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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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All Eyez on Me

2Pac

62

A defining, larger-than-life final statement from an icon of ’90s rap.

In a recording career that lasted less than five years, hip-hop’s most complex figure showed us many sides. He was a political firebrand on 1993’s Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., an introspective diarist on 1995’s Me Against the World and a temperamental hothead on his Makaveli project, released shortly after his death in September 1996. However, most of the 27 tracks on All Eyez on Me—the last album released during his lifetime—showcase 2Pac as a gangsta-rap tough guy, one of the reigning kings of ’90s G-funk on one of the genre’s most defining releases.

“I will always have that sense of reaching a certain standard as far as empathy and compassion toward a record the same way Pac approached music.”

Kendrick Lamar

Though All Eyez on Me has deeply personal tearjerkers (“Life Goes On”), incredibly filthy sex raps (“What’s Ya Phone #”) and evocative storytelling (“Shorty Wanna Be a Thug”), it’s best known for anthems of defiance like “Ambitionz Az a Ridah” and “Picture Me Rollin’”, in which one of music’s greatest writers embraces the combative, larger-than-life side that made him an icon of ’90s gangsta rap.

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Love Deluxe

Sade

61

Impossibly lush and impossibly rich, an exercise in pure immersion.

Sade’s revelatory fourth album Love Deluxe is an exercise in pure immersion, beginning with the opening bassline of the immortal “No Ordinary Love”. Its nine songs represent rich-sounding music that, in less capable hands, would risk becoming totally overwhelming. Just as the smash debut Diamond Life arrived at the peak of quiet storm’s popularity in the mid-1980s, the slinky dub and drum machines of Love Deluxe coincided with trip-hop’s emergence in the early 1990s, sharing ostensible shelf space and musical DNA with Massive Attack’s monumental 1991 debut Blue Lines.

“[They] made so many great records, and when you go back and revisit them—pure class, pure beauty.”

Elton John

Where trip-hop is regularly associated with haze and obfuscation, Sade couldn’t be clearer, from the impossibly lush and cavernous “I Couldn’t Love You More” to the closing instrumental “Mermaid”. Singer Sade Adu has fittingly described Love Deluxe as a reflection of the search for the ultimate unattainable luxury: You can buy any kind of love, but you can’t get love deluxe. That Sade took an extended hiatus after the album’s release has only added to its weight and legend.

Love Deluxe by Sade