6. Some Girls (1978)

When the Rolling Stones went into the studio to record their sixteenth (16th!) album, popular music was being pulled in two separate directions — disco and punk rock. Neither genre was what one would consider, at the time, the Rolling Stones’ milieu, and yet the band managed to split the difference between these two poles and make what is widely considered one of their best records of all time. Have you heard Some Girls? It’s awesome. From the jaw-dropping four-on-the-floor opener “Miss You” to the remarkable, comic, desperate man-in-the-mirror closer “Shattered” this is vintage Stones. Pure energy, humor, and dystopian anxiety. A surfeit of brilliant material on the record has the tendency to make barnstorming gems like “When The Whip Comes Down” a respectable, simple afterthought, but in fact this ranks with the most pugnacious and exciting work the band has ever done. It comes as no surprise that Johnny Rotten would say in 1977 that he did not even think of the Stones as a band and maintain that “they’re more like a business,” but perhaps — for understandable reasons — he didn’t anticipate that Jagger and company would be able to respond with such unvarnished conviction.