Jason Ankeny

“Men are what their mothers made them,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously declared, and with 1968’s Bakersfield Sound bildungsroman “Mama Tried,” Merle Haggard finally came to terms with the man his mother made — not just the transgressions he committed, but also the pleas and prayers he ignored, and the damage that was done.

• Mama Tried

Jason Ankeny

“War” is a howl of psychic agony — a harrowing, hallucinatory broadside against America’s involvement in the decades-long conflict in Vietnam, and the immense human toll it exacted.

• War

Emma Akpan

“Party Rock Anthem,” the worldwide smash from electronic duo LMFAO’s sophomore album Sorry for Party Rocking, doesn’t make grand statements about American politics. It doesn’t show concern for people sleeping on the streets. It doesn’t consider our warming climate, or worry about daily commutes or paying bills. It offers neither commentary on the pains and joys of romance, nor profound statements about sex or death.

But it will make you dance.

• Party Rock Anthem

KORD

Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat celebrated for saving thousands of lives during World War II, may seem like an unlikely source of inspiration for a classic rock mainstay, but the hit song Wallenberg sparked, Red Rider’s “Lunatic Fringe,” remains as earnestly powerful — and as sadly topical — as it did back in 1981.

• Lunatic Fringe

Jason Ankeny

“You Can’t Hurry Love” boasts all the essential ingredients of the Supremes’ greatest Motown hits — all of them except for Florence Ballard, that is. Ballard, the talented but troubled Supremes vocalist pushed out of the spotlight by Motown brass in favor of Diana Ross, was absent for the session that produced “You Can’t Hurry Love” and surreptitiously replaced by Marlene Barrow, a member of the Andantes, the label’s longtime in-house vocal group — a substitution that did absolutely nothing to dull the 1966 single’s impact or slow its ascent to the top of the pop charts.

• You Can't Hurry Love

Rob Moura

When the Supremes’ Diana Ross introduced the world to five singing siblings from Gary, Ind., she lit the fuse on what would become one of America’s defining and most enduring musical families. Since 1969, we’ve known the Jackson 5 for a series of impeccable Motown Records singles spearheaded by an inchoate, irrepressible Michael Jackson: there’s the grandiose introduction (“I Want You Back”), the wistful ballad (“Never Can Say Goodbye”), the uptempo burner (“The Love You Save”), and then there’s “ABC” — the crown jewel among the group’s number one hits. More than any of their songs, “ABC” captures everything that made the Jackson 5 such a unique force in pop: its pace is flawless, its energy is irresistible, and its narrative hinges on a creative twist that only an 11-year-old virtuoso frontman could have pulled off.

• ABC

Rob Moura

The surface of Vampire Weekend’s “Holiday” is all sun, but darkness lurks underneath its ska-punk bounce. “It’s about a member of my family who gave up meat when we invaded Iraq,” lead singer Ezra Koenig explained to British music weekly NME in 2010. “They were horrified by what was happening, and they lost their taste for meat. It wasn’t even an overt protest, it was a physical reaction.” It’s a strange origin for a single that many (including advertisers) interpreted as a non-denominational song written specifically for the end-of-year holidays, but then again, most everything about Vampire Weekend seems conjured in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory: college students in polo shirts fusing street music from globe-spanning locales with trends from across American pop history, their career was jolted to life by the internet, a then-emerging technological force the nascent Vampire Weekend leveraged in fresh, fascinating ways. 

• Holiday

Jason Ankeny

Johnny Cash opened the newspaper on the morning of July 18, 1986 to read that after 28 years, 57 albums and 13 number one hits, his days with Columbia Records were over. The 54-year-old Cash — the iconic Man in Black, whose cavernous baritone, plainspoken narratives and signature boom-chicka-boom rhythm revolutionized American music — was one of Columbia’s biggest stars during the 1960s and early 1970s, even headlining his own network television show. But his career cratered during the 1980s, and he hadn’t charted a Top 10 single since “The Baron” back in 1981. Cash desperately needed to move on from Columbia to rejuvenate his creative and commercial momentum, per biographer Graeme Thomson: “He needed a jolt, a change of scene, a new perspective.” And he got them — but not until 1993, when he signed to producer Rick Rubin’s American Recordings and created some of the most acclaimed and impassioned music of his career. This is the story of the period between Cash’s embarrassing exit from Columbia and his rebirth at American, when he landed at Mercury Records to cut six erratic, little-noticed LPs culminating in a collection of re-recorded versions of his best-known hits, including the career-defining “Folsom Prison Blues.” 

• Folsom Prison Blues

Jason Ankeny

“Where such men love, they have no desire, and where they desire, they cannot love,” the renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote in 1925 to illuminate what he famously dubbed the Madonna-whore complex — i.e., the dichotomy between the women a man finds admirable and those he finds sexually desirable, and the schism at the heart of the J. Geils Band’s lone number one hit, 1981’s “Centerfold.”

• Centerfold