Last year, my top 10 list was packed with pop bops and feminine energy (Kylie Minogue, the Last Dinner Party, all-night dance parties by Faux Real and the Dare, a Brat Summer that lasted all year long). But 2025 was the year when Euro-Anglo rock ‘n’ roll frontmen went bold and baroque, dominating my playlists while seemingly dividing the rest of the music-listening and music-list-making world.

Yes, aside from the inevitable and much-deserved Lily Allen inclusion, this just might be the most polarizing year-end albums ranking of my entire obsessive-countdown-compiling career. (Two of the artists on this actual list, the Darkness and Yungblud, even made headlines this year with an ongoing feud about their artistic merits!)

But hey, the heart and ears want what they want. And what my heart and ears, as well as my rubbed-raw nervous system, insatiably hungered for throughout this bonkers/bummer year was music that was unsubtle, audacious, elegant, and escapist — haters be damned. However, I do have wildly swinging musical moods and wide-ranging tastes, so I’ve also included 33 very honorable mentions. So, keep scrolling, and let’s do it all over again in 2026.

10. Ima Robot – Search and Destroy

For some dumb reason, in 2025 some dumb revisionist music historians randomly and wrongly decreed Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ perfectly pleasant “Home” the worst song of all time. But those internet trolls should’ve been funneling all that energy in a more positive way, by celebrating the unearthing of this long-lost 2006 treasure from Zeros frontman Alex Ebert’s electro-rock supergroup. It’s quite astounding that a band that sounded so utterly of-the-moment, futuristically flash-forward, and vacuum-sealed-’80s back in the aughts still sounds so funky-fresh more than two decades later. But Ima Robot’s quirky, herky-jerky post-rock (think Queen, Devo, and Andrew WK jamming at a Berlin disco circa 1982) still slaps. Forget the Zeros and get with these indie-sleaze heroes, who have finally come home.

9. Garbage, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light

Much speculation has been made about the future of Garbage, but if their eighth album ends up being their last, suffice to say they are not going quietly or gently into that good night. One would expect no less, of course, from the fierce, formidable, and forever flame-hearted/haired Dame Shirley Manson, but on this electrogoth fever dream of a record, for which she recorded much of her vocals at home in an opioid haze while recovering from double-hip replacement surgery, she often sounds uncharacteristically vulnerable. She confronts her own morality, or at least her own fragility, atop a dark, dense, and dystopian bed of super-producers Butch Vig, Duke Erikson, and Steve Marker’s analog synth hiss and angular guitars, and is at her most beautifully broken on “The Day That I Met God” — a first-take writing demo that she recorded in her bedroom, in her pajamas, on an afternoon when she, according to her stream-of-semi-consciousness lyrics, “found God in Tramadol.” But she’s still full of fire on tracks like the opening rallying cry “There’s No Future in Optimism,” and especially on the deliciously attitudinal “Chinese Fire Horse,” an anthem for all the unapologetically ungracefully aging women of Generation X. On that rebuke, inspired by Manson’s ludicrous experiences with ageist journalists repeatedly asking her when she’s planning to quit music, she snarls and snarks, “Just a fucking minute/Who you talking to?/You must be mistaken, or you are drunk/And failed to read the room/I may be much older, so much older than you/But I’ve still got the power in my brain and my body/I’ll take no shit from you.” Hell yes. So, perhaps rumors of Garbage’s retirement have been greatly exaggerated, because on this record the alt-rock innovators sound reborn, and they still sound like the (slightly optimistic) future.

8. Sloan – Based on the Best Seller

Canada’s finest never, ever disappoint. They’re such a consistently excellent import, in fact, that it’s all too easy to take the Nova Scotian gods’ greatness for granted after 33 years. Like all of Jay Ferguson, Chris Murphy, Patrick Pentland, and Andrew Scott’s worthy predecessors, this, Sloan’s 14th studio album, comes across like a lovingly compiled mixtape or some really awesome K-TEL compilation of ’70s AM radio gems — swaggeringly swerving from flying V-brandishing, drumstick-twirling, muscle-car cock-rock to soft-rock mellow gold as the hits keep coming. Sloan are blessed to have four sublime songwriters among their ranks, and all U.S. powerpop fanatics living in Canada’s basement are very blessed to have them.

7. Damiano David – Funny Little Fears

On his stellar and surprising solo debut, Måneskin’s formerly leather-sheathed Italian stallion transforms into an Armani-suited pop crooner — fully leaning into the camp of his Eurovision era and the world of musical theater introduced to him by his now-fiancée Dove Cameron, and singing more beautifully and purely than his day-job band ever allowed. He penned an ambitious 72 songs for this passion project during a quarterlife crisis, and standouts among the 14 tracks that made the cut are the majestic “Silverlines” with electronic auteur Labrinth; the teen-heartache prom ballad “Next Summer” with Jason Evigan and Sarah Hudson; and especially the Hudson/Evigan avoidant anthem “Born With a Broken Heart” (three minutes and 28 seconds of elegant, eloquent euphoria, complete with an Old Hollywood mini-movie music video and torn-from-his-diary lyrics that make it hard to believe that English isn’t David’s first language). Funny Little Fears didn’t garner nearly enough attention this year, but it showcases one of the most convincing and thrilling male pop reinventions since post-One Direction Harry Styles.

6. Ghost – Skeletá

The bombastic, theatric, operatic metal Swedes have become unlikely stadium-rock superstars over the years, and with every album, the backlash by wet-blanket-wrapped rockist detractors has seemingly swelled along with their devoted Congregation. However, when one such hater recently bitchily dismissed Ghost as “the metal ABBA,” it was clearer than ever that the good Papa V Perpetua and his band of merry Nameless Ghouls had gotten it right on Ghost’s sixth mega-opus. As if being compared to the almighty ABBA, in any way, could ever be considered an insult!

5. Lily Allen – West End Girl

This zeitgeist-capturing record was such an event, such a moment, in 2025, inspiring dozens of thinkpieces and at least two viral SNL clips, that I almost don’t know what to write about it at this point. Allen was certainly never one avoid messiness, mince words, or miss her target, ever since she debuted in 2006 with the gleefully nasty breakup song “Smile.” But even by Allen standards, the dirty-laundry-strewing West End Girl is absolutely eviscerating in its wittily and coolly delivered female rage. And now Allen’s ex, David Harbour — once best known as a Stranger Things actor, now better and probably forever known as a world-class fuckboy/love-bomber/narcissist/toxic masculinity posterboy/sex addict/gaslighter/butt-plug-hoarder — could only wish that she’d written music about him as relatively benign as “Smile.” Throughout West End Girl, the cringey, creepy scenes from Allen and Harbour’s coerced open marriage unfold and unravel in what feels like real time — from the unsupportive Harbour’s jealousy over Allen’s budding theater career, to Allen’s devastating discovery of her new groom’s emotional affairs (and, of course, her discovery of that infamous Duane Reade shopping bag). And Allen narrates it all in her breezy, beguiling, sing-songy manner, which only renders her confessions more startling — yet somehow also relatable, and maybe not so surprising or startling, for any woman who has suffered a brutal romantic betrayal.

