"What's Going On" in first place? Yeah, I don't see it. It's good, but it wasn't THAT good even when it came out. Whereas Sgt Pepper was heraled and recognized as such from day one -- and for the next decades. And number 3 is Joni Mitchel's Blue?
This is more about pandering to 2020 ideologies and taste than about a somewhat objective album ranking.
Is there such a thing as an objective album ranking? Especially when you consider the shifting landscape of music over time. Actually forget the shifting landscape of music, consider the shifting landscape of people - theres been significant generational change since 2003, doesn't it make sense that albums move up and down the ranking as their relevance increases or decreases? It doesn't surprise me at all that Marvin Gaye would have gone up the ranking.
edit: I think it's also worth asking the question of what role race played in the degree to which an artist or group was heralded "at the time".
>Is there such a thing as an objective album ranking?
No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".
>Actually forget the shifting landscape of music, consider the shifting landscape of people - theres been significant generational change since 2003, doesn't it make sense that albums move up and down the ranking as their relevance increases or decreases?
Not when it hasn't change that much for 3 decades prior...
>It doesn't surprise me at all that Marvin Gaye would have gone up the ranking.
As if Marvin Gaye represents some new taste/genre? It's as old or older as a lot of the stuff it went above in ranking.
And it's not like 2020 sensibilities are somehow closer to Joni Mitchel's Blue suddenly over, say, Velvet Underground (which, iirc, got dropped in ranking).
> No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".
Is there? Can you expand on the methodology? All the somewhat objective ranking methodologies I can think of rely on data sources such as top-sellers lists, which would result in not a ranking of best albums but rather of highest selling ones. "Best" is inherently subjective in my estimation. About the best you can do for that is figure out which albums the largest number of people would consider best (but now you have absolutely massive familiarity and sampling biases to contend with).
I'm ok with the regular "cricic makes an assesment" methodology for that. Just needs critics that know their stuff (e.g. not just marketers and shallow dabblers) and who don't just pander to some fashion du jour when making a list in spite of their actual prefereneces thinking that this will make their list more sellable/controversial (and thus generating views)/etc.
Which I think was lacking here. I don't believe those are the actual tastes of those critics, them just wanting to appear like that...
You're making a subjective judgment here on the quality of these critics though. I mean it's Rolling Stone, the biggest music magazine of all time. These lists come out roughly once a decade, so a lot of consideration is going into them.
Just because you disagree with the ranking doesn't mean that they don't know their stuff or weren't rigorous about it. If you really don't like this list, show me a better one, and I'll show you a list whose editors just happen to agree with your tastes more than the editors of the Rolling Stone list does.
Rolling Stone has significantly larger worldwide circulation than all of those magazines (in some cases by an order of magnitude or more). In addition, some of the magazines you listed no longer exist, whereas Rolling Stone still does. E.g. NME ended its print publication in 2018 and Melody Maker ceased entirely in 2000.
You got any other examples of magazines you think are bigger/more relevant than Rolling Stone? Because none of these fit the bill.
>Rolling Stone has significantly larger worldwide circulation than all of those magazines (in some cases by an order of magnitude or more). In addition, some of the magazines you listed no longer exist, whereas Rolling Stone still does.
The RS is just something read by aging boomers. It hasn't been relevant since the 70s. And even then, after an initial period, it was for the politics/culture/gossip content, not the music.
The circulation is not really relevant. If you follow the music world, press, interviews, behind the scenes, biographies, etc., RS has never been influencial for actual musicians/execs/fans/etc. The other magazines mentioned, have.
NME, Melody Maker were far more relevant in the 1980-1995 period (yeah, that's UK, but UK had an unproportionate influence in US music as well. Not just in punk, post punk, new wave, and electronic music, which it close to dominated, but back to the Beatles, Stones, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Who, and so on (all British).
As for something actually influential for post-2000, that would be something like Pitchfork.
If you are saying beauty has some degree of objectivity because we share some common genetics that predisposes us to develop similarly, I understand what you're getting at, but it's still completely subjective.
Not quite what I'm saying. Beauty and goodness (being fundamentally identical) are attributes of objective reality. Subjectivity is the confusion of our limitations for the eternal truths of the universe. I hope this makes my position more clear.
I wouldn't say that I agree. I don't think a delusion of any sort is produced. If something is beautiful (which is objective), saying "it is ugly" does not make you ignorant so much as it makes you simply incorrect. Calling beauty ugly is equivalent to saying "truth is false", which i would argue is a "problematic" view to hold.
