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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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Kid A

Radiohead

33

How do you follow up a revolutionary album? With an even more revolutionary one.

In the wake of 1997’s OK Computer, Thom Yorke had begun to resist the idea that he was in a rock band at all. Radiohead were, with some stress and shouting and madness, going to throw away the rules altogether; in turn, Kid A became their second revolutionary act in as many records.

“Every artist or musician will go through a period where you have to think again about what you’re doing.”

Thom Yorke

Radiohead

With its seasick sequences and Yorke’s multiplied vocal lines folding in and over and around one another like an Escher sketch, “Everything in Its Right Place” is both taunt and gambit—a little wink from the band that had gone from “Creep” to these so-called creepy sounds. That was simply the start. The demented bass and howling horns of “The National Anthem”, the operatic tremors of “Motion Picture Soundtrack”, the refracted guitars and babbling circuity of “In Limbo”: Radiohead found new space to explore on every track. Each was anchored to a hook—however obscured—before setting off into unfamiliar terrain.

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Ready to Die

The Notorious B.I.G.

32

Rapping about crime and culture, elevated to divine art.

By naming his debut Ready to Die, Christopher Wallace bluntly encapsulated both his fearless, take-no-prisoners lyrical style and his sense that death could come for him at any time. While hardly the first to rap about the pleasures and pitfalls of drug dealing, Biggie Smalls elevated the form to a divine, brutally honest art.

From the autobiographical “Things Done Changed” onwards, the 22-year-old spoke directly, without distillation, about Brooklyn crime and culture. The costs of the hustle are laid bare on the stick-up-kid anthem “Gimme the Loot” and the closer “Suicidal Thoughts”, which ends with the sound of him killing himself.

But against the backdrop of violence and death, Big mixes in moments of aspiration and confidence, too. On the breakthrough single “Juicy”, he professes his love of hip-hop through a deeply personal come-up narrative so exemplary that few, if any, have come close to matching it since. Street-hustler rhymes softened by glossy, radio-ready production made for a blueprint that JAY-Z, 50 Cent and rap stars of today still follow.

Ready to Die stands the test of time because the story still is the same story.”

DJ Mister Cee

producer

Ready to Die by The Notorious B.I.G.