4. The Darkness – Dreams on Toast

There’s nearly nothing that gladdens my little rock ‘n ‘roll heart more than the fact that Justin Hawkins and his British brigade are riding high again, two decades after they were written off as one-hit wonders. I never stopped believing in a thing called the Darkness, and the band had a real moment this year. They finally released their long-gestating documentary (or Darkumentary, if you will); that supposed one hit, “I Believe in a Thing Called Love,” shot back to No. 1 after a clip of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce belting it at the U.S. Open Women’s Final went viral; Justin’s music-critique podcast, the aptly titled Justin Hawkins Rides Again, was a viral sensation; the Darkness announced their first major arena tour in 20 years; and their eighth album, Dreams on Toast, debuted at No. 2 in the U.K., their highest chart placement since 2003’s Permission to Land. And it couldn’t have happened to a more awesome gang of rock ‘n’ roll lifers, who against all odds have stayed the course and outlasted trends, even when there were diminishing returns (as the ever-clever Hawkins quips on the Dreams on Toast anthem “Walking Through Fire,” they “never stopped making hit albums, it’s just that no one buys them anymore”). The Darkness’s latest instant classic skewers tired macho-rock tropes (“Rock and Roll Party Cowboy”); faces shaggy-head-on the realities of middle age (“Mortal Dread,” “I Hate Myself”); and loopily veers from campfire country (“Hot on My Trail,” “Cold Hearted Woman”) to speed-metal headbangery (“The Battle for Gadget Land”) to swooningly romantic, ELO-style blue-sky pop (“The Longest Kiss”). And the Darkness do it all with the catsuited camp humor and glass-shattering falsetto flamboyance that made OG fans believers in the first place. Let’s all toast to the Darkness!

3. Pulp – More

My Anglophilia was in even fuller force than usual in 2025 (spoiler: my top five album picks were all by U.K. artists). But in a year when Oasis pulled off the comeback of the century, it was this Britpop comeback that thrilled me the most. (Back in the ‘90s, my answer to the great “Oasis or Blur?” conundrum was always either “Suede” — who also released a great record this year, by the way — or “Pulp.”) Nearly a quarter-century after the last Pulp album, Jarvis Cocker and company are still in a different class all their own. Cocker’s observational and often self-deprecating lyrics have possibly only grown even more sharply witty with age, but unlike 1998’s nihilistic midlife-meltdown This Is Hardcore, this record, as hinted by its bold title, is unexpectedly celebratory. Sure, “Tina” is a sad, Sliding Doors-style stalker song about a love affair that never happened, and “Grown Ups” is an all-too-relatable lament about life’s all-too-speedy transition from young, starry-eyed hipsterdom to suburban middle-aged malaise. But the meet-cute story-song “Farmers Market” is a sweetly hopeful ode to all the unexpectedly possibilities of late-in-life romance, and the centerpiece “Got to Have Love” — a hands-in-air disco anthem absolutely intended to be played for the festival masses and Hollywood Bowl crowds (if you didn’t see Pulp play this song on tour, were you even living in 2005?) — is pure elation. Plus, that latter track features one of the best grown-up realizations in Cocker’s lyric book: “Without love, you’re just jerking off inside someone else.” I’m so delighted that the much-missed Pulp decided to meet up with us in the year 2025.

2. Yungblud – Idols

To call Dominic Harrison’s fourth album “epic” would be the understatement of the year. The record’s gauntlet-throwing lead single — a sort of please-allow-me-to-reintroduce-myself statement song called “Hello Heaven, Hello” — is a nine-minute, multiple-time-signature, three-act mini-rock opera that practically makes Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell,” Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain,” or My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade” seem like exercises in economy and restraint. And it’s accompanied by a cinematic music video starring a shirtless, horseback-straddling, Prometheus-winged Yungblud posing and preening against black-and-white backdrops of cranked-to-11 Marshall stacks and Discovery Channel-worthy aerial shots of medieval snowscapes. Such a potentially frontloading album-opener would be a daunting act for most artists to follow, but clearly, Yungblud is not like most artists. Sometimes he does wear his influences on his Burberry sleeve — for instance, the cheeky Cool Britannia of “Lovesick Lullaby” evokes Parklife-era Blur (complete with Harrison’s Phil Daniels-esque rap), while the soaring and storming “The Greatest Parade” brings to mind Black Market Music-era Placebo, and the closing piano ballad “Supermoon” sounds like a lost cut from either the Velvet Goldmine or Hedwig soundtracks. Other songs are reminiscent of the swirling shoegaze of Catherine Wheel, the chiming post-punk of pre-Joshua Tree U2, the ‘60s-meets-‘90s college-rock psychedelia of Kula Shaker, the Charlatans, and Stone Temple Pilots’ Vatican Gift Shop, or pretty much every era of David Bowie. But despite all that, and despite the album’s impudent title, Idols never sounds an exercise in nostalgia. It’s all so utterly unexpected from the new-school punk/pop provocateur, and it’d almost seem like a parody, if it wasn’t so clearly sincere and undeniably great.

1. Luke Spiller – Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes and Wine

The audacious title of the stunning solo debut by the Struts’ frontman reflects all the ambition and emotion held within. The years-in-the-making project was inspired during Spiller’s rare between-tours downtime, when he was penning poetry and deep-diving into mostly classical music and Scott Walker albums, and his first two symphonic tracks created during this era of dark-L.A.-night-of-the-soul-searching were so fantastical, he actually pitched to them to be James Bond themes. And while didn’t happen (which is totally 007’s loss), there was no turning back after that. The result is a literal labor of love, in all love’s forms, but most of all, these 10 cinematic epics form a love letter to ex-pat Spiller’s second home of Los Angeles. “Hold me like Hollywood held you,” he croons on the classically noirish L.A. concept album’s title track, wearing his tattooed heart on his glittery sleeve, while he goes all Lauren Canyon on the sentimental seasick/lovesick Jason Falkner collab “She’s Like California,” and he so perfectly and specifically captures the wonder and anything-could-happen promise of late-night romance on “Magic at Midnight in Mel’s Diner”(which is as explosive as anything the Struts have ever recorded). For anyone in love with Los Angeles, or just in love with love, Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes and Wine is heady, addictive stuff. (Now, can we please get Spiller to sing the next Bond song?)