Can you make this more concrete for me? What are the concrete levels of objectivity as applied to the judgment of quality of musical albums? The thing about objectivity is you can define what you're talking about very precisely, i.e. "This angle on this triangle is 72 degrees" is an objective statement (subject only to measurement error). I'd love to see some similar statements about how we can make objective statements on the beauty or quality of music.
Sure. I replied to another comment with a longer explanation of the definition of beauty, i suggest you check it out and give me your thoughts.
to be brief, beauty is a transcendental. thus, it exists independently of the individual, and further, exists independently of the material universe. thus, a claim like "this angle is 72 degrees" does not have an analog in metaphysical space because the object does not exist in an empirically measurable space. think of it this way: can you measure beauty, truth, or goodness with calipers? the notion is ridiculous because these ideas exist in metaphysical space, not in a material space. the definition of beauty converges on the conditions of integrity, harmony, and clarity. Does the music have integrity? Is it complete and whole? Or is it incomplete? Is the harmonious (think about this in terms past musical theory...)? Is it proportional? Does it exhibit symmetry (imo this is not limiting)? Or does it sew discord and disharmony? Is it asymmetric and poorly proportioned? Is it clear? Is processing fluency (ease to which information is processed) high?
A more interesting question to ask is: is this music in accordance with natural/divine law?
So, you can get an objective statement on beauty by understanding beauty as true, good, and virtuous. It is objectively complete, harmonious, and clear. It is the ideal to which art strives. Therefore, when something is in accordance with the nature of beauty, we can say objectively it is beautiful. We can make an antithetical statement to this if something (say the music) is in discord with the nature of beauty.
This is an interesting point of view that I hadn't considered before. Thank you for making this argument. How do you square your ideas with musical genres like dubstep, likely not the best example but the one that springs to mind, that lack some or all of these features and are still beloved by a subset of the population?
Would the variance in taste not imply that beauty itself is subjective?
Thanks for the kind response. I would say that variance in taste or popularity does not imply beauty at all. Something can be popular but not beautiful. Just because something is popular does not make it beautiful. People liking lots of different things does not imply that all these things are beautiful or that beauty is subjective, relative or meaningless.
> No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".
I wouldn't disagree with that, I'm sure all of the various versions of this list by RS are "somewhat objective"
> Not when it hasn't change that much for 3 decades prior...
That's an interesting point - but look at the last decade: western society has been going through some turmoil, change is happening faster in some areas
> As if Marvin Gaye represents some new taste/genre? It's as old or older as a lot of the stuff it went above in ranking.
>
> And it's not like 2020 sensibilities are somehow closer to Joni Mitchel's Blue suddenly over, say, Velvet Underground (which, iirc, got dropped in ranking).
I think Marvin Gaye is more relevant to modern tastes (and therefore universal tastes) than the Beatles, for example. But yes, that doesn't explain all, or even most, of the shift in the rankings.
>No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".
What objective criteria do you think should be used to do the ranking? Number of chord progressions used? Variety of instruments on the album? Lingual diversity? Or maybe the inverse of one of these criteria would be better? Point being, even choosing an evaluation criteria is subjective.
The only semi-objective criteria I can think of would be the number of other albums/musicians it influenced - but this is basically a meta-ranking.
Aside, for the record, I wouldn't have Sgt Pepper anywhere near my top ten "greatest albums", but What's Goin On and Pet Sounds can stay.
A good critic does a subjective assessment, but also understands things like the place of a work within the larger history of the medium, it's relative importance, how influential it has been, several skills involved (not necessarily technical "playing" skill - skills in e.g. emotional resonanse or expression or production, etc are good to judge too), and so on.
And whetever the fashion of 2010-2020, they wouldn't put "Let's Get In On" as the #1 in a 500 Greatest Albums of all time list.
This looks more like a too-little-too-late "let's have RS show some hypocritical allegiance with the black movement and the whole hoopla in 2020" calculated ranking, than actual consideration of the relative merits of the work.
Beauty is the canonical example of a subjective criterion. There's even a well-known phrase about this you've probably heard: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", a phrase so old and time-tested that it predates Christianity by several centuries.
It's hard to even make sense of what you're saying because you're using words in exactly the opposite manner that everyone else uses them and thus only offering up contradictions, which are by definition already false.
