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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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After the Gold Rush

Neil Young

81

Messy but direct, the blueprint for despairing acoustic rock to come.

After the Gold Rush is probably the first multi-platinum album to be recorded in someone’s basement, but just as importantly, it sounds like it. Young settled into the style that defined him for the next 50-plus years: intuitive, direct, a little messy, but with a reliable line on what often felt like deeper creative truths. When the hotshot teenage guitarist Nils Lofgren fielded his request to play piano by saying he didn’t know how, Young said great—that’s exactly the kind of pianist he was looking for.

And in a moment when the optimism of the ’60s was dissipating into the realities of the Vietnam War and ecological ruin, Young took the now-familiar step of engaging his surroundings by withdrawing to somewhere quieter and more despairing (“After the Gold Rush”), a tone that eventually gave us everything from Elliott Smith to Bon Iver. James Taylor and Joni Mitchell could keep their sophistication—Young was gonna rhyme “burning” with “turning” and “fly” with “sky” all day long.

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The Marshall Mathers LP

Eminem

80

Provocative, catchy and engineered to piss off the world.

By Eminem’s own admission, The Marshall Mathers LP was a peak. He was already a lightning rod after his legend-making The Slim Shady LP a year prior, but here his provocations were more provocative (the ultraviolence of “Kim”), his catchier moments among the catchiest in early-2000s pop (“The Real Slim Shady”). And if you didn’t think he was capable of something as complex and empathetic as “Stan”—which did nothing less than invent one of 21st-century pop culture’s most inescapable words—it’s as acute in its portrayal of everyday desperation as a Springsteen tune.

“I rap to be the best rapper… When you push yourself like that, that’s what inspires greatness.”

Eminem

That said, the album also found Eminem working against himself by using homophobic slurs to insult his detractors. Such jokes diluted the bigger point he wanted to make—that he was being made a scapegoat for bigger problems. “Wasn’t me, Slim Shady said to do it again,” he rapped on “Who Knew”, channelling a teenage gunman. “Damn, how much damage can you do with a pen?” A year earlier, Eminem claimed that God had sent him to piss the world off. The Marshall Mathers LP brought him one giant step closer.

The Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem