Nevermind by Nirvana

Lemonade

Beyoncé

Sometimes even Beyoncé has to summon her inner Beyoncé.

There’s one moment critical to understanding the emotional and cultural heft of Lemonade, Beyoncé’s genre-obliterating blockbuster sixth album—and it arrives at the end of “Freedom,” a storming empowerment anthem that samples a civil-rights-era prison song and features Kendrick Lamar. An elderly woman’s voice cuts in: “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up,” she says. “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.”

The speech—made by her husband JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015—reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali British poet Warsan Shire. Both the album and its visual companion are deeply tied to Beyoncé’s identity and narrative (her womanhood, her Blackness, her marriage) and make for her most outwardly revealing work to date.

The details, of course, are what make it so relatable, what make each song sting. The project is furious, defiant, anguished, vulnerable, experimental, muscular, triumphant, humorous, and brave—a vivid personal statement, released without warning in a time of public scrutiny and private suffering. It is also astonishingly tough. Through tears, even Beyoncé has to summon her inner Beyoncé, roaring, “I’ma keep running ’cause a winner don’t quit on themselves.” This panoramic strength—lyrical, vocal, instrumental, and personal—nudged her public image from mere legend to something closer to real-life superhero.

Every second of Lemonade deserves to be studied and celebrated (the self-punishment in “Sorry,” the politics in “Formation,” the creative enhancements from collaborators like James Blake and Karen O), but the song that aims the highest musically may be “Don’t Hurt Yourself”—a Zeppelin-sampling psych-rock duet with Jack White. “This is your final warning,” she says in a moment of unnerving calm. “If you try this shit again/You gon’ lose your wife.” In support, White offers a word to the wise: “Love God herself.”

Nevermind

Nirvana

When hyperbole about changing the world is somehow an understatement.

Even now, years after you first felt its edges, the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” still sounds too dangerous—too loud, too ugly, too upset—for any mainstream. And yet Nevermind’s opening salvo didn’t just mark an unlikely breakthrough for the Seattle trio, it upended popular culture in ways we haven’t seen since. Punk became pop, grunge became global vernacular, industry walls broke into rubble, and lead vocalist Kurt Cobain was anointed the reluctant voice of a generation in need of catharsis, all seemingly overnight. But what makes Nirvana’s second album special isn’t its rage, but its innocence. For as haunting and corrosive as it can often be, it was never at the expense of melody or songcraft or humanity.

The old guard was actually still alive and well: Both Metallica’s Black Album and Guns N’ Roses’ two-volume Use Your Illusion famously came out within weeks of Nevermind. And while the album went on to sell about as well as those—even displacing Michael Jackson’s Dangerous as the best-selling album in the United States for a brief moment in 1992—Nirvana’s influence extended well beyond sheer economics, cutting a path for generations of forward-looking artists that stretches from Radiohead to Billie Eilish. They presented themselves not as rock gods, but ordinary (and highly sensitive) mortals. As an alternative to the pinup in leather pants, they offered the proud feminist, screaming until his voice gave out (“Territorial Pissings”). In place of the glossy power ballad, they delivered something fragile and raw (“Polly,” “Something in the Way”).

Nirvana’s angst didn’t only come across in the lyrics, but in the delivery. None of Cobain’s wisdom or fury would have resonated in the culture-shaking way it did if not for the sort of tunefulness that has always had a way of making wisdom and fury go down a little easier.

Apple Music 100 Best Albums

Lemonade

Nevermind