I disagree. Beauty is a transcendental attribute of being. As such, it is not contingent upon cultural diversity, religious doctrine, or personal ideology, but is an objective property of all that exists.
For one thing, it captured a place/era almost perfectly (as agreed by tons of people in that place/era - including fellow musicians).
Second, it has the height of maturity of what was considered the most important band of all time (and close to such as seen by both the critics and commercial success).
Third, it unarguably has considerable skill in several areas (melody, harmony, orchestration, playing, etc).
Fourth, it was largely influencial.
Fifth, most experts (critics, rock musicians, etc) agreed so for half a century.
Those things are enough to call it beautiful in mind book.
Just because we can't measure something (e.g. beauty here) with some technical instrument doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or people can't agree on it.
i was going for an explanation of how art and aesthetics are not purely subjective. and how one could arrive at the statement "semi-objective ranking". so im not arguing "Sgt. Pepper is beautiful" im arguing "there is objectivity in art therefore some art is better than other art" thus implying some form of objective "ranking". nonetheless, ill try to answer what makes something (in this case music) beautiful. there are many different explanations that converge on similar concepts/ideas.
in many traditions, ranging from Chinese philosophy to the ancient Greeks, beauty is associated with goodness, virtue, and truth. particularly of the Greeks, there was an emphasis on its relation to mathematics, namely proportion and symmetry. aesthetic considerations like symmetry/asymmetry, simplicity/complexity are utilized in mathematics, physics and cosmology to define truth (or lack thereof).
the Thomistic view is that:
A) beauty is a transcendental (a Platonic view)
and B)that there are 3 conditions:
1. integritas (wholeness, integrity, perfection)
2. consonatia (harmony and proportion)
3. claritas (radiance/clarity that makes apparent the form to the mind, analogous to processing fluency)
The definition of beauty thus converges on the idea that: something is beautiful when it is harmonious, complete, and clear. something beautiful is virtuous, good and true. you could also argue this as "in accordance with natural order" as the natural order is complete, clear, and harmonious (and thus beautiful). you could go further with this idea and argue that beauty is "of God" or "in accordance with God" or "in accordance with the Logos". but that is a different argument for a different time.
art is the field of human interest whose ideal is beauty. therefore, it follows that beautiful art is complete (has integrity, wholeness), is harmonious (perhaps in accordance with natural world i.e. proportions such as golden ratio, etc. this is not limiting), and is clear (the form is readily made apparent to the mind, i.e. high processing fluency, the information is easily processed)
Does Sgt. Pepper fit this criteria? Is it beautiful?
Have you listened to Sgt Pepper recently? Certainly great in its time and groundbreaking, but musically it's not aged that well and its songs are not particularly relevant. I say this has a huge Beatles fan who can sing just about every song. What's Going On both is both great musically and has remained completely relevant - its passed the test of time far better.
Pet Sounds is also the more important of the two seminal rock albums, has aged better, and is actually the best Beach Boys album, as opposed to Sgt. Peppers, which isn't the Beatles best.
Agree that Pet Sounds was very influential especially in music production, and has some great tracks. To my ears though it sounds incredibly dated, like a time capsule of sappy 60s teenage pop or music you'd hear on a TV show from the 60s-70s. There's something about the Beach Boys - especially their vocals - that fail to transcend that era.
I guess the test for me is what the listening experience is like. Certain musical sounds / conventions / lyrics tend to be rooted in their era, like Beach Boys 'ba- ba ba ba ba-', falsetto harmonies, instruments & production method, etc. Altogether they're pretty distracting make it harder to enjoy the many good parts.
Has aged better? Most don't listen to Sgt. Peppers today, but tons still listen to the Beatles, including younger audiences. How many comparatively listen to the Pet Sounds or the Beach Boys?
And how "not dated" it is? It's chock full of late-60s pop sounds and harmonies, which is even more dated than the everything goes/psychedelia/world influences of Sgt. Pepper.
The Pet Sounds is mostly something hipsters started to mention around 2000 or so as better than Sergent Pepper to appear "edgier" and "more informed" than those giving the conventional answer.
The question isn't whether the Beatles or the Beach Boys have aged better. Obviously, the Beatles have. But Pet Sounds has aged better than Sgt. Pepper's, was more influential (it's part of the reason there is a Sgt. Pepper's), and its songs have aged better. Apart from "Lovely Rita", is there are song on Sgt. Pepper's that you'd go back to deliberately today? "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "God Only Knows", "I Know There's An Answer", and even "Sloop John B" --- timeless.
