with a youthful hip-hop sensibility. For the follow-up, 1994’s career-defining My Life, the 23-year-old got even more personal, drawing on her depression, struggles with drugs and alcohol, experiences with domestic violence and heartbreak, and the spiritual fortitude that carried her through it. All this while trying to process her breakneck trajectory from a Yonkers housing project to worldwide fame.

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Chucky Thompson, scion of Bad Boy Records’ Hitmen production team, laced the beats with funk samples and street hits, while Blige added gospel-informed grace and grit. This aesthetic peaked on the sublime “My Life”, where she brings melancholy and reserved hope to a sample of Roy Ayers’ “Everybody Loves the Sunshine”. But the album found its mission statement in its final track: “All I really want is to be happy,” Blige sang over a slap bass nabbed from Curtis Mayfield’s “You're So Good to Me”. “I don’t wanna have to worry about nothin’ no more.”

“I was trying to heal. I was going through hell. And when I released the album, it started a movement.”

Mary J. Blige

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Golden Hour

Kacey Musgraves

85

Ethereal country that stretched and reimagined the genre’s possibilities.

No one saw it coming: not even Kacey Musgraves—just look at the “surprise face” meme that went viral after she won the Grammy for Album of the Year for Golden Hour. It was a passion project dedicated to fresh love, made with a new production team (Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian) and a little bit of LSD, and partly recorded above Sheryl Crow’s horse barn. But it was a passion project that exploded Kacey Musgraves from critically adored artist into global superstar.

Golden Hour is a masterpiece of ethereal country pop—psychedelic at times, disco-forward at others, and all held together by Musgraves’ wit and poignant vocal delivery. “Slow Burn”, in its minor-key opening strums, sends her earliest acoustic inclinations through a kaleidoscope of new sounds, while “Space Cowboy” is a perfect, wandering country ballad. And the album’s closer, “Rainbow”, is a timeless offering of comfort to queer youth that affirms Musgraves’ commitment to the community. In her hands, country music would stretch the imagination, and everyone was invited to come along for the ride.

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Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves