The Most Memorable 1999 Albums (Part 1)

PopMatters recently turned 25, and these memorable 1999 albums celebrate the popular music that defined the year of our birth. This is part one, with more to follow.

In the relative safety of comfortable hindsight, think back to that moment of propulsion as our collective species hurtled towards one of time’s inevitable barriers. One of the most expansive and reflexive centuries in history was slamming to a close, and an equally mythologized future was careening toward us, promise, and uncertainty reaching out to pull us forward. That moment even came with its pop soundtrack as we danced the fin de siècle shuffle, partying because it was, at last, 1999.

That culturally impregnated year saw the birth of PopMatters, finding its nascent voice as an open-ended exploration of the cultural moment, and continuing in this vein for the first three decades of the chrome-bright 21st century. From the start, PopMatters loved music, loved what music means in art, history, culture, and society; loved what music means to people. It’s only natural that we care about the music of the year we were born.

However, the music of 1999 is more important than a mere catalog history of chart positions and popular tunes suitable for cutesy birthday cards. As mildly embarrassing and forgettable as “Y2K” paranoia seems now, it’s easy to forget that music was experiencing a similar cultural moment like every other human endeavor: a preparation for passage.

Nothing marks the interconnectedness of the human race quite like the triumph of the Gregorian calendar, and the looming turn of a new century was a planetary phenomenon. Even the hazy confusion over the actual beginnings and endings of centuries is an attendant example of how this preparation for passage was marked with uncertainty and anxiety, and no small amount of anticipation.

Any number of genres scrabbled through the 1990s to be the ascendant king of the final days or first voice of the future. For a time, it seemed apparent that electronic dancescapes would be the champion of a brave new world. However, hip-hop had already begun to assimilate the planet, and even traditional forms like Americana and country found new revivals. Jazz, punk, metal, Latin, world, indie, and pop; the entire 20th century seems to be represented in 1999’s numerous releases. One peek at the exhaustive list of 1999 albums on Wikipedia reveals just how diverse human song was as we sang out the old cycle.

In sorting through the list of 1999 releases to select some of the most noteworthy, PopMatters sought out those releases that marked out 1999 in their distinct ways. Whether or not you consider the success of Britney Spears and Blink 182 to be worthy or a stain, their impact on how we listened in 1999 is inescapable. Mainstream country gained massive crossover appeal in the Dixie Chicks’ sophomore effort and lost the same as it lost Garth Brooks to Chris Gaines.

Whether the idyllic icon of the West Coast was won by the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Rage Against the Machine is still debated. Eve, Missy Elliot, TLC, and Macy Gray offered competing pop narratives for women, while the war of cool on the dancefloor was waged between Air and Basement Jaxx, while old-timers the Underworld slipped in the back door.

Some of the artists herein made grand final statements in 1999 (XTC, Ben Folds Five), while others debuted to a mere glimmer of the success they’d achieve in the new century (the White Stripes, Eminem). Most are names that continue to influence and shape the discourse of popular music. Whether or not the artists remain vital in the present, these albums shaped 1999, expressed the electric trepidation and expectation on the edge of change, and helped shape the future. – Patrick Schabe

Britney Spears – …Baby One More Time [Jive] – 12 January 1999

We all know this album is paper-thin wank. Rolling Stone and NME railed against it when it was first released, and, even when praising it, AllMusic called it a “piece of fluff” with “its share of well-crafted filler”. However, the more one researches Britney Spears‘ debut album, the more one fact becomes clear: Spears was exploited, and few of the bad things that have happened to her since were entirely her fault.

Spears tried out for The New Mickey Mouse Club at eight years old but was considered too young. She then performed as an understudy in off-Broadway shows, lost in the second round of Star Search in 1992, and returned to star on The New Mickey Mouse Club at age 11. Spears left the show a couple of years later, spent a year in high school, landed a major-label contract, and recorded her debut album in the same studio that gave us *NSYNC, Five, and Ace of Base. She was hardly allowed a real childhood, and she went through puberty under the glaring eye of the ravenous public.

Sure, Spears’ career path looks excellent on paper. Her debut shot to number one on the Billboard charts, where her subsequent three albums would also premiere. She remains one of the highest-selling female artists in history, with over 83 million units sold worldwide. Yet, much of this was achieved through the calculated, intense sexualization of the underage girl via a performer who was not legal herself.

