Album Anniversaries

'By All Means Necessary,' the second album from the Boogie Down Productions crew, was a step up in consciousness for a young emcee named KRS-One. The 10-track album was released on May 31, 1988, almost a year after the tragic murder of the rapper's groupmate DJ-producer Scott La Rock, who died on Aug. 27, 1987.

For many years, rappers have always sampled jazz music within their hip-hop productions. The late rapper Guru took it a step further and enlisted several prominent jazz musicians to back him up on his bellwether album, 'Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1.'

On May 11, 1993, Terence Trent D'Arby released his masterful third album, 'Symphony or Damn.' In a perfect world, this genre-blending record would have cemented D'Arby's popularity and status as a musical alchemist worthy of comparisons to Prince.

On May 10, 1988, Prince won a personal battle between good and evil with the release of his 10th album, 'Lovesexy.' Unfortunately, he lost much of the record-buying public in the process.

The Isley Brothers are timeless. Their catalog holds a range of soul classics from 1959 to 2006, giving them at least three generations of music fans.

'Down With the King' was the end of a decade-long reign by the legendary hip-hop trio Run-DMC.

On April 14, 1988, Public Enemy unleashed their second album, a dense, dizzying masterpiece of social outrage entitled 'It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.'

Bob Marley and the Wailers' seminal album, 'Catch a Fire,' which made them international superstars, debuted in the marketplace on April 13, 1973. Forty years later, it's still remembered as one of the greatest reggae albums ever made.

Aretha Franklin had collected 10 Grammys, scored seven No. 1 albums and was crowned ‘The Queen of Soul’ before she released the ‘Almighty Fire’ LP on April 13, 1978. Today marks the 35th anniversary of the power singer’s 25th album.

"Our rap comes from the streets," exclaimed Havoc, one half of Queens-bred hardcore rap duo Mobb Deep, in a 1995 TV interview. "It's about reality -- straight up." You couldn't help but believe him, either. Two years earlier, on April 13, he and his longtime sidekick, Prodigy, released 'Juvenile Hell' -- a debut LP of bat-toting, nerve-shaking tracks that all but drowned their