The Chronic by Dr. Dre

Pet Sounds

The Beach Boys

When you’re young, everything hits with the weight of an orchestra.

Brian Wilson’s arrangements brought a complexity to rock music that nobody had heard before, but they also captured a simple, poetic point: When you’re young, everything hits with the weight of an orchestra. At a moment when bands like The Velvet Underground were starting to use pop to explore bracing realities, Pet Sounds reached back to the fantasies of ’30s pop and ’50s exotica, of old Hollywood and early television. And as sacred as the album’s mood is (Wilson called his next project, Smile, a “teenage symphony to God”), it makes sense that its co-lyricist, Tony Asher, had come from advertising: Despite the ambition, Wilson also knew he needed to project something neat, immediate, and universal.

“It really made people understand that an album can be an incredible journey.”

Graham Nash

Of all Pet Sounds’ legacies, the most profound is the idea that pop music—something accessible and extroverted—could be used to express deep, internal worlds. Wilson’s experiments with LSD aren’t obvious in any garish way, but you can hear him trying to excavate feelings buried so deep that seeking them out is an adventure on par with any.

The Chronic

Dr. Dre

God-tier street rap powered by weed, vitriol, and G-funk.

The Chronic is powered in equal parts by weed, vitriol, and G-funk, a West Coast hip-hop subgenre that Dr. Dre had minted by way of optimizing some of the funkiest and most innovative sounds of his adolescence and young adulthood. And atop their rejiggered masterpieces? A crop of then still-bubbling yet incomparably talented MCs who, in that moment, shared an insatiable hunger to make a name for themselves—including, of course, a young Snoop Dogg.

“It felt like tension in the studio. You got Bloods over here and Crips over there. But it added to the creativity.”

Dr. Dre

The album, named for a high-grade marijuana of its time, contains fiercely competitive posse cuts (“Deeez Nuuuts,” “Stranded on Death Row”), vivid depictions of the lives of young hustlers (“Let Me Ride,” “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang”), and a handful of ruminations on the perils of street life and also solidarity in the Black community (“Lil’ Ghetto Boy,” “A N***a Witta Gun”). All of which is not to mention a large dose of misogyny (“Bitches Ain’t Shit,” etc.). But The Chronic was then, and is still, everything the legendary Death Row Records would become known (and notorious) for—god-tier street rap and incubator of some of the most memorable talents in rap history.

Apple Music 100 Best Albums

Pet Sounds

The Chronic