VERY HONORABLE MENTIONS:

AFI – Silver Bleeds the Black Sun

Billy Nomates – Metal Horse

Blone Noble – Life’s New Adventure

Coyle Girelli – Out of This Town

Elton John & Brandi Carlile – Who Believes in Angels?

Foxy Shazam – Animality Opera

Franz Ferdinand – The Human Fear

Jake Wesley Rogers – In the Key of Love

Jason Isbell – Foxes in the Snow

John McKay – Sixes and Sevens

Lady Gaga – Mayhem

Lambrini Girls – Who Let the Dogs Out

Lucy Dacus – Forever Is a Feeling

Lydia Night – Parody of Pleasure

Mareux – Nonstop Romance

Margaret Cho – Lucky Gift

Miles Kane – Sunlight in the Shadows

Olly Alexander – Polari

Orville Peck – Appaloosa

Perfume Genius – Glory

Peter Doherty – Felt Better Alive

Peter Murphy – Silver Shade

Public Enemy – Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025

Sextile – Yes, Please

Skunk Anansie – The Painful Truth

Suede – Antidepressants

The Horrors – Night Life

The Ting Tings – Home

The Weeknd – Hurry Up Tomorrow

The Wombats – Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

Tunde Abimpe – Thee Black Boltz

Viagra Boys – Viagr Aboys

Wet Leg – Moisturizer

Henry Rollins (Photo: Heidi May)

“I’m coming to you as someone whose life was changed by music, and it’s punk rock that really formulated the person who’s croaking into the phone to you right now,” punk icon, radio DJ, newspaper columnist, actor, and all-round rock ‘n’ roll Renaissance man Henry Rollins tells Yahoo Entertainment with his usual neck-vein-throbbing enthusiasm.

Rollins can now add another title to his résumé: Sound of Vinyl curator. The Sound of Vinyl, which launched this month in the U.S., is a personalized service that helps music fanatics discover and purchase vinyl records from a catalog of more than 20,000 titles — and among SoV’s appointed vinyl experts are Don Was, Ahmet Zappa, and Rollins, who seemingly has at least 20,000 albums’ worth of deep music trivia filed away in his close-cropped skull.

To give an example of Rollins’s expertise and excitement for the SoV project, Yahoo assigned him a timely task: We asked him to recommend his favorite political albums. Below, he gushes about his picks, always making the political personal.

“These are records that really addressed what I was going through [as a kid], the ones that just hit me in the teeth — the ones I could have written … were I more talented,” he jokes. “I have a real human attachment to these records, because they genuinely warned me of what was to come. And they were right.”

The Clash, The Clash

“This would be kind of the first record where I went, ‘OK, this is a political thing. It’s not a Van Halen record.’ Because I was new to punk rock around the time that record came out. I was buying some records here and there, but with ‘Career Opportunities’ and the chorus — ‘Career opportunities, the one that never knock/Every job they offer you is to keep you on the dock’ — when I heard Joe Strummer put those words to melody, I realized he was talking about me and the adult world that I would soon be facing. I was graduating from high school, and I was about to go into the minimum-wage working world, since I had no real interest in college, and I just didn’t have a career path at all. I just realized, ‘Well, this is going to be like the jobs I had in the summer, but every day.’ And soon enough, I’m working somewhere with an apron on, doing whatever every damn day, and suddenly my life is a Bruce Springsteen lyric. I am a Bob Seger song. I was that guy, and I was that song.

“Living in the city with racial tension, you hear ‘White Riot’ and you go, ‘OK, I understand that song.’ I even understood when the Clash covered Junior Murvin’s ‘Police and Thieves’; they do such a beautiful cover. When all my friends dropped the skateboards and picked up instruments — that would be all the early Dischord bands, Minor Threat, the Teen Idols, Fugazi; those are my friends, those are people I grew up with — there was the song ‘Garageland.’ We all practiced in garages and basements, and I wasn’t in a band, so I just hung out. So when Joe Strummer says, ‘I’m going to stay in the garage all night,’ I’m like, ‘Well, I guess I am too, with my dumb friends.’

“That record spoke to me differently than any rock album had, where [other albums are] like cars and girls and mystical journeys with mountaintops and fairies and gremlins or whatever. That, and the Sex Pistols album, which to me had more anger and intensity. But I didn’t have a queen, so ‘God Save the Queen’” was cool, but I didn’t have a problem with the queen.

“So it was really that Clash record that really made me question authority, question any established structure. I was in high school when I heard that, and that record, I was going to a prep school with a uniform and a bunch of ex-military yelling at me every day: ‘Get up!’ I’d stand up. Your parents paid good money to have teachers yell at you for all of high school, and that’s what I went through. I was terrified of them, and I was kind of submissive in the face of yelling power. Once professor Joe Strummer got to me, I started going to Saturday detention, because I started pushing back. The Clash album pulled the scales away from my eyes and I went, ‘Wait a minute, screw the lot of you,’ I turned into a real pain in the ass because of that record. I became smart.

“It was punk rock that gave me the courage to mouth off to my teachers, who were obviously wrong. It was punk rock that gave me that, but it was Joe Strummer and the first Clash album that made me start realizing that the adult world is intensely and innately political.”

Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

“Jello Biafra is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I met him in 1980 at a Dead Kennedys show in San Francisco. He’s just a wise guy, he’s smart, and he reads everything and can quote it back to you. He’s also a political troublemaker. The Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables record is so hectic, like lyrically he’s trying to get something to light on fire, like he’s trying to cause unrest. It’s intense. I mean, the music is great, but when you read the lyrics, it is like a blueprint for a citywide riot.

“That record hit me — like, it kind of scared me — because I knew him. It was a bit much for me, like ‘Let’s Lynch the Landlord’ or whatever. I’m like, ‘Why? What are you doing? You’re an anarchist, I’m kind of nervous around you!’ He tripped me out with that record, and it kind of blew my mind. It was like politics with a fuse that you’re supposed to light, and I didn’t want to light it. It was a bit much for my young mind to get itself around. Jello is like an intellectual terrorist, and he was one of the first people who made me understand the power of an idea. I joined Black Flag soon after I heard that record.’

“We’re both kind of old men now, but Jello’s mind is still looking to blow things up. He’s a truly cerebral cat, and the power of the idea has never left him. I think Jello lit up a lot of young minds with Fresh Fruit. It’s one of those ‘This changed how I thought about things’ kinds of records.”