The video for the title track from Baby One More Time puts Britney in a school, in the requisite uniform with her hair in pigtails, while she sings the word “baby” an astounding 22 times in three minutes. Some four months after Rolling Stone gave the debut two stars, the then 17-year-old Spears appeared on the cover in her underwear, clutching a Teletubbie to her right breast.

Sure, Tiffany had gone on mall tours in the early 1990s, but Spears’ debut marked a significant moment in the pop culture sexualization of the young girl image. The American Family Association recognized the “disturbing mix of childhood innocence and adult sexuality” and organized a boycott of any stores selling the debut. A boycott was exactly what Jive Records wanted.

The Backstreet Boys were going the way of the New Kids on the Block and needed controversy to sell records. Who better to exploit than an underage girl with a great body, a modicum of talent, and a “For Sale by Parents” sign around her neck? Since the debut still holds the Guinness World Record in the “best-selling album by a teenage solo artist” category, the hype worked.

Spears has since paid a fantastic personal price for that record-setting controversy. Hounded continuously by up to a hundred paparazzi a day since the beginning, she got married and divorced in 55 days, randomly shaved her head in a stress-induced haze, and birthed two children who were subsequently removed from her custody for months on end. Spears was faced with the formidable task of becoming an adult while everyone in her life wanted her to stay the same. My heart goes out to her.

Of course, her debut album has not aged well. It was never expected to. It consisted of embarrassingly basic instrumentals ripped out of the Michael Jackson playbook, with her overproduced voice doing its best to give meaning to utterly trite lyrics loaded with banal innuendos. Still, none of that will ever change its place in history or remove any of its reported 25 million in sales that make it her single-most successful release. This is an album that genuinely launched an empire. – Alan Ranta

Bonnie “Prince” Billy – I See a Darkness [Palace] – 9 January 1999

If you’ve been listening to Bonnie “Prince” Billy‘s I See a Darkness on high-rotation since its original release in 1999, chances are that by now you’re well past the point of no return on some Hogarth-like Rake’s Progress, wasting away in an inevitable decline of monomaniacal introspection and intangible despair. For the slightly-rosier listener, it’s a rare treat of self-aware doom and gloom that’s best brought out occasionally and then quickly sent back whence it came.

Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, aka a bunch of other names, has always had an air of cultivated mystery about him — jumping between pseudonyms, losing himself behind bushranger beards, and drowning himself in low-fi recordings. However, the real question about the highly-praised I See a Darkness is whether or not you listen to it while drinking absinthe or moonshine: it’s at once a weird Appalachian howl and cerebral arts-student debauchery. Ten years on, it remains the uneasy sticking point in this still undeniably great album.

Oldham may seem to channel the “high lonesome” sound of someone like Roscoe Holcombe or Clarence Ashley. Still, the flatly-stoic imagery of that old weird sound here often finds its way into slightly too-neat rhymes and clever resolutions, dredging up a hundred intangible resonances and anxieties only to then wrap them up just a little too precisely with a clever rhyme or turn of phrase.

The title track (wonderfully covered by Johnny Cash with Oldham on backing vocals the following year) paints a world of delicate and troubled existential pleas (“Many times / We’ve been out drinking / And many times / We’ve shared our thoughts” and “Well, I hope that someday, buddy / We have peace in our lives / Together or apart / Alone or with our wives”) only to try and cohere the core of it all (“Did you know how much I love you…”) into some flatly tangible psychological insight (“…Is a hope that somehow you / Can save me from this darkness”).

Similarly, a song like “Death to Everyone” is derailed into a quirkily-written but fairly straightforward statement about death’s presence in life (“Death to everyone / Is gonna come / And it makes hosing / Much more fun”).

Like most of Oldham’s work, exactly how much patience you have for the album may depend on exactly how you respond to this odd mix of intense otherworldly visions and affected statements of bohemian cleverness (before singing one of his songs in concert, Marianne Faithfull once described her friend Oldham’s desire not to be famous, bringing audible scoffs from most of the audience).

But who said that gothic visions of gloom were supposed to be subtle anyway? When you’re ready to sink into the solitary vice of melancholy, Oldham’s soundtrack still remains as perfect a complement as half a glass of absinthe mixed with half a glass of moonshine. – Kit MacFarlane

Four Tet – Dialogue [Output] – 1 February 1999

That Kieran Hebden’s Four Tet project could ever be charged with spearheading the insipidly-named folktronica movement is far from apparent on his debut full-length Dialogue. However, he does seem to be moving music forward a couple of essential steps. Unlike most folk music, or electronic music of the time for that matter, Dialogue was fluid and loose, unguarded and, yes, organic.

