But no list is definitive β tastes change, new genres emerge, the history of music keeps being rewritten. So we decided to remake our greatest albums list from scratch. To do so, we received and tabulated Top 50 Albums lists from more than artists, producers, critics, and music-industry figures from radio programmers to label heads, like Atlantic Records CEO Craig Kallman. As in , we allowed votes for compilations and greatest-hits albums, mainly because a well-made compilation can be just as coherent and significant as an LP, because compilations helped shaped music history, and because many hugely important artists recorded their best work before the album had arrived as a prominent format.
Of course, it could still be argued that embarking on a project like this is increasingly difficult in an era of streaming and fragmented taste. The classics are still the classics, but the canon keeps getting bigger and better. Nigerian-born fashion designer Sade Adu and her London band defined elegantly cool Eighties soul with their smash debut, Diamond Life.
Pavement were the quintessential American independent rock band, and this is the quintessential indie-rock album. The playing is loose-limbed, the production laid-back and primitive, the lyrics quirky and playful, the melodies sweet and seductive. Slanted and Enchanted is one of the most influential rock albums of the s; its fuzzy recording style can be heard in the music of Nirvana, Liz Phair, Beck, the Strokes, and the White Stripes.
For Americans in the full grip of Beatlemania, this was the first album they could buy. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were on a roll that would be unmatched in rock history, and at this point they were a real team. She released Body Talk in three mini-album installments on her own Konichiwa label, before cherry-picking the highlights for this epochal feminist disco statement. Leonard Cohen was already well into his thirties when he made his debut, in the Summer of Love.
The Montreal poet had been publishing his books to literary acclaim for years, but he took to songwriting, with his acoustic guitar and the orchestrations of producer John Simon. After Thriller turned Michael Jackson into an international pop phenomenon, he spent two years of work on the follow-up.