Stiff Little Fingers, Inflammable Material

“You get perhaps a better understanding [of this album] if you read about the troubles in, or have ever been to, Northern Ireland. This record came to America as an import item, so only people who actually worked for a living like me could afford it, and all my lazier friends would listen to my copy. We thought the music was so intense, and Jake Burns’s vocal sounded like he ripped his throat out or drank acid, and then stepped up to the mic. You could tell he was angry, and the music was urgent. The beginning of the song ‘Suspect Device’ is just one of the most hectic things I had ever heard. I was like, ‘Man, this guy is not fooling around! What does he mean? We’ve got to look this up.’

“He talks about a lot of futility that any young person might feel, but if you go to Northern Ireland, you just see it, and you see it in the older people. I’ve been there a lot of times now, and I’ve done like documentary work there; I got to know it quite a bit. I’ve interviewed ex-IRA members, and I have a different idea of it than when I was young, and now I see what Stiff Little Fingers was getting at.

“Back then, those songs that I didn’t understand, I just uploaded as a streetwise political point of view, because it was talking about depression and being nowhere and feelings of futility, which any young person feels anywhere. But if you’re a young person climbing out of the troubles in Northern Ireland, it would be very understandable if your outlook was the posterboard for ‘bleak.’ Because what in your life has shown you that there’s any light at the end of the tunnel? There’s really been nothing, except your parents telling you the sickest stories about things blowing up and killing kids. I mean, it’s a topic. … You just don’t even bring it up when you’re there.

“The Stiff Little Fingers record came to us in America as an interesting foreign item, because we didn’t understand the idea of a suspect device. At the end of that song where he goes, ‘I’m going to blow up in their face,’ it’s really assaultive, it’s like a serious threat that came from some kind of life experience that I had not experienced. I might have said, as a stupid youth, ‘I’ll kick your ass,’ but that is nothing like, ‘I’m going to blow up in their face.’ That was so much more like, ‘He means business. He’s in touch with an anger that I do not understand. I’ve never been that mad.’ At that time, I’d had no life experience that pissed me off that much. And you could tell, with the Stiff Little Fingers guys, that that was their childhood.

“That record was a masterpiece; it’s a perfect album. It was a perfect encapsulation of what those people were going through at that time, what they had been through in decades before. For a young, angry, pissed-off American like me, it augmented my already bleak thoughts about my future. It is a totally political record, but it has enough real-world blues-ness to it, where you can kind of get the best of both worlds.”

Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

“This is a political record that’s coming from a different experience. It’s not a scrawny, freckled Irish kid. It’s an African-American male relating the African-American experience to anyone who will listen. And who should listen to that record? Every white person born after a certain year. The disconnect between white America and black America is regrettable, because we’re paying for it every day in blood and money and a lack of progress. It is so distinctly different, the two, that you might as well have them be two other planets.

“I said this to Russell Simmons many years ago: ‘I’m going to give you a great compliment; feel free to agree with me. I think hip-hop is the most transformative art form of our time, giving young, white America a basic idea of the black American experience. And you are one of the ground-floor people of that.’ He leaned over, shook my hand, and said, ‘Of course, you’re right.’

“How are you going to understand what a black guy’s going through? Well, maybe this record helped. It can make you understand the anger, the humiliation, the pain. I think that’s why you see so many million Public Enemy records sold, because a lot of people said, ‘I do want to understand.’ There’s a lot of white people buying those records, because Public Enemy had something to say that is really valid. And those records lose no speed whatsoever, because sadly, what ails America keeps ailing America.

“Yo! Bum Rush the Show is a great rap album, but Nation of Millions was the record to warm you up for Fear of a Black Planet, where he really lays it down. It speaks to the entire struggle of nonwhite people and nonrich people in this country. The songs address so much of the black experience, and not only are the lyrics straight, but it’s just some of the best music you’ll ever hear.

“I think Chuck D, who is a longtime buddy of mine, is one of the most astonishingly intelligent people. He should be on a campus when he’s not onstage, because he’s a damn professor. He was at his artistic [peak] — expository, explanatory, historical — on Nation of Millions. It is an educational tool for getting someone from one place to another, and I think Chuck has been instrumental in making America a better place.”

“This is that record that comes with the foldout booklet of everything in like 0.8 type, where you have to get a magnifying glass to read it — and it’s super-boring when you do because it’s over-your-head and quite congested. My more serious friends in the all-eight-of-us D.C. punk rock scene had that record. It was a record you were supposed to like — because, you know, it’s Crass, man! You have to like it! I’m one of the people who actually did like it.

“My best friend, Ian McKay, his younger brother, Alec McKay, had this record and played it all the time. By hanging out with Alec, because I was homeless for a while, I was living in his room, and he always played it. I read that massive, football-field-sized foldout book thing, and I started to understand where these anarchists are coming from. They’re into a Thatcher-Reagan anger, really speaking to what’s going on in Britain, which was very bleak. It’s enough punk rock and enough anger and futility expressed in it where I saw myself in it.

“It’s a record where I was proud of myself, because I kind of earned my affection for it. I played it a lot of times, and it grew on me because I toughed it out. It’s a tough record to get, a tough nut to crack, because it’s not very musical. It’s a news broadcast with an angry band kind of scraping away behind it. It’s so reactionary, where I must say — maybe I’m old and have lapsed into conformity — but I was reading the lyrics and I don’t necessarily disagree with some of it, but a lot of it I read back now and it’s a bit kind of thick-skulled and not completely thought through. As a guy who’s almost 60, I can see that now, but I admire the anger and the fact that they made the records themselves.

“Ironically, Crass eventually started pressing records, and they pressed the first Black Flag record in the U.K., which was a single. It was done by the Crass people, which I always thought was really cool.”

The Stooges, Raw Power
MC5, Kick Out the Jams

“I would like to put in a caveat that overtly political music … well, it doesn’t exactly leave me cold, but it’s not usually something that grooves to me. It’s like a lecture with a backbeat, so if it’s too political, while I might respect it and dig it, I can’t play it all that often, because it just feels like marching orders to me. I don’t have a ton of political music favorites. So to me, a great Vietnam War album is Raw Power, because the lyrics are talking about napalm, firefight, ‘Search and Destroy’ — that’s all Vietnam era, and when you do some researching, you see how close to the Vietnam War every Stooges member was. To me, it’s political in a way that’s not necessarily wearing it on a posterboard or jumping into your face. I kind of dig that.