Even with such a stunning and phantasmagoric mix of freeform psychedelic noodling and rusty groove basslines, it’s hard to deny the preeminence of Hebden’s beat science on the album. His membership in post-rockers Fridge informed those meticulous rhythmic cues, though hardly expected even from those who knew that band, which made the album take on the unique shape it did. It culled free-jazz, psychedelic, raga, progressive rock, hip-hop, fusion, indie, exotica, and beyond into a free-associative amalgamation that sounded like a family reunion wherein you could trace the genetic makeup of all those styles back to a single ancestry.

The landscape of music in the years that followed the album’s release seems to have formed in its underbelly. Even if not directly influenced by Dialogue, it’s easy to see its reflection in the woozy, hard-drumming blue sunshine of Manitoba/Caribou’s “Up in Flames”, or the whimsical flutter of vintage jazz reimagined as 22nd-century astral beat voyages for Madlib and the like (the late J Dilla would later remix Four Tet).

Even the ecstatic tribal drumming and strange woodland/woodwind noises of tracks like “3.3 Degrees from the Pole” (built on a trance-like loop from Roxy Music’s “2HB” to add another influence to the pot) have echoes in the freakiest of folk being put out today, like Sunburned Hand of the Man, who had one album produced by Hebden.

Ultimately, though, Dialogue is a singularity, both in Hebden’s catalogue and the general music world. That it came at the end of the 20th century, typifying the abstractions of the past couple of decades and signaling what was to come, is simply the icing on this delectable multi-layered cake. – Timothy Gabriele

Pole – 2 [Matador] – 1 February 1999

The middle chapter of Stefan Betke’s trilogy of seminal ambient dub albums is also the shortest one, which means that it, and not 1, is the best place for novices to start. Although the three albums differ, Pole’s sound is such that the differences are invisible to anyone beyond already-committed fans.

Indeed, the staticky pops, crackles, and bass pulses of 2 are a little more active than the almost parodically withdrawn 1, and given the lack of variation in Betke’s sound, 2‘s brief running time and unusually sprightly tracks make it the most palatable. Betke started working as Pole after he was gifted with a damaged Waldorf 4-Pole filter — Betke was interested enough in the glitchy, cracked end of dub techno that the hissing and popping the filter now produced were turned from a defect into not just a virtue, but a production aesthetic.

The nine-minute “Fahren”, which opens 2, should give any listener more than enough material to determine whether Betke’s uncompromising style is for them. If early Pole is a dub of anything, it’s a dub of broken machinery, and it sounds like it.

However, there’s a reason Betke’s first three records are still lauded by the type of people who lionize Basic Channel, Deepchord, and Gas: the furiously twitching (for the genre) “Streit” and the hazy “Hafen” are pretty much as compelling as ambient dub gets, and for converts that’s very compelling indeed. Most listeners who find Betke’s work intriguing probably don’t need to go beyond this brief record, but that’s part of what makes 2 so great. – Ian Mathers

Built to Spill – Keep It Like a Secret [Warner Bros.] – 2 February 1999

On the family tree of Northwest rock music, Built to Spill may not be godfathers, but they are certainly the cool uncles, mixing drinks in the kitchen while the party takes place on the patio. This splendid Boise, Idaho, band spent most of the 1990s quietly drafting the blueprint for the Northwest Sound (their DNA residue is evident in the strains of Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, and other crucial Northwest bands), closing the decade with Keep It Like a Secret, ten tracks of gangly, melodic delight.

Keep It Like a Secret works at once as a firm handshake to new listeners and a warm embrace for disciples, an amalgam of the crisp, clever structures demonstrated on 1993’s There’s Nothing Wrong with Love and the gorgeous, languid sprawl of 1996’s Perfect From Now On. Meandering guitar lines wander into infectious choruses, and propulsive rhythms demand sympathetic movement of appendages (tapping feet, pumping fists, air drumming, etc.); beguiling lyrics offer literate, coherent documentation of incoherent events (or perhaps vice versa) — the record secured Built to Spill’s status as demigods of the indie set, even as skeptics dismissed them as a stoner mutation of Dinosaur Jr.

