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The 50 Best Albums of 1982
Looking back at 1982 in music, the headline is obvious: Thriller Sells A Bajillion Copies, Becomes World’s Biggest Album. But is it the year’s best album? Funny enough, Michael Jackson‘s sixth LP hardly even affected the charts that year — it snuck out in late November, just as Men at Work’s 1981 blockbuster, Business as Usual, began its commercial stranglehold in the U.S. Only one record on our list, Fleetwood Mac‘s chart-targeted Tusk follow-up, Mirage, hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. (Doesn’t it seem weird, looking back, that Prince‘s 1999 peaked at No. 9?) Lots of fascinating shit was happening in 1982, and you didn’t always find it on the radio. On our list, we included everything from early hip-hop (Grandmaster Flash) to horror-punk (Misfits) to lo-fi synth-pop (Solid Space). Revisit...
The 40 Greatest Music Video Artists
Music videos are the perfect bastard child of art and commerce, even more than pop music itself. A promotional visual accompaniment to a popular song doesn’t need a coherent narrative (although on rare occasions, they do). It just needs to suit the song, sell the record, and possibly make the artist look cool. But since the launch of MTV 40 years ago this week, a select few recording artists have helped raise music videos to an art form — sometimes by accident, and sometimes by carefully curating the work of brilliant directors like Mark Romanek, Hype Williams, and Spike Jonze. Here are 40 artists from the last four decades that helped video kill the radio star. 40. Lil Kim [embedded content] Although earlier female MCs like Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah used music videos to help launch th...