“Iggy Pop was talking about how there’s nothing to do, because all your friends are out in Vietnam getting killed. ‘1969’ is about Midwestern boredom — but why? Because the neighborhood is empty of young people; it’s just girls and draft dodgers. The quarterback went to Vietnam. All your friends went to Vietnam. The first three Stooges albums are Vietnam War-era records, and the MC5 addressed it directly and indirectly. I think a lot of the records of that time have references to what was going on, which makes them somewhat political. The MC5 definitely were with the White Panther movement thing they were doing, but they weren’t political song to song; they always had the big Motown love ballads in there too.

“Because of Vietnam giving you the Stooges and the MC5 and all the great Haight-Ashbury scene bands, a ton of other bands said, ‘Well, screw you too!’ and they went into the garage and made great music. It’s logical to wonder if this [Trump-era] conflict could give you the next Public Enemy or Rage Against the Machine. It’s a logical question.

“But I don’t know if music is the vehicle for that anymore in this modern age. If it’s 1964 and you’re young, you’re Bob Dylan, and you don’t like the war, you pick up a guitar. If you don’t like racism, you pick up a guitar and you get together with Joan Baez, and you go out there and change the world. I’m all for that. But now it’s more like, ‘I’m angry about what the president said, so I’m going to blog about it!’ Or ‘By golly, I’m going to tweet that right now!’ Or, ‘That guy said it better than me, so I’m going to retweet him!’ I don’t know if it’s ‘I’m going to go write a song,’ whereas maybe in 1967, it was ‘I’m going to write an album!’

“So to answer the age-old question, in bad times, will we get good music? And will we get great music out of this administration, with the rise of the alt-right, and the crassness of white power groups who now exist in broad daylight instead of hiding under rocks? I don’t know if we will get another Zach de la Rocha or another Chuck D. … But music has been a refuge and a place of expression for people for a long time.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Steve Aoki (Photo: courtesy of Dim Mak/Ultra)

When asked to reminisce about the albums that changed his life, it’s no surprise that superstar CJ Steve Aoki mentions Eazy-E, given his new album’s KOLONY’s hip-hop direction. His nods to influential French DJs Daft Punk and Justice are no surprise as well. But Aoki’s tastes are impressively diverse, so he speaks just as enthusiastically and authoritatively about the Beatles as he does about hardcore acts like Gorilla Biscuits and Refused or ’90s alt-rock darlings Weezer.

“It’s interesting, because the albums I thought of are based more on my roots and less on what informs my production now. … I think of these as the classics that really I’ve lived with for a long time. I go back to the beginning,” Aoki says. Read on for his surprising and very cool picks.

The Beatles, The White Album

“When I really think about the rock bands that really moved me, in entirety, I would have to go with the Beatles above any other band. And my favorite era of the Beatles was the experimental era and The White Album, and the song ‘Revolution 9.’ There’s a lot of different songs on the album that spoke to me in a deep way, and definitely informed my music as well.

“When I was in college, I started playing different kinds of music. When I was in high school, I was making very thrashy, punky, hardcore music, but in college, I started becoming more sophisticated in my tastes, and I listened to a lot of the Beatles. I listened to a lot of The White Album, and it would play into the songs that I would put out. Of course, it was a reference of many references that the overall feeling from that album was a big part of my college years. They were big time stamps of my college era.

“The White Album really went above and beyond experimentation for a band of their size and scale. ‘Revolution 9’ is one of the most epic songs to me, just because they were so enormous, ubiquitous — like, everyone knew the Beatles — and then they do this album where they’re like, ‘F*** the rules. We don’t have to do anything that defined us in the past.’ And they made this song called ‘Song Number 9,’ which is just stream of consciousness, almost like an acid trip, you know? And I love that they went and did that in a period of time when they were at their peak. They were like gods, you know? So I think [this album is influential for me] not necessarily just for the songs so much as the fact that they made that statement — or I wouldn’t call it a statement, so much as it was a big middle finger to conformity and the rule book.

“And it’s interesting, because there’s so many bands at the time that wanted to do that as well — wanted to go experimental — so the Beatles broke the genre wide open for a lot of bands that were working with a pop format structure and making very sing-along-able songs that everyone knew. The thing is, you need a band of that scale to do that. You need an artist to say, ‘It’s OK to just jam and then put that as a song.’ I love that.”

Gorilla Biscuits, Start Today

“Gorilla Biscuits was the very first tattoo I got on my body when I was 18. As a kid, I was thinking, ‘When I have my first tattoo, I want it to be something that was life-changing.’ And music, essentially, was life-changing for me. It was a culture shift for me. My whole lifestyle changed, even for my eating habits. The food I ate, the clothes I wore, the friends who I became friends with, what I did with my free time. I learned how to play music, I learned how to play instruments, I learned how to sing, I played with a band, I started making a zine. And it was all based on the scene called the straight edge hardcore scene.

Steve Aoki’s Gorilla Biscuits tattoo. (Photo: Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images for Pandora Media)

“One of the biggest, real iconic bands of that scene was Gorilla Biscuits, and it was on the first mixtape that I got when I was introduced into this culture. So I listened to that album front to back. I got my mom to buy me a record player back then, because that was what we did as straight edge kids: listen to records. This was my go-to, my pregame music, in the car when going to shows. I knew all the lyrics. I just remember me as a kid, like jumping on my bed, singing along to the songs. It was a big part of my life.”

Refused, The Shape of Punk to Come

“This was a breakup album — or the album they put out and then they broke up. I’ve listened to them for a long time. They are one of the pillars in the straight edge hardcore scene. They’re part of the straight edge hardcore scene that I resonated to the most, because when I first found straight edge, I was listening to the more obvious bands like Gorilla Biscuits and Youth of Today — like kids getting together and making something good with their lives that whole straight edge thing. And then I got introduced into more thinking, ‘Hey, you can get together and do good for yourself, but you could do a lot more than that and actually make a stand — on eating meat, or going against the system, or politicizing.’ Arming your voice with real actions, real words, instead of just like, ‘Hey, let’s get together and just sing along.’ There were a lot of bands in that category that really fueled me, that gave me a lot of passion, and Refused was one of them.

“This album was all-encompassing, not just for their own politics, but the politics infused with motivating music in general. They mixed up so many different genres inside this album. They used so many different types of instruments. It’s just one of those epic albums that you can ask any hardcore kid, they’d probably put this as one of the best hardcore albums of all time. And the song ‘New Noise,’ which was the megahit off that album, I also used in my first mix album I released in 2008. It was called Pillowface and His Airplane Chronicles. That mix album was what the electro scene was to me at that time. So it was Justice and MSTKRFT and all the cool indie stuff that was happening and the stuff I was just starting to put out on my label. And I started the mix album with ‘New Noise,’ because I really wanted to bridge this whole new genre of music that happened in electronic music.

