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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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Back to Black

Amy Winehouse

8

Her blend of brassy retro-soul and brash lyrics is inimitable and immortal.

Producer Mark Ronson remembers when Amy Winehouse came in with the lyrics for “Back to Black”. They were at a studio in New York in early 2006, their first day working together. Ronson had given her a portable CD player with the song’s piano track, and Winehouse disappeared into the back for about an hour to write. What she re-emerged with was masterful: bleak, funny, tough, hopelessly romantic. The chorus, though, kept tripping him up because it didn’t rhyme: “We only said goodbye with words, I died a hundred times.” He asked her to change it, but she just gave him a blank look: That’s just how it came out, she didn’t know how to change it.

For all her brashness, what makes Back to Black so moving is the sense that Winehouse is constantly trying to punch through her pain—not to suppress it exactly, but to wrap it in enough barbed wire that nobody could quite reach its core. The appeal to soul music is obvious: the Motown horns (“Rehab”, “Tears Dry on Their Own”), the girl-group romance (“Back to Black”), the organic quality of the arrangements (“You Know I’m No Good”)—much of it courtesy of Brooklyn outfit The Dap-Kings.

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But Winehouse’s presentation and otherworldly, timeless vocals still make her music feel different—not so much an attempt to recreate the past as to honour the music she loved while still being true to the trash-talking, self-effacing millennial she was. Years before the next generation learned to temper their misery with sarcasm, memes and deadpan fatalism, we had Amy Winehouse, fluttering around words so crass you could barely believe she was singing them at all, let alone with a horn section. The sound of Back to Black might appeal to retro-soul fans and jazz classicists, but the attitude is closer to rap. Yes, she was funny. But she wasn’t kidding.

“She’s a godlike creature. She’s not a goddess, she’s a god. She’s not a queen, she’s a king. That’s how I feel about Amy Winehouse.”

Billie Eilish

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good kid, m.A.A.d city (Deluxe Version)

Kendrick Lamar

7

Hip-hop storytelling at its most visceral and vivid.

A few days after releasing 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, the then-25-year-old Kendrick Lamar deemed his sophomore studio album “classic-worthy”. He wasn’t lying: Lamar’s sophomore album is one of the defining hip-hop records of the 21st century. On the surface, good kid, m.A.A.d city is a hood tragedy, with Lamar painting a vivid picture of Black and brown youths growing up in underserved communities. But the album is also powered by faith and hope, with Lamar chronicling his turbulent coming-of-age through a cast of compelling characters that portray the trauma, familial guidance and relationships that led to his inevitable ascent.

West Coast hip-hop elders like Snoop and Dre anointed Lamar to carry on the legacy of gangsta rap, and his second studio album—conceptual enough to be a rock opera—certainly uplifts the genre with its near-biblical themes: religion vs. violence and monogamy vs. lust.

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Sitting just a few miles from Compton, where much of good kid, m.A.A.d city takes place, Lamar pieced together tracks alongside collaborators Sounwave and Dave Free, both of whom had known the prolific rapper since high school. Throughout the writing process, Lamar would frequently return to his childhood neighbourhood to relive the “mental space” he was in during the early days of his rap career, unearthing the deeply personal tales that came to shape the monumental artist.

From the album’s opening scene—a collective prayer of gratitude—Lamar’s approach is entirely theatric (he even gives good kid, m.A.A.d city a subtitle: “A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar”). And he never misses an opportunity to hold listeners in his grip, unspooling a series of vulnerable confessions over the album’s 12 tracks. Graphic scenes of violence, addiction and disillusionment are pervasive here. But Lamar makes even the harshest truths easy to swallow, as he does on “Swimming Pools (Drank)”, a vivid tale of alcoholism. good kid, m.A.A.d city’s legacy is a crucial example of American storytelling that established the future Pulitzer Prize winner as perhaps his generation’s most accomplished writer.

good kid, m.A.A.d city (Deluxe Version) by Kendrick Lamar