100 Albums That Rocked My World

My answer to Apple Music's recent Greatest Albums list

Two weeks ago, I commented on Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums list, closing with the remark that I’d rather point a young music fan towards the infamous Nurse With Wound list.

That’s pretentious nonsense, of course. That list is from 1979.

So I’ve been thinking about putting together a Top 100 focused on some kind of alternative canon, from free jazz, psychedelic pop/rock, post-punk and industrial to experimental electronic music, leftfield hip-hop and alt R&B.

I spent my whole Sunday to get this done.

This is the list I’d give to my non-existing kid if they wanted to discover the music that’s relevant to me. I’d hope it would send them down some intriguing back alleys of popular music history.

Think of it as a highly subjective, genre-agnostic list of inspiring, trail-blazing records, just like Steven Stapleton’s list or that hand-written list Kurt Cobain left behind.

House rules:

• Only one album per artist/band. Many of the artists/bands on this list have made several outstanding albums, but for the sake of diversity, I settled for what I believe is their “best”.

• This list is not ranked, but chronologically ordered. I don’t believe in ranking art.

• Every album still holds up and excites me as a body of work today. That doesn’t mean every song is a “hit”.

• No compilations, soundtracks, DJ mixes or posthumously released albums.

• The oldest record in this list is from 1960 – while there are great older recordings, the stereo LP as we know it was introduced in 1957/58.

• The newest is from 2019. I found it too hard to determine which albums from the last years will remain relevant for me.

Again: This is my subjective take and not designed as a general “greatest albums” list, so don’t get mad. Have fun with it – I certainly did.