“Eight years later, I brought ‘New Noise’ back into my world to introduce this new style of electro with a mix of thrashy, overdistorted, taking risks, taking moments from the hardcore scene, from hardcore and punk, and applying that to electronic music — not just on the musical side of things by really overly distorting and really amping up electronic music to the point where the sound itself is different, but also the attitude and the ideology of punk and hardcore was very similar to this new sound of electro. It was by far the most punk thing that’s ever happened to electronic music, because of the sound, because of the middle finger to ‘The Man.’ It was a cutting away from the mainstream sound that was happening and saying, ‘Hey, we are our own entity. This is our own world. And we don’t care if you like it or not.’ That kind of idea. So Refused was a monstrous influence in so many different areas of my creative pie — when I was a hardcore kid putting on shows, being in a band, writing in zines, to even when I started becoming more and more popular as a DJ, years and years later.”

Daft Punk, Alive 2007

“They released this on their 2007 tour, right after they came out at Coachella [2006] in the pyramid. F***ing epic, epic sound live. It’s probably the best live album, for me, of all time. I mean, I’ve got to have a live album in here to represent live sound, and watching that show at Coachella, that was 100 percent a big shift in me. A big, life-affirming, life-changing shift for me. Because what it did was before then, you never really thought of DJs as a focal point at a festival, at a big live show. DJs before then were always playing these very little clubs to a very select few people, and to put them on a festival, next to a rocking band that everyone knows the lyrics to, just was unheard of. If you were a DJ, you played at a ‘rave.’ You didn’t even call it a festival. DJs and festivals, they didn’t mix yet. The term ‘EDM’ didn’t even exist. It wasn’t even a blink in someone’s eye yet. Dance music, electronic music … you just don’t put a DJ up there on the stage because they’re just remixing, right? And then you look at Daft Punk and like, that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re literally just standing there. They’re not even moving. You can see their heads bouncing a little bit. So on paper you’re like, ‘Oh, this is going to be really bad. Why are we going to book this when we can have a band that play the guitars and sing their songs?’

“But then you watched the show, and your body just melts into the ground. You were completely frozen into the moment, more mesmerized and hypnotized by what’s happening in front of you than by watching a band thrash around. It’s like literal hypnotism to me. I was just overcome with emotion, completely from head to toe chills, all the way through the set. And like with a band, I knew all the songs, you know? I’m a megafan of Daft Punk. And then you have this stage setup of them sitting on the pyramid and the lights are going in a certain way; the production is immense around them. And you realize you’re not even staring at artists, you’re staring at two aliens that came down from f***ing space and are just blowing our minds without even moving. Literally, they just infiltrated our brainwaves and jacked them. Like, they’re masturbating our brainwaves to orgasmic proportions, and we’re just like stuck in this frozen place.

“I mean, I’m already a DJ here, so for me, for my culture, this is huge. It was like, electronic music is not going anywhere, and we’re gonna change the game. They were the start of DJs that could bring something on that large scale and blow people’s mind. I think after that, DJs started thinking differently, like even myself. I was like, ‘I need to think different about my show! I can’t just DJ now on turntables. I want to do something different. I want to add new elements to my set.’ I wanted to entertain my crowd with my music, in the same way that I was blown away by these two guys. So that was a huge point for me — as an artist, as a live performer.”

Justice, † (Cross)

“This was the next evolution of what I was just talking about. Justice took what Daft Punk built on the foundation of having a live show. They took that to the next level for me. First of all, when they came out with their single off of †, ‘Waters of Nazareth,’ you feel the distortion, as a musician. It really got into my soul. It was the fusion of live instrumentation, the distortion, that kind of abrasion, and then also the energy. It was the extra output of energy that electronic music needed to have at that time. And it started forming its own scene, almost this new punk sound as electronic music. That attitude of, ‘We know we’re different and we’re just gonna do our own s***.’ And it became so big. It became big enough that everyone was serious about what was going on.

“I remember when Justice came out the next year, 2008, at Coachella. The seeds were planted with the sound. The kids and the people that were gravitating toward this music were dying for a live experience. Coachella had that once again with this performance. It was the biggest punk uprising electronic music we’ve ever seen or heard. People were crowd-surfing. And I mean, that just did not happen in electronic music. The sound was abrasive and it was energetic and it was almost angry, like it made you want to scream and go crazy in that state. Like that happy kind of anger.

“For me as a producer as well as a DJ at the time, this was a big deal, because I was making remixes in 2005 to 2007 — I made, I don’t know, 40 remixes. I was toying with production, doing this and that. And then when this scene started emerging, this new electro scene started emerging, now there’s a real ecosystem. There’s a community of people that will support the music in this underground scene. And we have parties. And we’re throwing all these really cool parties in L.A. at the time. And we’re doing these electro parties. My label, Dim Mak, we were doing these Ed Banger annuals for all the French crew who would come. Thomas [Bangalter] from Daft Punk would come, DJ Mehdi, SebastiAn, Justice, MSTRKRFT from Toronto would come down and Boys Noize would come out from Germany, the Bloody Beetroots from Italy, and you’d have this really cool scene going on.”

Weezer, Pinkerton

“This is one of my favorite college albums. I loved The Blue Album, I thought that album was absolutely incredible. And then they dropped Pinkerton, and you know, the album got no love on the radio. It got no love anywhere, no pickup. Really strange. And of course, I picked it up and I went bonkers. I always go back to it.

“And when I think about collaborations as an artist, I always think about artists that are not collaborating in the EDM space, and one of the first to come to mind was Rivers Cuomo. I reached out to him, really because of my love for Pinkerton, and I ended up doing two collaborations with him. The first, ‘Earthquakey People’ off of [2012’s] Wonderland, was a pretty big song for that period of time in my career. That was a cool thing.” 

Eazy-E, Eazy-Duz-It

“This is the first album that I learned all the lyrics to. I was so young, about really, like 14. Younger than that, maybe, like 13. I grew up in Newport Beach, California — suburb, middle/upper-class, right on the beach. I think it’s defined as 96 percent white. A very conservative place to grow up in, seeded with lots of ignorance and racism. … And then I found hardcore and punk. So I’m grateful for being able to find my voice through a [subculture] that allowed voices of disenfranchised kids.

