3 Feet High and Rising by De La Soul

The Queen Is Dead

The Smiths

Music to cry with or laugh at, all within the same songs.

Morrissey had already aspired to be the Oscar Wilde of pop music, but The Smiths’ third album is the first time he sounds like a lock for the title. The singular chemical reaction between his perpetual despair and Johnny Marr’s ringing guitars is indie rock’s often imitated but never duplicated formula—songs about sadness that are also a hoot to listen to.

The Queen Is Dead remains the band’s most dramatic—or maybe melodramatic—album, addressing Moz’s concerns with everything from stardom (“Frankly, Mr. Shankly”) to celibacy (“Never Had No One Ever”) to his usual arsenal of limitless self-pity (“Bigmouth Strikes Again,” “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side”). He even proclaims to “know how Joan of Arc felt.”

This self-parodic approach works best on the thrilling tingle of the incredibly romantic “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” where he croons, “If a double-decker bus crashes into us/To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.” There was never a band as openly confessional and conversational, so willfully sincere and cheeky.

“The Smiths were crossing girl groups with electro, believe it or not.”

Johnny Marr

The Smiths

3 Feet High and Rising

De La Soul

A playful 63-minute blueprint for hip-hop’s odd future.

Transmitting live from Mars—or, more specifically, the Long Island suburbs—De La Soul emerged fully formed and casually bugged-out in 1988 with “Plug Tunin’,” a 12-inch that mixed off-the-wall wordplay with the most off-kilter samples hip-hop had ever seen. On their subsequent debut album, Trugoy, Posdnuos, DJ P.A. Pasemaster Mase, and producer Prince Paul laid out a playful 63-minute blueprint for rap’s odd future. They were outcasts before Outkast, the roots of The Roots.

De La’s genre-agnostic approach to crate-digging imbued hip-hop with alien moods and new textures rather than just blips of James Brown and Funkadelic (though the latter’s rubbery melody would drive “Me Myself and I,” the band’s lone US Top 40 moment). Their playground included Schoolhouse Rock!, Steely Dan, learn-to-speak-French records, Johnny Cash, and a Liberace cassette they found in the studio. And their freewheeling poetry broke sentences apart into expressionist clouds that ranged from pure poetry to inspired nonsense. Proudly eccentric and preaching their message of self-expression while dressed in African medallions instead of fat gold ropes, they became the bohemian model for years of alternative-minded rappers.

Apple Music 100 Best Albums

The Queen Is Dead

3 Feet High and Rising