Norman F*****g Rockwell! by Lana Del Rey

The Marshall Mathers LP

Eminem

Provocative, catchy, and engineered to piss off the world.

By Eminem’s own admission, The Marshall Mathers LP was a peak. He was already a lightning rod after his legend-making The Slim Shady LP a year prior, but here his provocations were more provocative (the ultraviolence of “Kim”), his catchier moments among the catchiest in early-2000s pop (“The Real Slim Shady”). And if you didn’t think he was capable of something as complex and empathetic as “Stan”—which did nothing less than invent one of 21st-century pop culture’s most inescapable words—it’s as acute in its portrayal of everyday desperation as a Springsteen tune.

“I rap to be the best rapper…When you push yourself like that, that’s what inspires greatness.”

Eminem

That said, the album also found Eminem working against himself by using homophobic slurs to insult his detractors. Such jokes diluted the bigger point he wanted to make—that he was being made a scapegoat for bigger problems. “Wasn’t me, Slim Shady said to do it again,” he rapped on “Who Knew,” channeling a teenage gunman. “Damn, how much damage can you do with a pen?” A year earlier, Eminem claimed that God had sent him to piss the world off. The Marshall Mathers LP brought him one giant step closer.

Norman F*****g Rockwell!

Lana Del Rey

She paints with sincerity and satire, and challenges you to spot the difference.

Tucked inside Lana Del Rey’s dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Winking and vivid, Norman F*****g Rockwell! is a definitive riff on the rules of authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. She paints with sincerity and satire, and challenges you to spot the difference.

The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath with anecdotes from her own life to make us question, again, what’s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt: She’d spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: The only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.

“She’s so mysterious. I feel like I know what she’s talking about…but then you almost feel like you can’t with her.”

Miranda Lambert

Apple Music 100 Best Albums

The Marshall Mathers LP

Norman F*****g Rockwell!