“Also in that period of time, for whatever reason, I gravitated toward West Coast rap. I thought it was so cool, because I was from the suburbs — so completely opposite from Compton or anything I saw in music videos or what I saw in the Boyz N the Hood movie. I always looked up to N.W.A, and Eazy-Duz-It was one of the first albums I got and the first album I listened to front to back. I learned all the lyrics to every single song. I used to write them down in my notebook and recite them, rap them in a mirror in my bedroom.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Sasha Velour (Photo: Courtesy of VH1)

The bald and the beautiful Sasha Velour was always one to watch on RuPaul’s Drag Race, Season 9 — who else could make Village People cowboy couture look so chic? — but some fans, and even some judges, wondered if the 30-year-old Fulbright scholar, self-declared “amateur drag historian,” and Velour magazine editor’s high-brow intellectualism was the perfect fit for such a high-camp show. However, on the truly grand finale, when Sasha transformed Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional” into a woman-on-the-verge stalker song, and stripped off her scarlet wig to reveal a shower of rose petals, she set a new standard for American beauty. It was one of the greatest, most literally wig-snatching lip-syncs in the show’s herstory — and with that, Sasha snatched the crown.

Never remove your wig while performing, unless you have a gaggle of rose petals underneath. #DragRace pic.twitter.com/UDya2mxaw5

— RuPaul (@RuPaul) June 27, 2017

It’s almost a shame that Sasha never landed in the bottom two and thus never had to lip-sync for her life throughout Season 9, because viewers never really got to see what she can do. Sasha, a true visionary and rock ’n’ roller who masterminds the theatrical showcase Nightgowns in Brooklyn, elevates drag to an entirely new level of performance art, pulling from the past while pushing the medium into the future. Utilizing what she says is a “very strange mixture of my favorite songs, everything from straight-up punk to old-fashioned, midcentury gay anthems that speak to the kind of sentimentality that I love in drag culture,” as well as “everything from lighting effects to reveals to projections of visual art,” she creates a magical, sometimes disturbing, and, above all else, highly emotional experience every time she takes the stage.

It remains to be seen if Sasha, like many Drag Race queens before her, will embark on her own original music career (“I’m interested in dipping my toes in those waters; I may have fun with that,” she muses), but for now, she is focused on putting her own creepy, creative spin on songs by everyone from Björk to Britney. Here, she shares with Yahoo’s Reality Rocks the music that has inspired her singular aesthetic. Suffice to say, Sasha rocks.

Siouxsie & the Banshees, “Cities in Dust”

“Siouxsie Sioux was such an inspiration when I was a teenager, because I connected with these goth college students who listened to this genre of music. She showed me that femininity didn’t necessarily have to look the way that I was familiar with. It could be more exciting, and much more identifiable… My own experience of gender has been about a lot of fluidity. In drag, I like to combine aspects of masculinity and femininity, and rewrite the rules for those. I’m so inspired by the artists that have done that before, especially in such high-fashion ways.”

Le Tigre, “Deceptacon”

“This is one of my favorite songs to perform to. I feel it has that femme punk energy that says, ‘I’m tough, I live life by own rules, and I’m fabulous — even while screeching at you!’ Hearing the beat of that song when it takes over, it’s so thrilling and I get such a rush. I typically perform it with backup dancers, which is maybe a little bit opposite to the style of the song, but I love this kind of classic draggy pageantry juxtaposed with tough, rough-around-the-edges punk.”

Dionne Warwick, “A House Is Not a Home”

“This was one of those songs that drag queens were performing in the ’60s during the Stonewall riots. I love thinking about the music that has spoken to queer people, especially drag queens, over the course of time, and tapping into those feelings — that sadness and melancholy and loneliness — because I think that’s still really present in people’s experiences. This song is very much about being lonely or being heartbroken. My performance of this song is actually what the little house on top of my head [seen in Drag Race’s Rainbow Challenge] comes from. I reveal this image of the house on different papers that I hold in my hand while I sing about this loss of home, and then at the climax of the song I reveal that the house has been under my hat, on top of my head, the entire time. Even though it’s silly and campy, I play it with a lot of real pain and sorrow. And that juxtaposition of this strange little hat and this real genuine feeling of loneliness — which is easy for me to tap into, because I’ve experienced it so many times in my life — that’s what I think is really fun and powerful drag. That was the number that I auditioned for Drag Race with, so this song played a role in helping me get on the show, showing my unique perspective.”

Kate Bush, “Wuthering Heights”

“I perform this as Gollum, with kind of like stringy hair and monster teeth in a rag dress. There’s just something so strange and monstrous about the way Kate’s voice sounds while singing this. And I really relate [to this song], because for me so much of my experience of gender is feeling like some sort of indescribable monster. Even though I present myself at the height of glamour and beauty, part of my truth is being desperate and emotional, and unafraid of being unattractive. And that song, the sound of her voice with my presentation, really capture that for me.”

Barbra Streisand, “Gotta Move”

“I like a little Barbra Streisand! This song is super-empowering, because she talks about how she has to break away from this man who won’t let her live her life the way she wants to. I first heard this song on the soundtrack of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, which was this drag paradise movie I saw as a little kid. I wasn’t really encountering a lot of drag queens as an 8-year-old! But I got to see this movie, and I realized that there were adults who lived the kind of life that I was playing with as a little kid, as a gender-nonconforming lover of all things glamorous and fabulous. That movie really inspired me, so this song has always played a special role for me. I perform the song with a video of myself as two backup dancers. And together, me in real life and the backup dancers change from a kind of housewife-on-the-run costume to this bald-headed, blood-soaked monster of revenge, capable of securing her own life for herself completely independently from someone else’s idea. It’s so exciting to perform.”

Annie Lennox, “Love Song for a Vampire”

“I’ve always been obsessed with vampires. I definitely see them as a kind of queer figure, contributing to the destruction of smooth heterosexual relationships, living at night. That kind of gothic glamour really speaks to me, and that is the kind of drag that I love. This song is so emotional and so beautiful, and the pacing of it is really powerful. I perform it with a projection that shows blood dripping from two holes in my neck, and the blood runs down and becomes a dress — a beautiful red dress. And then I reveal the red dress underneath [my costume] all along. I love using different aspects of fear to convey the emotion of a song on many different levels.”

Sia, “Cellophane”

“This is a really emotionally raw song. I perform it standing in a white dress against a screen, and I let all these colors project onto me, onto my face, onto the background. The colors represent different emotional states. I love those swirling, dramatic — manic, almost — overwhelming qualities of our emotional lives. That’s such a huge part of my experience of being alive and being queer: the going up and down with my emotions. I love to transform that into something beautiful using drag, because I think so many people can connect with that.”

Celine Dion, “I Drove All Night”

“This is a Roy Orbison song, but with the Celine Dion version, I started listening to the lyrics … and she talks about climbing into someone’s room whether they like it or not, in the middle of the night, after traveling all night to get to them! And I thought, ‘This sounds absolutely mad!’ So I performed it in kind of this manic-obsessive, monstrous way. Fundamentally, I relate. My feelings sometimes take me to places like that — that I have to cover up — and it’s fun to get to explore that, and kind of be at peace with that level of emotional instability!”

