Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums

In the Nineties, much of the conversation about hip-hop was dominated by the feud between the East and West Coasts. The South was putting out tons of incredible rap records too, but almost nobody was paying any attention to Portsmouth, Virginia. With 1997's "Supa Dupa Fly", Missy Elliott and Tim "Timbaland" Mosley changed that, and gave the world a taste of the future. 

Missy and Timbaland met as teenage...

In this special holiday episode of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums, our new podcast on Amazon Music, we delve into 1963's "A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector", an album that changed the way we look at holiday music. In 2019, Rolling Stone named it the best Christmas album of all time.

A labor of love that pulled together all the top girl groups, including the Crystals and the Ronett...

In the newest episode of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums, we dive into Lucinda Williams' 1998 masterpiece "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," an album that helped define modern roots music and got Williams' long-overdue recognition as one of America's greatest songwriters. The album took six years, three producers, and some label drama to make, but Williams' perfectionism resulted in an arguably perfect album...

In the first episode of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums, we tackle one of hip-hop’s most important albums: Public Enemy’s 1988 political-rap masterpiece "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back", which landed at Number 15 on the magazine’s all-new 500 Greatest Albums list. In this episode, Public Enemy frontman Chuck D and producer Hank Shocklee tell the story behind the album and break down the sample-layering t...

In 2013, Kanye West released Yeezus, his sixth studio album. It sounded like nothing the rapper had ever produced. Fans recoiled at the album’s experimental sound. Critics began to wonder if Ye, who seemed to be at the height of his career, might finally be losing his touch. But, then, something strange happened. Over time, the world Kanye constructed on Yeezus — full of guttural and chaotic emotion, combined with so much ...

At the beginning of 1975, Gerald Ford was president, the United States and Soviet Union were approaching a détente in the space race, and a barber-turned-singer with a wild imagination named George Clinton was redefining the possibilities of funk music with his bands, Parliament and Funkadelic. That year, their iconic album Mothership Connection played off one of Clinton's fantasies, sending Black people to space. Clinton ...

In 1975, David Bowie moved to Los Angeles and reinvented himself. As rock's greatest chameleon, he had already achieved success as Ziggy Stardust. But this new character would be his darkest yet: the gaunt, theatrical, slick-haired Thin White Duke. And as the Duke, he created the art-rock odyssey Station to Station. It was a record made on no sleep, a dash of black magic, and an avalanche of cocaine. Bowie rarely did press...

Back in 1993, a young songwriter named Liz Phair came out of nowhere to drop one of the Nineties’ defining albums: Exile in Guyville. Phair came from the Chicago indie rock scene, but she had a new story to tell: the secret life of an ordinary twentysomething woman, grappling with love and sex and insecurity. The album didn’t get any mainstream airplay, but it changed the stakes for indie rock, musically, culturally, and e...

With more than 80 million records sold worldwide, Shakira is the best-selling female Latin artist ever. But within her decades-long career, there’s one album that set her up for massive fame and in many ways, predicted it all: 1998’s Donde Estan Los Ladrones?. In this episode, producers and collaborators behind the album open up about working with the Colombian singer with the huge voice, on the cusp of her foray into glob...

In 1989, a teenage Rivers Cuomo moved from suburban Connecticut to Los Angeles to become a superstar hair-metal guitarist – and instead ended up the frontman of Weezer, one of the key bands of the Nineties alt-rock revolution. Cuomo and his bandmates tell the story of the unlikely birth of Weezer, and the making of a classic debut album that's still winning over new generations of fans.

New episodes of Rolling Stone's 500 G...

Dolly Parton takes us inside Coat of Many Colors, the 1971 album where she came into her own as a solo artist, as a songwriter, and as a storyteller. Over the album’s 10 tracks — seven of them written solely by Dolly — she explored topics like poverty, class, spirituality, nature, female empowerment, and sexuality. The album marked Dolly’s first significant steps out of the shadow of Porter Wagoner, the rhinestoned country...

Alice Coltrane spent the mid-Sixties in personal and musical bliss, starting a family with John Coltrane and touring the world as the pianist in his band. Then John died suddenly of liver cancer in 1967. Newly widowed at the age of 29 with four children to care for, she plunged into a lengthy period of despair. Sensing her pain, an old friend introduced her to his guru, Swami Satchidananda. With a new clarity — and a harp ...

In the mid-2000s, few people were more famous than Britney Spears. But as she began to stumble in her personal life, the price of the public’s fascination was more than just a few nasty late-night jokes. Paparazzi swarmed Spears’ home and her family, turning the singer into a tabloid punching bag. But when you’re a platinum-selling pop princess, the show goes on even when you desperately need an intermission. In the midst ...

Let It Be is known as the Beatles’ breakup record: the one where squabbles among John, Paul, George and Ringo began to overtake the music, resulting in their darkest, most divisive set of songs. In our season 2 premiere, Paul and Ringo join best-selling author and Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield to take us step-by-step through the making of the album, from the failed back-to-basics concept to the famous 1969 rooftop gig...

The stories behind some of the most essential albums of all time, told by the artists who made them. Each episode focuses on one album from Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums list and features fresh conversations with the people behind the music, as well as classic interview audio and expert commentary from Rolling Stone’s writers and editors. Season 2 takes you inside a new slate of classics: Paul McCartney and...

What's Going On was R&B's first concept album, a suite of seamlessly connected songs tackling everything from police brutality to heroin addiction, inner-city poverty, and the dire state of the environment. When Marvin Gaye first proposed the project, inspired by a song brought to him by Four Tops member Obie Benson, Gordy told him it was career suicide. But when the title track came out, it was an instant smash, ...

In early 1966, the Beach Boys arrived at Los Angeles’ Western Studios to hear what Brian Wilson had been up to. The touring version of the band – Mike Love, Bruce Johnston, Al Jardine and Dennis Wilson – had been on the road in Japan, singing surf hits like “Fun, Fun Fun” and “I Get Around.” Wilson, after suffering a mental breakdown on a plane the year before, stayed home, opting to work on instrumental tracks with s...

In the mid-2000s, Daddy Yankee was a married father of three living in the Villa Kennedy public housing projects in San Juan, Puerto Rico. But he was about to change the world with an album that did perhaps more than any other to turn reggaeton -  an underground urban movement out of Puerto Rico, drawing on influences like Jamaican dancehall, Panamanian reggae en español and hip hop - into a global...

After rocketing to worldwide fame in the early Nineties as an actress and a member of the Fugees, Lauryn Hill took a big risk with her solo debut, 1998's "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill". It made her an even bigger star at age 23, sold millions of copies, and won her five Grammy Awards, which is the most any woman before her had taken home in a single night. But in the years following Miseducation's blockbuster ...