Ten years later, the album still defies easy placement into a genre, sounding as vibrant today as it did on the day of its release. Perhaps the band’s fusion of muscle and melody will elicit the raising of one eyebrow instead of two from some listeners, but Keep It Like a Secret remains a stellar document from a seminal Northwest band and a sonic pleasure in the present tense. – Bill Reagan

Of Montreal – The Gay Parade [Bar/None] – 16 February 1999

Before Of Montreal were one of the most discussed indie bands of the 21st century, they were merely a charming remnant of the Elephant 6 collective, working first within the Kindercore label’s oft-praised stable of psych-pop tweesters, then struggling to survive the scene’s dissolution. Years later, it seems clear that the major turning point for the band came with the signing to Polyvinyl and the release of 2004’s grandiose Satanic Panic in the Attic, but way back in 1999, when more people thought Of Montreal was a description of origin than a band name, Kevin Barnes and his shifting outfit released their first truly cohesive, brilliant collection of songs.

The Gay Parade sprang out of the Athens psych-pop pack to show that Barnes and his band should no longer be relegated to the sidestage behind the Apples in Stereo and Neutral Milk Hotel. Filled with lighthearted piano, bright guitars, a hodge-podge of effects, and bouncing melodies, The Gay Parade is suffused with a smiling, wide-eyed joy that those only familiar with Barnes’s recent work would find surprising.

With the standard Beatles influence worn on its sleeves, the trippy light psychedelia of “Tulip Baroo”, “The March of the Gay Parade”, and “Y the Quale and Vaguely Bird Noisily” could have spilled out of any yellow submarine or lonely hearts club band, while “The Miniature Philosopher” and “A Man’s Life Flashing Before His Eyes While He and His Wife Drive Off a Cliff Into the Ocean” reveal hints of the everyday melancholy that would mark much of Of Montreal’s work in the future.

Certainly, as a band, Of Montreal are constantly evolving, as is the songwriting of Kevin Barnes, but it’s informative to look back at this period in the group’s discography to reveal the path he’s charted. The Gay Parade was the first fully-formed expression of Barnes’s musical ambitions, a testament to the goddess who gave his hometown a name and a giant leap forward from the spare twee recordings Of Montreal had yet produced. It’s the foundation for all that was to come, even as much of its innocence and lo-fi organic pop sound fell away over the years.

If a shot in the dark in 1999, The Gay Parade proved its strength by continuing the psych-pop dreams of its peers into the next century. – Patrick Schabe

XTC – Apple Venus Vol. 1 [Cooking Vinyl] – 17 February 1999

Opening with plucked strings and the sounds of droplets falling, XTC‘s Apple Venus, Vol. 1 makes an immediate and surprising impression. A new direction for the band is made clear at once. It’s only when Andy Partridge’s distinctive vocals come in that it becomes evident that this is XTC, albeit an XTC making some changes.

Their first album since 1992’s much poppier Nonsuch, Apple Venus, Vol. 1 shifts to a more acoustic sound with extensive use of orchestral arrangements. Songs such as the spare “Knights in Shining Karma”, the vitriolic “Your Dictionary”, and the restrained “Harvest Festival” all offer the listener an opportunity to glimpse the musical turns XTC has taken.

The band was moving forward and changing in ways that led keyboardist and lead guitarist Dave Gregory to quit a 20-year stint over creative differences during recording. Nonetheless, they created an album of sparse beauty with gorgeous melodies, biting lyrics, and allusions to 20th-century classical music — a mix of the expected with the unexpected, and wholly successful in execution.

Marked by Partridge’s idiosyncratic songwriting (along with bassist Colin Moulding’s contribution of two of the more traditional XTC-sounding songs), Apple Venus, Vol. 1 fits into XTC’s previous discography while also carving out a new direction. The album is not one easily identified by its time period. It sounds as fresh as if it were just released, which is no easy feat for any band, much less one with such a distinct sound. Apple Venus, Vol. 1 is an ambitious album that exceeds expectations for a group that has been releasing music for the last 20 years. – J.M. Suarez

Eminem – The Slim Shady LP [Aftermath/Interscope] – 24 February 1999

How skilled must Eminem be that even those of us who preach tolerance and respect forgive him his misogyny? After all, this is the man who, on “My Fault”, from his first major-label release, The Slim Shady LP, mocks a girl who will suffer a fatal overdose by the song’s end, an overdose for which the song’s narrator is responsible. Among his other taunts, he says, “Susan, stop crying / I don’t hate ya’ / The world’s not against you, / I’m sorry your father raped you / So what you had your little coochie in your dad’s mouth? / That ain’t no reason to start wigging and spaz out”.

