The Music

1 Their Greatest Hits: 1971-1975 The Eagles

27 million copies sold Year released: 1976

BEST-KNOWN SONGS "Take It to the Limit," "Lyin' Eyes," "One of These Nights," "Best of My Love," "Witchy Woman"

OTHER TOP-100 RIAA ALBUMS Hotel California (1976; 15 million sold), Eagles Greatest Hits, Volume Two (1982; 9 million sold)

SIGNIFICANCE This album's popularity and its skillful commercialization of various Woodstock-era sounds reflect the baby boom generation's tendency to see itself as the sum total of its romantic dysfunctionality.

26 million copies sold Year released: 1982

BEST-KNOWN SONGS "Billie Jean," "Beat It," "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," "Human Nature," "Thriller," "P.Y.T."

OTHER TOP-100 RIAA ALBUMS None

SIGNIFICANCE That Thriller continues to sell despite the increasingly unsavory spectacle of Mr. Jackson himself suggests that the album and the cultural revolutions it fostered (for example, integrating MTV) have taken on a life of their own.

23 million copies sold Year released: 1979

BEST-KNOWN SONGS "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)," "Run Like Hell," "Comfortably Numb"

Other Top-100 RIAA albums Dark Side of the Moon (1973; 15 million sold)

SIGNIFICANCE Could the navel-gazing cynicism of parts of contemporary Western culture stem from this widely disseminated, cynical "rock opera"? Nah; The Wall is just one more example of art imitating life.

22 million copies sold Year released: 1971

BEST-KNOWN SONGS "Stairway to Heaven," "Black Dog"

OTHER TOP-100 RIAA ALBUMS Physical Graffiti (1975; 15 million sold), Led Zeppelin II (1969; 12 million sold), Houses of the Holy (1973; 11 million sold)

SIGNIFICANCE To rock musicians and the world at large, a hard-rock monument-its peaks and depths disappearing into the clouds and Middle Earth respectively. To gullible Christians, an urban legend-its lyrics allegedly unmasked as Satanic when played backwards.

21 million copies sold Year released: 1985

BEST-KNOWN SONGS "Just the Way You Are," "Only the Good Die Young," "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me," "Uptown Girl"

OTHER TOP-100 RIAA ALBUMS The Stranger (1977; 9 million sold)

SIGNIFICANCE Vivid proof of what happens when a square peg (Mr. Joel might've single-handedly revitalized the Broadway musical) insists upon fitting into a round hole (rock superstardom).

John Wesley Harding seldom pops up in discussions of Bob Dylan's best albums any more, but upon its release in December 1967, when domestic tension over the Vietnam War was escalating, many considered it significant indeed. Its one-take, acoustic sound and direct, parable-like lyrics put it at odds with such then-fashionable extravaganzas as the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper and the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request, causing a culture accustomed to regarding Mr. Dylan as the "antenna of the age" to subject Harding's form and content to scrutiny. Harding is in some ways even more mysterious now: Removed from the '60s, its outlaws, patriots, saints, drifters, and messengers resound within contexts quite different from the ones in which they were first heard. But it's less mysterious too: Its jokes now sound like jokes instead of ciphers, and its biblical echoes, having come home to roost in Mr. Dylan's gospel albums, now have literal as well as symbolic meaning. Ironically, what once made Harding unfashionable-its simplicity-now makes it seem forever young. Don't be surprised if one day it's held out as the truly essential Bob Dylan.