Madonna

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• Top 6 Pop Artists of All Time

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• Michael Jackson

  Michael Jackson's 1982 album Thriller remains the best-selling album in history, with estimated sales exceeding 70 million copies worldwide, and its seven top-10 singles set a record for the most hit songs drawn from a single album that stood for decades after its release. Jackson's music videos, particularly the 14-minute short film for "Thriller" itself, elevated the format from a promotional afterthought into a genuine artistic medium, and MTV's decision to add Jackson's videos to heavy rotation in the early 1980s is widely credited with breaking down the network's earlier reluctance to feature Black artists prominently. His performance debuting the moonwalk during a 1983 televised Motown 25th anniversary special is remembered as one of the most significant single moments in pop music television history, instantly cementing a dance move that became permanently associated with Jackson specifically. Jackson's later life was overshadowed by repeated child sexual abuse allegations, including criminal charges he was acquitted of in 2005 and posthumous allegations detailed in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, controversies that have significantly complicated his legacy and continue to shape ongoing debate over how his music and cultural influence should be remembered.

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• Whitney Houston

  Whitney Houston holds the record for the most consecutive number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 by any artist, with seven straight chart-topping songs between 1985 and 1988, a run of consecutive dominance no other solo artist has matched before or since. Her vocal range and technical control, honed partly through her mother Cissy Houston's gospel background and Whitney's own early years singing in church choirs, made her one of the most technically admired vocalists in pop music history, with her rendition of "I Will Always Love You" for The Bodyguard soundtrack becoming one of the best-selling singles of all time. Houston's 1991 performance of the national anthem at Super Bowl XXV, delivered shortly after the start of the Gulf War, is widely regarded as one of the greatest renditions of the anthem ever performed and was re-released as a charity single following the September 11 attacks a decade later. Houston's struggles with substance abuse became increasingly public in the years before her 2012 death at 48, a decline that stood in stark contrast to her earlier career as one of the cleanest, most universally acclaimed vocal talents in the industry, and her death remains one of the more significant losses in modern pop music history.

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• Elvis Presley

  Elvis Presley's fusion of country, blues, and gospel music into a new, guitar-driven rock and roll sound in the mid-1950s made him the genre's first major crossover superstar, and his early Sun Records recordings are widely credited with helping bring rhythm and blues-rooted music to a mainstream white American audience for the first time. His 1956 appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, during which the network famously chose to film him only from the waist up out of concern his hip-swiveling dancing was too provocative for television audiences, became a defining cultural flashpoint over rock and roll's perceived threat to conservative social norms of the era. Presley starred in more than 30 feature films across the 1950s and '60s, extending his celebrity into Hollywood alongside his recording career, before returning to live performance with his famous 1968 "Comeback Special" and an extended residency of Las Vegas concerts throughout the 1970s. His massive commercial success and cultural influence have long been complicated by his direct appropriation of Black musical traditions — rock and roll's roots in Black rhythm and blues artists who received far less mainstream recognition than Presley did — a tension that remains central to ongoing critical conversations about his legacy and rock music's broader racial history.

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• Prince

  Prince wrote, produced, and often played nearly every instrument on his own recordings, a level of total creative and technical control over his music that was unusual even among the era's most ambitious pop artists, and his 1984 album and film Purple Rain became both a commercial blockbuster and a critical landmark for the way it blended rock, funk, and pop into a singularly distinctive sound. His decision in the 1990s to publicly change his name to an unpronounceable symbol, in protest of a contract dispute with his record label, became one of the more famous artist-label conflicts in music history and reflected Prince's broader, career-long insistence on maintaining ownership and control over his own work. Prince's guitar playing, showcased memorably in his solo during the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tribute performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," is frequently cited among the greatest single guitar solos ever performed, reflecting a level of instrumental virtuosity that his flamboyant pop stardom sometimes overshadowed. His famously prolific output — Prince reportedly left behind a vault containing thousands of unreleased songs upon his 2016 death — has continued generating posthumous releases years after his death, reflecting a level of sustained creative production across his lifetime that few pop artists of any era have matched.

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• Beyoncé

  Beyoncé has won more Grammy Awards than any artist in history, and her 2016 visual album Lemonade, released alongside a full accompanying film, is widely regarded as one of the most ambitious and critically significant pop albums of the 21st century for its exploration of Black womanhood, infidelity, and generational trauma. Her surprise self-titled 2013 album, released without any prior promotional announcement, upended the traditional album rollout model the music industry had relied on for decades, and the "surprise release" strategy she pioneered has since been adopted by numerous other major artists. Beyoncé's 2018 Coachella headlining performance, later released as the documentary Homecoming, incorporated marching band arrangements and step-show choreography drawn directly from historically Black college culture, a deliberate artistic statement that brought HBCU traditions to one of the largest mainstream music festival stages in the world. Her 2024 album Cowboy Carter, which topped country music charts despite historical resistance within that genre to Black artists, extended a career-long pattern of Beyoncé deliberately pushing into genres and cultural spaces where Black women have historically been underrepresented, reinforcing her status as one of the most artistically ambitious pop artists of her generation.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.