Shirley Bassey, “My Way”

“This is one of my favorite songs to perform to; I actually performed it Sunday night at the Brooklyn celebration of this victory [the legalization of gay marriage]. It’s a song that I’ve always really disliked — until I heard this version. Hearing this kind of like powerful, emotional version, it took on new meaning, and I understood it. It reminded me how important it is to break away from clichés and from other people’s influence, and really live a life that is true to yourself with no regret. I think that message is so powerful, especially revisiting it after this win. It filled me with pride and joy, and I felt it was connecting me to the community, letting them know that I love them and I honor them.”

Britney Spears, “I Wanna Go”

“This is one of the first songs I ever performed to in drag. You know, the song that Charlie Hides didn’t lip-sync to on Drag Race! I performed it as this captured queer creature in the woods who’s forced into a wig and dress, and then at the end of the number she breaks out of it — she rips the wig off her head and rips the dress apart, and returns to her natural queer state. You know, I feel that actually has some connections to Britney’s own experience, in maybe her being pushed into a certain type of self-presentation that wasn’t completely authentic.”

Tom Waits, “Little Drop of Poison”

“I love not being wedded to always performing to women’s voices — just doing creative numbers that set a mood, and making surprising choices for drag. This is one of my favorites. So creepy. So powerful.”

Celine Dion, “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”

“This is such a campy, over-the-top, and, frankly, endless song! I perform it as a duet with myself, using projections. I love making romantic songs into things that are very much not cliché romances, so I interpret this song, instead of it being about a romantic relationship, as being about my relationship with myself out of drag. It’s about the push and pull between my in-drag and out-of-drag selves. During the number, the projection of myself and my actual body on the stage switch — so I start out of drag and then put myself in drag onstage, and then the video gets out of drag. I actually instigate this by throwing water in my own face. In the video, I get drenched with a huge bucket of water that washes away the drag. It’s this sort of antagonistic but ultimately loving interaction between these two aspects of myself. It’s really messy!”

Lorraine Ellison, “Stay With Me (Baby)”

“This is a powerful ballad that I perform completely raw, begging someone to stay — and that has taken on so many different meanings, based on my feelings when I perform it. It can be about myself, or it can be a message to a lover, to a friend, or even to fans online.”

Björk, “All Is Full of Love”

“Björk has been a huge influence on my aesthetic. The way she really earnestly uses creative visual art, and visuals, with her music is so powerful and unforgettable. She’s definitely a role model. This is such a calming and beautiful song. I actually haven’t ever lip-synced to a Björk song, yet, but who knows what the future will hold.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Music fans now live in a permanently heightened state of paranoia, fearing that yet another icon will soon be taken from us – tensing up when we hear news of Joe Perry’s onstage collapse or Joni Mitchell and Glen Campbell’s ongoing health issues; feeling a sense of dread when we notice a veteran musician’s name suddenly trending on Twitter; or forking out a month’s salary for tickets to the all-star classic rock festival Desert Trip, just in case this is the last time we’ll have a chance to see greats like Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney share a stage.

It is in this morbid mindset, when we hear 72-year-old Desert Trip performer Roger Daltrey (who’s had his own share of recent medical problems) declare “hope I die before I get old” or the now-74-year-old McCartney contemplate what life might be like at age 64, that such lyrics truly hit a nerve. What’s interesting, however, is that while themes of aging and the simple unstoppability of time have always permeated popular music, many of the most chilling lyrics were penned by artists who at the time had barely even hit the big 3-0. Why were all these twentysomething artists, still very much in the early stages of their careers, so obsessed with mortality? Did any of these boomer-era rockers realize that their songs would take on much greater meaning when they’d perform them for their graying fans several decades later? And does it bother these artists to sing these lyrics now?

Below are some of the most impactful lines about aging in rock, all penned by veteran artists when they were, ironically, very young – artists who are, thankfully, still alive and well and performing today. We appreciate these legends more than ever now, and we feel the weight of their every word.

Fleetwood Mac, “Landslide”

Writer: Stevie Nicks

Age at the time: 27

Age now: 68

Key lyric: “Time makes you bolder/Even children get older/And I’m getting older, too”

The Who, “My Generation”

Writer: Pete Townshend

Age at the time: 20

Age now: 72

Key lyric: “Hope I die before I get old”

Aerosmith, “Dream On”

Writer: Steven Tyler

Age at the time: 25

Age now: 68

Key lyric: “Every time when I look in the mirror/All these lines on my face getting clearer/The past is gone.”

John Mellencamp (Cougar), “Jack & Diane”

Age at the time: 31

Age now: 64

Key lyric: “Oh yeah, life goes on/Long after the thrill of living is gone”

The Cure, “Closedown”

Writer: Robert Smith

Age at the time: 29

Age now: 57

Key lyric: “I’m running out of time/I’m out of step and closing down”

Alice Cooper, “I’m Eighteen”

Writers: Alice Cooper, Michael Bruce, Glen Buxton, Dennis Dunaway, Neal Smith

Cooper’s age at the time: 22

Age now: 68

Key lyric: “Lines form on my face and hands/Lines form from the ups and downs”

The Rolling Stones, “Mother’s Little Helper”

Writers: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Age at the time: Both were 23

Age now: 72

Key lyric: “What a drag it is getting old”

Neil Young, “Heart of Gold”

Age at the time: 27

Age now: 70

Key lyric: “Keeps me searching for a heart of gold/And I’m getting old”

Simon & Garfunkel: “Hazy Shade of Winter”

Writer: Paul Simon

Age at the time: 25

Age now: 74

Key lyric: “Time, time, time/See what’s become of me/While I looked around for my possibilities”

The Beatles, “When I’m 64″

Writer: Paul McCartney

Age at the time: 25

Age now: 74

Key lyric: When I get older losing my hair/Many years from now/Will you still be sending me a valentine/Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?… Will you still need me, will you still feed me/When I’m 64?”

LCD Soundsystem, “Losing My Edge”

Writer: James Murphy

Age at the time: 32

Age now: 46

Key lyric: “I’m losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ‘80s…But I was there/I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City…I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band…I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids”

Honorable mention:

Adele is only 27 now, and “When We Were Young,” which she co-wrote with Tobias Jesso Jr., appears on an album titled 25. But we know years from now, when a still-relevant, still-touring, senior-citizen Adele Adkins croons, “We were sad of getting old/It made us restless/Oh, I’m so mad I’m getting old/It makes me reckless,” there won’t be a dry eye in the house.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.