Even more disturbingly, in “As the World Turns”, he fantasizes about slicing off a woman’s right nipple before he uses his “gadget dick” to “fuck that fat slut to death”. I know it sounds harsh, but keep in mind, he kills her in couplets, so, as the kids (and Dylan) say nowadays, it’s all good.

At the time of Slim Shady‘s release, I joined the hordes of fans and critics alike who celebrated Eminem as a vital new voice in pop music. This was when Christina, Britney, the Backstreet Boys, and Limp Bizkit ruled the charts, and Em’s eventual claim that “I’m only giving you things you joke about with your friends inside your living room” wasn’t too far off. These self-serious pop stars needed to be taken down a notch. What’s more, the comeuppance should be harsh and public. Em was our guy.

His songs skewered pop culture — the Spice Girls, Pamela Anderson, O.J. — and his videos were shiny. They were excuses to play dress up, to visually take the piss out of the celebrities that he couldn’t get to in the songs. There he is as Marilyn Manson. There he is as Johnny Carson, and that patented thumb wave can only be the then-President Bill Clinton.

The videos were eye candy, the equivalent of getting up early for Saturday-morning cartoons for kids who now vegged out to TRL after school. The irony, of course, is that in no time at all, he was as big as those whom he so openly disdained. If he could keep his street cred, it was only because of the muscle he had behind him: Dr. Dre.

Actually, only two songs from The Slim Shady LP credit Dre as the sole producer. Unsurprisingly, they were the two lead singles (“My Name Is” and “Guilty Conscience”, the latter on which the good Doctor also raps). Listening now, I am struck by how restrained the production is. For example, long stretches of “My Name Is” feature only the barest of beats and a bass line that can only be described as “bored”. Elsewhere, there’s more going on, but throughout, the album puts Eminem’s voice front and center, which is precisely where it should be on this, his introduction to the world.

However, featuring his voice so prominently also proves to be one of the album’s many limitations, for in 1999, Slim Shady hadn’t yet discovered just how many different looks his voice had. He’s pretty much one-note here — the few variances he does employ reserved for caricatures of nay-saying teachers and the like — which ultimately grates on this overly long record (more on that below).

At times, the rhymes carry the day. Growing up near Kansas City, I was always infinitely amused by the pairing of “naughty rotten rhymer” with “cursing at you players worse than Marty Schottenheimer” — but they are hardly redemptive. Compare any song from Slim Shady with a song like “Stan” from its far-superior follow up, The Marshall Mathers LP, and you will see just how much Eminem developed as a rapper in only a year.

The second problem with this record is that it is simply way too long. Never mind the skits — which are immediately dispensable, and an album feature that should have been done away with across the board after De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising — there are really only eight, maybe nine, songs here that reward a second listen. Everything else is either too stupid, too offensive, or, worst of all, too uninteresting.

In this way, Eminem is just as guilty as the pop princess who records an album as a kind of single-delivery system. I don’t even know if the chaff can be called “filler”. Someone thought it was worthy, but that person was wrong. In the days of compact discs, I would have said that the “skip track” button was designed for albums like this. Today, I’ll just say that only a handful of these songs are worth importing to your iPod.

The album’s final flaw brings us back to where we started, which is to say that I once sloughed off the casual violence toward women as harmlessly amusing, and I now find it disgusting. This is the flaw that proves fatal. I don’t mean to go all Tipper Gore here, and I am fully aware that my perception is influenced by the fact that I am, obviously, ten years older than I was when I first heard the record, and that age has brought with it what some would call stuffiness and what others would call maturity. Stuffy though it may be, my strongest reaction to my recent re-listen of The Slim Shady LP was that I don’t have to subject myself to such hatred.

Somehow, it’s more disappointing here than it is on subsequent albums (save his most recent). Later, when Eminem more formally introduces us to his estranged wife and his pill-popping mother, the objects of his anger are at least specific. It’s less about all women and more about these two. But without that specificity, his barbs are at best juvenile, and at worst psychopathic.

