50 Best Albums of All Time According to Rolling Stone's BRAND NEW, 100% Revamped Top 500

Formal integrity, innovation in the harmonic language, mastery of counterpoint xp

:D

according to an FB post from Xhukk, his name on this list is based on blurbs that he wrote in 2003; when they say they "started over from scratch," that does not mean that all the text is new. So it's probly that citations of the, ahem, pre-Pitchfork rockcrit establishment are based on shit from 2003, and that the new shit is generated from the present staff.

(xpost) Wow, that's great--I would have gone with Introspective, but that's a good choice. Ditto Husker Du (Flip Your Wig for me).

Ha, wow, Moving Pictures is at 379. The Wenner days really are over.

Lots of jazz in the '79 version of the guide it seems

http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/steveparker/rs_guide79.htm

Woah, those guys sure liked Coltrane and underrated Miles.

Need to change that username.

If I understand correctly there was a separate section for jazz and those jazz records weren’t on the main list.

There were separate sections for rock/pop/country/soul, blues, jazz, and gospel. There wasn't really a main list iirc.

I think a list for different genres would have been far more interesting than a top 500 rock/pop with token other entries

There’s good albums in the 500-201 portion but unfortunately with these “best of all time” lists most of the attention is directed towards the top tier.

I’ve always thought, and it’s specially evident in this revision that such an extensive list would benefit if broken down into 10 top 50 albums into subgenres, like say:

- Top 50 classic rock albums of all time
- Top 50 rap/hip hop albums of all time
- Top 50 jazz albums of all time
- Top 50 soul/funk/r&b albums of all time
- Top 50 electronic albums of all time
- Top 50 “world” music albums of all time
- Top 50 metal albums of all time
- Top 50 blues/folk/country/americana albums of all time

And so on... you get 10 times the chance to create a canon, for more clicks and more discussion.

Sund4r is correct about the separate sections in the red (1979) edition, and no main list. Weirdly, the albums in each artist's entry are listed alphabetically, while the reviews themselves are chronological, as they should be. Bob Blumenthal wrote the majority of the jazz reviews, iirc, and stuck around for the 1983 yellow RS Jazz Record Guide, where a few other critics hopped on.

There is also a separate section for Anthologies and Soundtracks in the 1979 version.

Some notable Bands and Artists that didn't make the cut below. Some of these are listed because they run contra to the "p4k-ication" narrative, others appeared multiple times on the prior list, and others are simply egregious absences.

- Animal Collective
- Aphex Twin
- Ariana Grande
- Arthur Russell
- Autechre
- Basement Jaxx
- Beach House
- Boards of Canada
- Boredoms
- Buffalo Springfield
- Burial
- Captain Beefheart
- Chance the Rapper
- Cheap Trick
- Clipse
- Duke Ellington
- Duran Duran
- Dwight Yoakam
- Emmylou Harris
- EPMD
- Eric Clapton
- Eric Dolphy
- Fugazi
- Garth Brooks
- Gas
- George Jones
- George Strait
- Gram Parsons
- Grimes
- Guided By Voices
- Hank Mobley
- Jackson Browne
- Jane's Addiction
- Joanna Newsom
- João Gilberto
- Justin Timberlake
- Kamasi Washington
- King Crimson
- Modest Mouse
- Mott the Hoople
- Nick Cave
- Os Mutantes
- Pharoah Sanders
- Philip Glass
- Roger Miller
- Serge Gainsbourg
- Sigur Rós
- Slayer
- Slint
- Spoon
- St. Vincent
- Stan Getz
- Stars Of The Lid
- Steve Reich
- Sufjan Stevens
- Sun Ra
- Talk Talk
- Tammy Wynette
- Terry Riley
- The Flaming Lips
- The Jesus and Mary Chain
- The Knife
- The Mamas and the Papas
- The Mothers of Invention
- The National
- The Postal Service
- Thelonious Monk
- Townes Van Zandt
- Waylon Jennings
- XTC
- Yoko Ono

I was complaining about compilation-friendly artists getting overlooked, but when I skimmed the lowest 50, I noticed a Supremes compilation (perfect example). So maybe I'm wrong about that.

four tops' reach out is #429, amy's back to black is #31 - make it make sense

I actually like the ridiculousness of not segregating things into genres and the tokenism that results. Makes ya ~think~. I mean obv this list is horrible but it's def a glimpse into what happens when consensus is employed and I find it interesting in a individual psychology meets group dynamics experiment sort of way

Top-ranking albums on Pitchfork's Best of the 2010s list that did not make the RS list:

11. Grimes - Art Angels (2015)
16. Joanna Newsom - Have One on Me (2010)
17. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell (2015)
20. DJ Rashad - Double Cup (2013)
21. Beach House - Teen Dream (2010)
22. Destroyer - Kaputt (2011)
25. Jamie xx - In Colour (2015)

eric clapton is in there. layla.

it sucks that ween will never be on one of these.

xp true D&D but the old list had 461 Ocean Boulevard and Slowhand, too

I feel like a lot of the critiques itt aren’t getting to the core rottenness of teh new canon... like amy winehouse being ranked above the albums her album was ripping off

Or bad bunny being better than Otis Redding

The bad bunny thing makes me feel like I was really right abt the sketchiness of his appeal ... like Future didn’t make the list but Bad Bunny does??? He’s like 2010s rap, but in Spanish, is ranked one over Otis Redding and 2010s rap he is emulating doesn’t make the list at all

80% of these attempts to canonize 2005-present will not age well.

Bad Bunny is like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqKG0HEPoEw

xp are there any contemporaneous decade lists that stick out as getting it roughly right given 20+ years to age?

Interpol is a surprise given the presence of YYYs and Strokes i guess. No Suede despite Blur, Pulp and Oasis, another eyebrow-raiser for the Indie Kids.

Suede has a much lower profile in the U.S. than those other three.

Was just about to say.

The Stone Roses missed the top 10, inexplicably.

no gaz coombes

Suede's profile lower than Pulp's? I just asssumed they were about the same but am prepared to believe otherwise. Poor old Suede.

Suede tried so damn hard to break here, but I think their timing was just a little off in terms of coming through, not helped by how Sony handled them -- the big 1993 push made them counterintuitive for alt radio, the big reattempt in 97 after Coming Up was a massive UK smash in 1996 was choppy.

ultimately it seems like critiquing lists is like trying to think of ways to tweak U.S. foreign policy and not recognizing the whole enterprise is rotten

lists are bad

50 Best '50 Best Albums of All Time' Lists of All Time

50 Best '50 Best "50 Best Albums of All Time" Lists of all Time' Lists of All Time

It's like the human centipede of music criticism.

Music criticism is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its 50 Best Albums of All Time lists and whose circumference is inaccessible.

who is "Suede"? are you guys talking about The London Suede?

xp are there any contemporaneous decade lists that stick out as getting it roughly right given 20+ years to age?

there's no perfect "end of decade" canon but the widely read 80s and 90s ones were not this bad.

xpost Yes

So named because there were literally dozens of Suedes popping up all over England at the time (the Bristol Suede were my personal favorite).

I've sat with this for a day. I honestly think picking apart individual choices and rankings is not seeing the forest for the trees.

The 2003 and 2012 lists were deeply sexist and deeply racist, but WERE attempts at canon building and path-lighting. The 2020 list corrects a lot of those mistakes, but is more like an open-tent free-for-all.

RS has sacrificed some amount of "editorial intent" to basically show "the zeitgeist." It's one you could already see in Pitchfork, the NPR list and RYM. Whether you think that's good or bad is up to you, but it's certainly DIFFERENT than how these things were

I think we can all agree that was good and smart and a long time coming to say "maybe we don't need EIGHT Springsteen albums and four Smiths albums on here and all this Mott the Fucking Hoople if it means we can include more rap and R&B and women. But actively deleting entire catalogs from the canon for modern poptimism really does nothing but create a mirror to the internet.

Like taking off the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music – an absolute indisputable bedrock exercise for American music! – to make room for Shania Twain and Jason Isbell does no one any favors. You're no longer teaching a canon and a history, you're repeating Twitter opinions. It's like replacing the Sight and Sound list with imdb.

It's poptimism, for sure. And people like what they like. But poptimism means actively deleting Professor Longhair, Jackie Wilson, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker, the Drifters and Albert King from your canon to make room for Kid Cudi and Tame Impala.

In a sense it’s the most accurate version they’ve ever published, but you lose a lot with that transition

I don't think dropping older stuff in favor of newer stuff is necessarily "poptimism," it's just an acknowledgement that if you repeat this exercise every 8-9 years and the list doesn't change, why bother?

if you repeat this exercise every 8-9 years and the list doesn't change, why bother?

Well, I mean, since you asked ...

I don't love the list, but I do think it's cool that they're including stuff from as recently as 2019. I also don't think anyone needs to be told by a RS list to listen to the Harry Smith anthology.

i also don't think anyone needs to be told by a RS to listen to Harry Styles

harry styles > harry smith, it's science

"Like taking off the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music – an absolute indisputable bedrock exercise for American music! – to make room for Shania Twain and Jason Isbell does no one any favors. You're no longer teaching a canon and a history, you're repeating Twitter opinions."

Is this how poptimism would operate in a list like this?