Aquemini
1998
Rosa Parks sued them over the song named after her, and the case ran for a decade. The record itself goes everywhere at once.
★ 8.7
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1998
Showing 10 albums from 1998
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
1998
Hill recorded much of it in Bob Marley's old studio in Kingston, and the classroom scenes between songs use actual schoolchildren.
★ 7.9
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
1998
Jeff Mangum wrote it after reading Anne Frank's diary, played a musical saw on it, and then more or less disappeared for a decade.
★ 7.6
Mezzanine
1998
The three of them fell out badly making it, and Elizabeth Fraser sang Teardrop while grieving for Jeff Buckley, who had just drowned.
★ 7.6
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
1998
Williams spent six years on it, scrapped a finished version, and fell out with two producers before she would let anyone release it.
★ 7.0
Ray of Light
1998
Madonna had trained her voice for a year to play Evita, which is why she suddenly sounds like she can sing. William Orbit did the rest.
★ 6.8
Vol. 2...Hard Knock Life
1998
Jay-Z sampled children singing from the musical Annie for the title track, an idea nobody around him thought would work until it did.
★ 5.4
XO
1998
Smith had just played the Academy Awards in a white suit, in front of an audience that had no idea who he was.
★ 4.8
Capital Punishment
1998
The first solo album by a Latino rapper to go platinum. Big Pun was dead of a heart attack two years later, at twenty-eight.
★ 4.5
Clandestino
1998
Chao recorded it on a portable eight-track while moving around Latin America, singing in five languages about people crossing borders without papers.
★ 4.0