Fairly or not, Slim Shady suffers compared to Eminem’s later work. Marshall Mathers succeeded, whereas Shady failed in demonstrating that style can trump content when it’s inspired enough and that Oscar for “Lose Yourself” from 8 Mile was well deserved. – Kirby Fields

Sleater-Kinney – The Hot Rock [Kill Rock Stars] – 23 February 1999

With all the critical attention heaped on Sleater-Kinney after the release of the anthemic Dig Me Out, it seemed that the band had successfully resuscitated the waning riot grrl movement and would become its strident standard bearer into the new decade. However, The Hot Rock effectively put an end to that idea. The opening track, “Start Together”, suggests that this was no accident: “Everything’s changing”, Corin Tucker sings. “Not the one you wanted”, the title track’s refrain runs, “not the thing you keep”.

It’s as though Sleater-Kinney wanted to be sure they wouldn’t be graded on a curve by fans who were just grateful to see women rocking out. The album offers no shout-along choruses. Instead, it features overlapping vocals that alternately intertwine and cancel each other out. Propulsive riffs are replaced by subdued, sinewy guitar lines that occasionally wind themselves into intractable knots. The songs eschew the more overt feminist themes explored on previous albums and focus more on relationship entropy, with lyrics revolving around nautical metaphors of sinking ships and failed captains.

The seductiveness of difficulty for its own sake and surrender seems to hang over the record, particularly the single “Get Up”, which opens with this spoken-word exhortation: “And when the body finally starts to let go / Let it all go at once / Not piece by piece”. With The Hot Rock, the band seemingly flirted with the idea of letting it all go, devolving their established approach to retreat from success and spin intricate and insular odes in obscurity. However, then a few years later, they were on tour with Pearl Jam. – Rob Horning

The Roots – Things Fall Apart [Geffen/MCA] – 23 February 1999

If the Roots are the best hip-hop band of all time, then Things Fall Apart is their best record. This isn’t a collection of singles, but a statement about the evolution of hip-hop as an artistic movement. The challenge was simple: could hip-hop artists produce an actual album, not just a singles collection? This is suggested as well on the first track, “Act Won (Things Fall Apart)” — “Hip-hop records are treated as though they are disposable. They’re not maximized as product even … [or] as art”.

Although it was considered brilliant when it was released, there is no doubt that the importance of this record has only grown over time. Now it is essential, a classic, a gold standard by which all other hip-hop records before and since should be measured. It is the single most influential hip-hop record since Eric B. and Rakim’s 1987 debut, Paid in Full (a fair comparison since the Roots’ MC, Black Thought, is the best rhymesmith since Rakim).

If hip-hop had become weak and ostentatious by 1999, then ten years later, much of the genre has become a mockery of itself. Things Fall Apart is a concept album about what it means to be in hip-hop and what the music can do for the soul if done properly, if done with TLC by a group of musicians who understand hip-hop’s history so that it can be channeled for future generations.

This record has no weak track, and it should be played continuously. There are some standout songs, though, the best being “The Next Movement”, “Double Trouble” (with a killer rap duet featuring Mos Def), and “Act Too: Love of My Life”, the only love song I’ve heard written for hip-hop as a whole. Says Black Thought, “Sometimes I wouldn’t-a made it if it wasn’t for you / Hip-Hop, you the love of my life and that’s true”.

Most people are drawn to the album’s biggest single, “You Got Me”, which features guest spots from Erykah Badu and Eve, and was originally written by Jill Scott. It is an astonishing and timelessly beautiful song with a kind of openly romantic honesty that is absent in hip-hop today. Drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson may be one of the best drummers in the world, period, and the producers allow Thompson to sample himself by ending the track with a drum-and-bass-inspired backbeat staccato.

However, “You Got Me” is just one of 18 solid tracks that all seamlessly blend into each other with an album production reminiscent of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Things Fall Apart is a massive collaboration of talent — Black Thought, Questlove, Kamal Gray’s keyboards, Leonard Hubbard’s bass, second MC Malik B’s skills, and a host of guest musicians and artists (DJ Jazzy Jeff, Common, D’Angelo, Beanie Segal, Scott Storch, Mos Def, etc.).

Listening to hip-hop now, it is shameful to see just how extra-terrestrial the music has become (and not in a cool, Parliament Funkadelic kind of way). But if we educated our youth on the true meaning of hip-hop and its roots — socially-relevant lyrics, jazz, blues, and rock and roll — then we, as a people, would be in a much better position to vocalize our thoughts and our emotions through positive music. The Roots’ Things Fall Apart is a quintessential record in the fight against ignorance because it challenges the hip-hop community to expect more of itself and hold the community accountable. – Shyam Sriram

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