Horses by Patti Smith

Doggystyle

Snoop Dogg

One of hip-hop’s most enduring characters brings the hangover.

Coming fast on the heels of Dr. Dre’s seminal solo debut, Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle plays like the night of partying and ensuing hangover that must inevitably follow The Chronic’s long lazy afternoon of Crenshaw cruising. Though tracks like the unforgettable “Gin and Juice” and “Doggy Dogg World” provide moments of gleeful levity to rival the sun-saturated joy of “Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang,” Doggystyle often sounds stressed and weary where The Chronic was celebratory.

“It was about trying to make something so deep and so different.”

Snoop Dogg

This is all best illustrated by “Murder Was the Case,” which features uncharacteristically baroque production from Dr. Dre and a ferocious rap from Snoop that finds the normally laidback MC—who was facing murder charges by the time the album dropped, before eventually being acquitted—mimicking Scarface’s cold-blooded delivery. Doggystyle’s occasionally gloom-laden atmosphere helps to distinguish it from the glut of West Coast party rap that began to appear on the charts in the wake of Death Row’s commercial ascendance in the ’90s. It also solidified the arrival of one of hip-hop’s most enduring personalities.

Horses

Patti Smith

The high priestess of punk’s debut seamlessly mixed traditionalism with radicalism.

In some ways, Patti Smith was a traditionalist, taking inspiration from the likes of Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger and ’60s pop. In others, she was a radical—the resolve, the intensity, the way she informed a nascent, rough-hewn downtown New York art and punk scene with poetry and jazz, name-checking Rimbaud and Kerouac. Her 1975 debut (produced by The Velvet Underground’s John Cale) covered all of this ground and more.

The magic of Horses is that it sounds deeply steeped in the history of rock while also trying to convey the music as though nobody had ever heard it before. So when she opens her adaptation of Them’s “Gloria” with the line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” it’s to remind you that rock is the sound of renegades. And when the apocalyptic visions of “Land” give way to the ’60s song “Land of 1000 Dances,” it’s because teenagers expressing themselves through their bodies is, in its own way, sacred. And when “Birdland” winds down with Smith singing doo-wop, it’s because sometimes words fail.

“Just that long format, that spoken-word platform, the way that she played with a live band. In that way, it’s innovative to the point of blurring discipline.”

Liz Phair

Apple Music 100 Best Albums

Doggystyle

Horses