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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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Straight Outta Compton

N.W.A

70

Relentlessly violent and wilfully outrageous, it still retains its power to shock, delight and enlighten.

Straight Outta Compton turned N.W.A. from a local phenomenon in LA into a nationally feared public menace. Dr. Dre’s simple but impeccably equalised production, Ice Cube’s powerhouse flow and incipient Black radicalism, Eazy-E’s sneering nihilism and MC Ren’s stolid ice grill started to shift the focus of the hip-hop universe 3,000 miles west.

“N.W.A. not only changed music, but we changed pop culture all over the world. Because we made it all right for artists to be themselves.”

Ice Cube

N.W.A

The adrenaline surge of the title track, the blaring sirens of “Fuck tha Police” and the roughshod drums of “Gangsta Gangsta” comprise nothing less than one of the most bracing opening sequences in music history. Relentlessly violent and wilfully outrageous, Straight Outta Compton arose from Los Angeles’ sprawling swap meets and dilapidated suburbs like a biblical plague, warning that hip-hop could no longer be ignored by the musical mainstream and still retains its power to shock, delight and enlighten. Ignore it at your peril.

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Master of Puppets

Metallica

69

A breakthrough that brought thrash metal from the fringes into the mainstream.

With 1984’s Ride the Lightning, Metallica found themselves caught between the worlds of underground purity and mainstream recognition, the bruising and brutal outsider art of thrash metal starting to make its way inside. Its successor, Master of Puppets, was even more intense—in speed, in aggression, in its hostility toward forces of control—yet its appeal managed to be even broader; their days in vans were numbered.

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For all its precision, Master of Puppets still feels like the product of the basement or garage. And where the boys’ nights out of Van Halen and Mötley Crüe promise relief (through girls, through drugs, through sheer lack of inhibition), Metallica played with the restlessness of someone in the grips of spiralling negative thoughts—whether about war (“Disposable Heroes”), addiction (“Master of Puppets”), religious evangelism (“Leper Messiah”) or the failure of mental health care (“Welcome Home [Sanitarium]”).

Never before had music this extreme found an audience so big—and never since have Metallica had one so small. Within the next half decade they would become one of the biggest bands in the world, full stop, bringing anger and alienation out of the shadows and into stadiums.