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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?

Billie Eilish

30

Experimental, pitch-black teen pop that marked the debut of a new kind of superstar.

With the release of her haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was going to be a new kind of pop star—an introvert who favoured chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos and a playful crudeness. At 17, the Los Angeles native—along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presented her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds.

Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Apple Music. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just…surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, the album quickly and decidedly launched Billie Eilish as the perfect avatar for a new, uncertain era.

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The Low End Theory

A Tribe Called Quest

29

A history lesson placing hip-hop within the broader history of Black music.

In the wake of the release of A Tribe Called Quest’s first album, 1990’s stellar People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, critics who had previously ignored hip-hop sat up and took notice of Q-Tip’s sophisticated and unorthodox productions and Phife Dawg’s party-rocking, self-deprecating rhymes. But those critics often overlooked Tribe’s far-reaching roots in the hip-hop underground and their larger place in the history of Black music in general. The Low End Theory was in many ways a conscious attempt to redress these oversights. It also happens to be one of the finest hip-hop albums ever recorded.

From the sinuous Art Blakey samples and myth-making rhymes of “Excursions” to the joyous free-for-all of the epic posse cut “Scenario”, The Low End Theory connects the dots between jazz and the work of like-minded New York rap contemporaries like De La Soul and Brand Nubian, drawing on everything from the crowd-hyping improvisations of their early park jams to the complex sciences of Golden Age rhyming styles.

The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest