The 75 Albums Every Man Should Own
Kick off Esquire.com's Music Week with our unranked, incomplete, yet highly tasteful and informative list of the records your music collection requires. How many have you listened to?
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Darkness on the Edge of Town, Bruce Springsteen
This is when Springsteen became a man. He realized that once you break these chains and jump in the car and leave this rotten town behind — that was Born to Run — all those dreams of freedom and redemption can turn into nightmares of hopelessness and, worse, banality.
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Phases and Stages, Willie Nelson
The heartbreaking chronicle of a marriage gone south. From Willie's perspective. And hers.
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The Stone Roses, The Stone Roses
Brit pop's platonic ideal.
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Lust for Life, Iggy Pop
In 1977 Iggy ran off to West Berlin with David Bowie to record an album so juiced with spleen that even cruise-line commercials can't make it sound safe.
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The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, David Bowie
Only Bowie could pull this off: an apocalyptic concept album by a horny alien drug addict alter-ego who wails his way through eleven glam anthems en route to rock 'n' roll suicide.
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Live at The Apollo, James Brown
The way those teenage girls in Harlem scream when he leans into "Try Me" equals anything the Beatles evoked on Ed Sullivan, a full fourteen months before that foursome stormed American shores.
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What's Going On, Marvin Gaye
He defied the Motown hit machine with a deeply personal, socially conscious work, forever altering the terrain of American soul music. If the Funk Brothers, Motown's most underappreciated backing band, sound especially white hot, that's because it's the first record they ever got credit for.
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Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement
Makes you shout and rant and cry and it surprises you and challenges you and angers you and brings you to your knees. Then it makes you hit play again.
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Illmatic, NaS
How to be an MC.
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Dire Straits, Dire Straits
Like listening to your best friend sing beautiful songs about girls and loneliness and wasting time, if your best friend was one of the smartest guitarists and lyricists of our time.
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American Beauty, Grateful Dead
This 1970 studio disc is the best introduction to the greatest jam band of all time… without all the forty-five-minute jams from Jerry and Co.'s exhaustive (and exhausting) live catalogue.
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Out of Step, Minor Threat
Eight songs. Nineteen minutes, sixteen seconds. That urgent enough for you?
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Aftermath, The Rolling Stones
Mick and Keith's first album of all original material, including "Paint It Black." Recorded when they were twenty-two. This was the British Invasion.
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Paul's Boutique, The Beastie Boys
Rap music was stuck in a robotic "boom bap" before this record dropped. After, it transformed from a niche genre that did one thing to a mainstream genre that included everything.
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Led Zeppelin (I), Led Zeppelin
I shows off each of the band members' singular superiority (Page on "Communication Breakdown," Plant on "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," Jones on "Dazed and Confused," Bonham on "How Many More Times") in a way none of their next four nearly-as-quintessential albums still can't. It's a clinic.
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Imperial Bedroom, Elvis Costello
If only for "Beyond Belief."
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The Cars, The Cars
Plays like a greatest-hits album — only it's their first.
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Being There, Wilco
Wilco unhinged and unsteady and under-produced is better than nearly any other band — including Wilco.
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Destroyer, KISS
While most bands start out as bands and evolve into cartoon characters, KISS started out as cartoon characters and evolved into a band. By the time they recorded Destroyer, their fifth record, they were at their peak, reached just moments before they began falling apart. (The iconic cover art is almost prophetic, the four members leaping off the top of the mountain they had finished climbing together.) The lead track, "Detroit Rock City," probably remains their best song; "Beth" pulled the improbable double-double of giving birth to the power ballad while also guaranteeing that we'd never have to listen to Peter Criss sing again.
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The Bends, Radiohead
Because Pablo Honey gave us a taste of how good Radiohead might become, and OK Computer gave us an idea of how weird they might become, but The Bends gave us just the right doses of good and weird in equal measure and at once.
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