The fifty all time best albums by Q magazine readers...

rmde at ppl getting upset a q lists

might as well get upset that the nra end of year list is full of guns

sorry for forgetting that yr friends in arcade fire are grrrls owen. :)

might as well get upset that the nra end of year list is full of guns

haha

well yeah obviously that's true to an extent — like, why wouldn't anyone read Q if they *didn't* think OK Computer was the best album ever made? — but I still think this list is bad enough to warrant a lil bit of upset-ness

basically the only thing that has changed in the past 5 yrs is that two of the better albums (Kid A and Automatic) drop out of the top 10 and are replaced by Arctic Monkeys and Muse

smdh

the 9 american (and 1 canadian!) albums paint an even bleaker picture:

I would say it shows the Q readers have gotten the point. Of course the best music is being made in the UK. :)

OK, so they may not be in the Top 30, but these are all in the list.

94) Prince and the Revolution - Purple Rain
93) Bob Marley and the Wailers - Exodus
91) Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back
84) Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life
65) Massive Attack - Blue Lines
63) The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced?
58 ) Michael Jackson - Thriller
38 ) The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland
32) Marvin Gaye - What's Going On

The lack of women is more obvious, but I guess there are still too few female singer/songwriters out there.

Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley are both surprising, given they both died before 1985, in Hendrix's case 15 years before the poll is supposed to start. It's like Q readers don't know what they're on about!

Well in the case of Bob Marley, Q readers are legally required to own a copy of 'Exodus' so that they can go around telling everybody that they "listen to reggae".

At what point did ITAOTS turn from underground Elephant 6 album into proper cannon fodder? Or has it been such a slow process I didn't notice?

No idea, although it should have been some Apples (In Stereo) album instead as they have always been much better.

http://iaspm-us.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Blake-2.pdf

(some paper I found while googling — "INTERNET MUSIC CRITICISM AS ARCHIVE: PITCHFORK MEDIA AND NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL’S IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA")

((that's the name of the paper, not the gogogle search I did to find it))

Magazine claims to have "always" liked an album that it was actually lukewarm towards on it's release, film at 11...

potentially relevant to this discussion:

McGonigal’s introduction for the second part [of Pitchfork's c.2008 10th-anniversary feature], a retrospective by currently in-
vogue indie artists, continued to link the album’s release and Pitchfork. In the opening
sentence, McGonigal claimed that “in indie circles, In the Aeroplane over the Sea was
hailed as an instant classic.”11 McGonigal emphasized its influence on contemporary
indie artists by associating the band with artists such as Devendra Banhart, the
Decemberists, and Beirut who were themselves lauded by Pitchfork. McGonigal’s
reiterated that he, and thus Pitchfork, immediately understood the album was brilliant:
“I’m really glad that Aeroplane is so revered. I love it to death, myself—cried when I first
listened to the promo cassette and everything. I knew immediately that this was
something really special, and wasn’t surprised when quite a few other people agreed.”12
Since the original sources were deleted, and since many of the original sources are from
out-of-print magazines or on defunct websites, someone reading Pitchfork today has no
choice but to believe Pitchfork was the sole source to laud the album from the beginning.

[...] The album’s manner of
circulation is seen as archetypically indie, receiving airplay on college and alternative
radio, but not on mainstream media outlets such as MTV or Top 40 radio. Since then, the
album has been described as selling via word-of-mouth, although it can be purchased at
major music stores. This method of advertising was found in the artists’ retrospective;
many of them described being introduced to the album by a friend.

for my own part, I hadn't listened to any E6 stuff (altho I think I had heard of Apples in Stereo) before I was introduced to NMH c.2002 through a recommendation by a cool older dude from Austin who posted on the same video-game message board as me and had generally excellent taste (also put me on to Haruki Murakami — thanks Chris!). but I got the impression, at that time, that it already had quite a cult following; and most of my friends in high school who were into 'indie' music had at least heard of it (remember getting clowned on for liking "that anne frank album")

also, I like Blake's idea that the album's "anti-mainstream qualities have ossified due to the group’s musical silence" — which could maybe more cynically rephrased as "they haven't done anything to embarrass themselves or create a backlash".

at any rate, it does seem to still be perceived as essentially 'weird' in a way that is rare for an album of its stature, 'mainstream' or not. part of which is of course due to the attitudes listeners and critics bring to the thing, but let's be real, the music also has to do a lot of work to sustain such a reading.

'nother interesting angle:

Radiohead, Neutral Milk Hotel Help Vinyl Sales Almost Double In 2008

JANUARY 8, 2009 2:05 PM EDT
While CD sales continue to decline, vinyl is still experience a renaissance: 89 percent more LPs were sold last year than in '07. Part of the leap can be attributed to Capitol Records' decision to reissue many of their most famous albums on vinyl, as the Beatles' Abbey Road was the year's second-highest-selling vinyl album, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon ranked seventh and Radiohead's OK Computer rounded out the Top 10. Radiohead's In Rainbows, an album that began its career as a free download, was 2008's biggest vinyl seller, a position that was no doubt aided by the fact that the album came out on January 1st of last year and therefore had plenty of time on shelves.

Other shockers: Neutral Milk Hotel's 1998 classic In The Aeroplane Over the Sea came in sixth, ahead of Dark Side, Fleet Foxes and Metallica's Death Magnetic. Guns n' Roses' Chinese Democracy, while struggling to sell CDs, sold enough vinyls to place third on the Top 10 list. But the biggest surprise: The B-52's' new album Funplex was the year's fourth best-selling record as it bridged the gap between people who probably owned record players decades ago and the new class of vinyl buyers.

As we examined back in June in our "Vinyl Returns" feature, the death of the CD and the influx of the MP3 — with its varying degrees of less-than-CD-quality sound — have opened the door for vinyl to be relevant again. Plus, the artwork for Aeroplane looks so much better on a larger canvas. In all, the number of records sold last year leapt from 988,000 in '07 to 1.88 million in '08. Still, the sales from vinyl only made up 0.1 percent of the music sales in 2008, a year that saw a 14 percent decrease across the board.

okay one last quote just for lols:

Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed.

(that's from the 2005 pfork review of the reissue, which argues that Aeroplane's most distinctive quality within the 90s indie rock canon is that it "is not cool.")

Well in the case of Bob Marley, Q readers are legally required to own a copy of 'Exodus' so that they can go around telling everybody that they "listen to reggae".

The Q readers feel no need to tell everyone they listen to reggae. They don't feel like they are required to like a certain kind of music that they don't, for instance they don't give a damn about listen to any token R&B or funk.
However, Bob Marley had more way with a tune than any (true) reggae act ever before or since, and as such, he has gotten a well-deserved position as the leading reggae act ever.

Bob Marley had more way with a tune than any (true) reggae act ever before or since

no way, e.g., horace andy; cornell campbell; jimmy cliff; the congos.

I like Jimmy Cliff, but I feel like his melodies were more repetitive and harmonically less varied than a lot of Bob Marley's tunes. I don't like "Exodus" (the song) at all, but thankfully Bob Marley was usually able to go way beyong one chord songs like that one.