1983 is a year that brought the absolute best out of so many powerhouse artists. Now that the sound of the decade had been firmly...

If I was forced to choose, I believe I would pick out 1973 as my all-time favorite year in all of music history. So much brilliant music...

This past year in music was a blockbuster year full of outstanding releases from members of music royalty, dropping projects that are...

2012 was one of the greatest years in recent memory for music, with countless classic records being made in all genres, as you'll see...

2002 was a diverse, multifaceted year for music with classic records being made in all genres. There were watershed moments for rap,...

1992 was a truly revolutionary year in music history in a way that spanned genres from rock to rap, alternative to pop, soul to dance and...

1982 was a banner year for everything music, from blockbuster pop smashes to iconic alternative rock staples, soul and funk gems and so...

1972 was one of the greatest, most pivotal years in music history and it celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and what better way to...

It’s honestly hard to fathom a time when Prince wasn’t an absolute superstar, yet in 1984 he was only a legend to those in the know. Sure he’d had some chart success with all time classic hits like “1999”, “Little Red Corvette” and “I Wanna Be Your Lover” but none of those loomed quite as large on their original release as they do today. In Minneapolis, the city he called home, he was second to none. If you loved funk music, he was already an icon, but to most of America h

Few artists get the chance to make a second first impression, but on this album Michael Jackson jumped at the opportunity to reintroduce himself to the pop charts as someone familiar, but far more confident, charming and self-assured. Contrary to popular belief this isn’t Jackson’s solo debut album, it is actually his fifth solo record, but it truly feels like the birth of a generational talent. Jackson had been performing with his brothers for over ten years at that point.

Depeche Mode is a band that has become so synonymous with a particular genre, fashion and time that it can be hard to believe that they existed outside of the microcosm that was the 1980s. Perhaps no other band embodied all the glories of the era of synthpop quite like Depeche Mode, pioneers in the genre and one of its most well-loved outfits. While New Order’s brand of club ready dance pop was commercially dominant, Depeche Mode’s edgier, more seductive brand of industrial

Fleetwood Mac is a band that has always been marked by turmoil, with the group recording over eighteen albums with nearly every other record boasting a significantly different line up. Only bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, for whom the band is named, have played with the group consistently from their beginnings as a 60s era English blues band (more like Cream and Led Zeppelin than the acoustic pop rock they’d become famous for) to their last studio album in 200

The pretty boy frontman of a pop group going solo might be the most well worn trope in pop music, but George Michael was not your average teenybopper. Of course, Michael had made a name for himself by fronting the iconic, frivolous 80s pop duo Wham! In his fruitful partnership with Andrew Ridgeley, he wrote and performed some of the frothiest, catchiest bubblegum pop of the mid-80s with hits like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”, “Freedom”, “Everything She Wants”, “I’m Your Ma

There is no one more synonymous with the concept of funk than George Clinton, the musical mastermind behind countless classic records, funk staples and the veritable musical empire that is Parliament-Funkadelic, an umbrella group of bands and musicians as well as a musical style unto itself. The man lives and breathes funk in a way that few others can even dream of. He was a contemporary of James Brown, Sly Stone and countless others, and an inspiration to later geniuses li

Few bands end their careers on a classic album, and even fewer bow out of the game with the best album they’ve ever made. Most groups would want to capitalize on the album that catapulted them to the top of the charts, but The Police aren’t most bands. This new wave trio dropped their crowning masterpiece, which made them the cream of the music world both commercially and critically, and then promptly split up, never to record together again. The band was in significant tu

The 1960s were a turbulent time in the world of music, which was turned upside down by a new wave of groups, led by the ever iconic Beatles, that were pioneers, namely because they wrote their own material and did not rely on outside songwriters. By the end of the decade, the need for staff songwriters, while not completely dead, was severely on the wane with the cookie cutter pop groups fading away for material penned by the artists themselves. One of the casualties of thi

Stevie Wonder’s run of five albums from 1972 through 1976, culminating in the greatest double album of all time, the masterful Songs in the Key of Life , is widely considered to be one of the greatest stretches of continued musical genius ever documented on record. Personally, I would rank only the '65 - '69 Beatles run and the '82 - '87 Prince run on the same level. While no one disputes that each record in that streak is an unmitigated triumph, the discussion mainly revolve

Billy Joel is one of the biggest names in music, one with so many hits to his name, that it's hard to imagine a time before he was a household name. He has become a true blue American institution in the realm of music, but back in 1977 when he was recording his fifth album, The Stranger , Joel was more or less a one hit wonder. Billy was four albums deep into his career and he had only netted two top forty hits, “The Entertainer” and “Piano Man”, the latter of which only re