Blowback is widely considered by Tricky fans as a true low point in his wild discography. I know this because I’m a Tricky fan, and have been since he was with Massive Attack (didn’t give a shit about that Wild Bunch act though). For it to be considered his worst effort is a particularly significant criticism levelled at the Tricky kid, since his last couple of records were, for the most part, ineffectual garbage.

I never liked Blowback. I bought it the first day it came out, I listened to it that day, and then slowly started generating militant disdain for it. Motherfucking fluff, the whole lot of it, I reckoned. And I was right: it is a fluffy, breezy album. Sort of (we’ll get to that more later). But one must consider the source here. Through his first four offerings (yes, I’m counting the brilliant 1996 collab effort Nearly God), Tricky’s best moments stimulated an urgent and imaginative eclecticism that spread the values of rock ‘n’ roll even as it brought them to their knees.  At worst, he rationalized the notion of absolutely no cultural mobility, concerned much too intensely with the mutated psyche of being in a real place that is logically seen as hell by all those who inhabit it.

When people dismiss hip-hop as dance music, or racist music, or cheap music, or angry music, or idiotic music, or detached music, or lazy music, they clearly have no idea what the genre is about. Founded merely on someone talking quickly over disco beats, hip-hop’s essential element has always been its words, and those who believe otherwise need take their Toby Keith records and get the hell out of the room.

It’s fascinating, really, how introspective and confounding stories can be told through 64 bars of vivid imagery on top of chopped-up and rearranged grooves. But that’s why rap music has managed to not only survive, but thrive over decades. When done correctly, there may not be another genre in all of music that has more substance within its texture. Hip-hop’s most imperative element is its lyricism and the skill with which it is presented. From the type of honest and revealing storytelling that some have mastered to the wit-centric, mind-bending lines that ooze with double entendres and third, fourth, and fifth meanings, the best hip-hop will forever be contingent on the power of its lyrics. Here, PopMatters takes a look at some of the best to ever craft simple sentences and small stories within this particularly transcendent medium.

Sweden’s Sarah Assbring has spent the last several years perfecting her own brand of morose-pop, exploring the inner reaches of depression that has informed every one of her releases. Her rather capricious start in music was the result of a strange encounter with a stray dog on a beach in Spain. Under the moniker El Perro del Mar (“Dog of the Sea”), Assbring would go on to record a quietly mournful set of songs that would comprise her self-titled debut. The Swede’s coy mix of Brill Building pop and gamine affectations were genuinely intoxicating, earning plaudits across Europe and bridging the gap between Stina Nordenstam’s difficult anti-pop and Anja Garbarek’s space-age diva-sonics. Assbring followed her full-length debut with another batch of confectionery lullabies entitled From the Valley to the Stars, before recording 2009’s Love Is Not Pop.

After a first listen-through of Houses of the Holy, one isn’t likely to arrive at the conclusion that “Over the Hills and Far Away” would later go on to be the most remembered track from the album. Other songs immediately come off as better choices for a single: “The Ocean” or even “Dancing Days” have a better immediate FM radio appeal. During the record’s 1973 release, the lack of such singles was likely a disappointment to fans who were anticipating a bigger emphasis on rock after the titanic impact of Zoso. Many were no doubt surprised by the lack of blatantly rockist fare like “Black Dog” or “Rock and Roll”. The blues rock influence, while not absent fromHouses of the Holy, is certainly diminished, with folk elements rising to the forefront. “The Ocean” can be retrospectively (and cynically) read as the one cut on Houses of the Holy to assuage those who disliked the change in direction the album signaled. The diversity found on this LP, while a key fact of its success for those who count it amongst Zeppelin’s best, is often just as easily labeled one of the reasons why it’s sub-par to works like Physical Graffiti or Zoso.

But regardless if one prefers Led Zeppelin with the distortion pedal turned on or off, “Over the Hills and Far Away” has a single quality that makes it an instant classic: warmth. Few other songs in Zeppelin’s catalog possess such an immediate friendliness; both lyrically and musically—especially the former—it’s as welcoming a song as the band ever wrote. “Over the Hills and Far Away” is the spiritual companion to the world music tribute “The Song Remains the Same”, but its embrace of universality spans even wider. Though at first the song begins with Robert Plant serenading a nameless woman (“Hey lady / You got the love I need?”), after the first stanza, his language becomes about human experience on the broad scale. It’s as if in his act of wooing a particular individual, he has come to realize his love for all people: “Many have I loved / Many times been bitten / Many times I’ve gazed along the open road”. By the end of the song, Plant’s mind has seemed to drift completely away from the woman he addressed at the beginning; he’s instead become engrossed with the human experience—nebulous though the phrase may be, it’s true of this song—in its perplexing totality.

Mendelsohn: It used to be we couldn’t spit at the Great List without hitting a double album—gatefold behemoths with more vinyl than the seats of my car. And then, we would have to determine whether said double album was a Grand Artistic Statement or a Pile. Thankfully, we won’t have much of an argument today as we dig into the Who’s Tommy because Tommy is, without a doubt, one of the Grandest Artistic Statements to ever grace the airwaves. Now, I could, given enough time and expletives, make a case that Tommy is indeed a pile, but just a regular old pile as in relating to crap, not the capital ‘P’ Pile that indicates a chaotic work of genius. It’s no secret that I’m not the biggest Who fan and it had been years since I listened to this album, but dear lord, this album is so freaking pretentious and that makes it very hard for me to take it seriously.