Oh.
Oh no. Um ... okay,
@payn you really need to come up with better rules!
Here are my rules for answering this-
1. No "Best of" Albums.
2. It has to be an actual album that the artist wanted released.
3. No more than one album by any artist.
4. I will try to use a combination of what the album means to me (I like it) with what the album means generally (overall importance).
5. No soundtracks.
6. No music prior to 1966.
7. No jazz (although the 1966 barrier excludes some of the best, like The Shape of Jazz to Come, it's just to hard to compare), no classical, no country. This is strictly pop/rock/hip hop.
This is not in order.
1. Low, David Bowie. Tough one. Station to Station is more listenable. Ziggy Stardust has the most hits. Hunky Dory is a sneaky favorite. But Low is the sound of the future crashing into the present.
2. Doolittle, Pixies. If you want to explain the early 90s, you don't start with
Nevermind. You start here. Still, arguably, the best 90s album ... and it was 1989.
3. Yeezus, Kanye. I know that Ye is more of a punchline than an artist today, but the run from 2004 (College Dropout) to 2016 (Life of Pablo) is right there with any artist you can name. And Yeezus is abrasive, flawed, alienating ... and Ye at his best.
4. Kid A, Radiohead. It is nearly impossible to believe that this album was controversial when it was released as the followup to their second-best album (OK Computer), yet ... it was. Timeless and magic.
5. The Velvet Underground & Nico, Velvet Underground. One of the few albums that can never sounds dated; it always sounds like it's coming from some impossibly cool party occurring three years in the future.
6. Aja, Steely Dan. Technically, doesn't violate the "no jazz" rule. Steely Dan is what would happen if Joan Didion and William S. Burroughs had an unholy love child that loved jazz and studio perfection.
7. Hatful of Hollow, The Smiths. Okay, this is skirting the "no best of," but it was a contemporaneous compilation originally released in 1984 from BBC sessions. Say what you will about Morrissey, The Smiths were amazing.
8. Dummy, Portishead. I wanted to go with Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk for its importance, but ... I love Portishead. Three albums, three stone-cold classics.
9. Random Access Memories, Daft Punk. Do you remember when a French Electronica band was the biggest thing in the world? I do, and they deserved it. I wanted to put in Human After All, or even Homework ... but this is just a stone-cold classic album, with every single track being amazing.
10. Blonde, Frank Ocean. If you're not living too much, maybe you're not living at all.
