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Apple Music 100 Best Albums
Rumours
Fleetwood Mac
11
Songs that somehow outshine the melodrama that forged them.
To understand what made Rumours so impactful, you have to look at the music that came out around it. This was the era of the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt—artists who, like Fleetwood Mac, combined the intimacy of singer-songwriters with a softened take on rock ’n’ roll. But it was also the era of Boston, Foreigner, Pink Floyd, and a wave of bands that scaled up the ambition of ’60s rock to blockbuster heights. And there, in the middle of the road, is Rumours. For an album that went on to sell more than 10 million copies, it’s more unsettling than it probably should be.
And while the album—and its infamously messy circumstances, which included the implosion of two intraband relationships—feels so emblematic of a very specific mid-’70s SoCal kind of indulgence, Rumours would not have endured the way it has had that pain not been rendered so universally. Later generations may know it through “Dreams” going viral in a TikTok or Daisy Jones and the Six mining the melodrama and mythology—but they know it.
Lemonade
Beyoncé
10
Sometimes even Beyoncé has to summon her inner Beyoncé.
There’s one moment critical to understanding the emotional and cultural heft of Lemonade, Beyoncé’s genre-obliterating blockbuster sixth album—and it arrives at the end of “Freedom,” a storming empowerment anthem that samples a civil-rights-era prison song and features Kendrick Lamar. An elderly woman’s voice cuts in: “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up,” she says. “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.”
The speech—made by her husband JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015—reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali British poet Warsan Shire. Both the album and its visual companion are deeply tied to Beyoncé’s identity and narrative (her womanhood, her Blackness, her marriage) and make for her most outwardly revealing work to date.
The details, of course, are what make it so relatable, what make each song sting. The project is furious, defiant, anguished, vulnerable, experimental, muscular, triumphant, humorous, and brave—a vivid personal statement, released without warning in a time of public scrutiny and private suffering. It is also astonishingly tough. Through tears, even Beyoncé has to summon her inner Beyoncé, roaring, “I’ma keep running ’cause a winner don’t quit on themselves.” This panoramic strength—lyrical, vocal, instrumental, and personal—nudged her public image from mere legend to something closer to real-life superhero.
Every second of Lemonade deserves to be studied and celebrated (the self-punishment in “Sorry,” the politics in “Formation,” the creative enhancements from collaborators like James Blake and Karen O), but the song that aims the highest musically may be “Don’t Hurt Yourself”—a Zeppelin-sampling psych-rock duet with Jack White. “This is your final warning,” she says in a moment of unnerving calm. “If you try this shit again/You gon’ lose your wife.” In support, White offers a word to the wise: “Love God herself.”
