Apple Music 100 Best Albums

Highway 61 Revisited

Bob Dylan

Dylan goes electric—and brings the entire culture with him.

“I need a dump truck, mama, to unload my head,” Bob Dylan howls toward the middle of his epiphanic 1965 album. Dylan—at that moment, the unofficial youth poet laureate and sneering voice of an emergent counterculture—had a lot on his mind. When he returned after a breakneck British tour in May 1965, he was exhausted, having released five albums in just three years. Was he out of things to say, or the drive to say them?

“It’s this transition…into rock star and exactly the time you do something slightly different—and piss people off.”

Ondara

On these nine songs, Dylan is over most everything—the world’s barbarity on “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” high society’s superficiality on “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the heart’s tangles and briars on “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” As war escalated, the country heaved, and Dylan battled his new status, these were the images of an overheated mind acting out the theater of human experience in song. That gave listeners something to hold on to as the language and landscape of rock shifted in real time, which happened on—and because of—Highway 61 Revisited.

The Blueprint

JAY-Z

In 2001, he was on top—but he still had a chip on his shoulder.

Just a few years earlier, JAY-Z couldn’t find a label. Now, he not only had the culture on his shoulders—he was helping to legitimize it for an audience that still might’ve written him off as a fad. Released on September 11, 2001, The Blueprint arrived as a classic. It’s brutal (“Takeover”), arrogant (“Girls, Girls, Girls”), playful (“Izzo [H.O.V.A.]”), and disarmingly vulnerable (“Song Cry”). With the exception of LL Cool J, the culture didn’t really have examples of second lives.

But The Blueprint pushed the lyrical parameters of mainstream hip-hop while returning to the form’s origins, thanks to the album’s samples of classic rock and soul (courtesy, in part, of a young producer named Kanye West). The result was a record that would help establish rap as music with historic continuity.

“It is very educational for all the young hustlers.”

Playboi Carti

“Reasonable Doubt, classic/Shoulda went triple,” Jay raps on “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)”: a callback to his first album, but also a reminder that he hasn’t lived it down. Can you be on top and still carry a chip on your shoulder? On The Blueprint, Jay has it all—and still wants more.