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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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Led Zeppelin II

Led Zeppelin

27

Rising rock gods find their footing by taking bigger, weirder chances.

What had sometimes felt clunky the first time around on their 1969 debut—British blues rock rendered slower, heavier, louder—felt seamless just eight months later on Led Zeppelin II. Their time on the road showed: A couple songs either originated or evolved live, while others (especially “Whole Lotta Love”) reflected a relationship between the band members that made the music much more direct, but also enabled them to take bigger, weirder chances.

While much has been made of Led Zeppelin’s liberal quotation of Black American blues, the reality—and legacy—was more complicated. Listen to Led Zeppelin II and you hear young British men absorbing blues not as a progressive pose but arcane knowledge, as gnarled and misty as the Celtic touches of “Thank You” or the Tolkien-inspired visions Jimmy Page leveraged into “Ramble On.” Led Zeppelin II marked the moment the band figured out how to make blues-based rock sound like something harder to recognize.

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My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye West

26

Opulent and ambitious, self-aggrandizing and confessional.

The most expensive hip-hop recording ever made, Kanye West's fifth album was a 68-minute LP pulsing with the rapper’s singular mix of the self-aggrandizing and the confessional. The album combined the art-rock ambitions of The Beatles, the opulence of Pink Floyd, and the pop-star grandeur of Michael Jackson—but had the personal gravity of a singer-songwriter statement. There’s a nine-minute prog-rap opus (“Runaway”) that came with a 35-minute short film. The album art is by contemporary artist and Warhol associate George Condo. “All of the Lights” features an orchestra and vocals from Rihanna, Alicia Keys, and Elton John.

But despite its ostentatious appearance, the heart of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is that of raw honesty, with West’s frayed ends of reflection, self-criticism, relationship woes, ruminations on fame, and moments of anger. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy would forever change the landscape of hip-hop, its genre-crossing boldness, limitless imagination, and sheer sumptuousness of presentation foreshadowing the genre’s 2010s turn towards maximalist sounds and arthouse design.

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My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West