Also, "Sloop John B" is the song that runs through my head every time I think about having left a startup.
If the question is, what's the better band? The answer is obvious: the Beatles are better than the Beach Boys. And I'd listen to Revolver before I'd listen to either of the two albums we're arguing about. But between those two albums? It has to be Pet Sounds.
It's not remotely a random collection though, it's a ranking of the albums actually considered "the best" by the people compiling the list. So yes, while saying "best" isn't objective, it's still completely different from "random". A "best" list still has lots of uses for lots of people (even if not for you), whereas "random" doesn't.
To be more sympathetic, perhaps this is more representative of 2020's music critics' demographic shifts, evaluation of pop music history, and changes in the way music is presented to listeners?
Keep in mind that voters are likely to overweight the music they were exposed to as teenagers and young adults (and the influences of that music), and that in the last 40 years pop music has become much less racially segregated than it was in the 30s-70s.
In the time since the 2003 edition, there's been a full generation of turnover; the largely white, rock-oriented baby boomers who ran and were the target audience of Rolling Stone from its founding have largely retired, to be replaced by millennials who, whether or not they are more diverse, had more exposure as teenagers to music by black people that was once relegated to the R&B charts.
To use the albums you listed (which, conveniently, came out within 5 years of each other), of course a reduction in rock's mindshare among critics is going to hurt Sgt Pepper the most. Looking at the Hot 100 today [0] (9-26-2020), and ignoring the electronic music whose forebears haven't had long enough to filter into cultural influence, I see a lot of confessional singer-songwriters and a lot of R&B.
TL;DR: Baby Boomers have lost influence at Rolling Stone in the last 20 years, so the rankings have shifted to meet the tastes and influences of a generation of music critics that were exposed to a lot more music by black people as teenagers.
> a generation of music critics that were exposed to a lot more music by black people as teenagers.
unlike those who grew up with blues, jazz, r&b, rock (and roll), gospel, doo-wop, calypso, soul, motown, reggae, disco, rap, club/dance, techno, pop, hip hop, etc.
I'm not saying those genres didn't exist, I'm saying that when the baby boomers were growing up, music was MUCH more segregated than it is now. White people in white areas were marketed music for white people, and v.v. for black people.
For a long time, much of the business of Nashville was recording two versions of every song, one by a black person for a black audience, one by a white person.
Hell, both Elvis and the British invasion were underlined by white people covering classic blues songs (and selling it to white audiences who didn't know they were covers).
One of my tinfoil conspiracy theories is that an unstated reason for the PMRC during the 1980s was not necessarily the "filthiness" of domestic music, but also that disco, never having died with the same finality in europe it that had domestically, had non-segregated audiences, and by the eurodance period, even featured integrated acts.
The Revolution (Prince) is an obvious counterexample, but they're post-Boomer (assuming 13 is the age for setting musical taste :-)
Charley Pride is a (the?) counterexample for Nashville.
>TL;DR: Baby Boomers have lost influence at Rolling Stone in the last 20 years
I can bet its readership is mostly boomers and the immediately next generation -- few born after 1980 would give a rat's arse about RS, so we're talking 40+.
Heck, Pitchform itself is mostly for the 30+ crowd nowadays...
Worse, "What's Going On" (a good, but not #1-worthy album, for sure) rose to number one, while the remarkably complex and innovative "Getz/Gilberto", which influence myriad other performers, dropped off the list entirely.
The real reason for the updates to the list are to get clicks. If the list doesn’t change at all, there’s no news. If it’s a completely different list every time, there’s no legitimacy. The list is tweaked by the amount that makes it a news story with a healthy and spirited debate on Twitter.
I’ve been following over the years and this very simple analysis says to me that they’re (RS) are desperately playing catch-up with culture. There’s a LOT of black albums suddenly appearing in the list making the previous lists look like they were compiled by Linnaeus.
Personal opinion: Purple Rain making a jump to slightly below where it should be (below Rumours? Gimme a break) with Sign O The Times nowhere near suggests that this years’ judges still don’t know their shit. Just get Robert Christgau to write it all next time?
It's essentially an impossible project anyway. I tend to agree with the older lists more simply because I don't like newer music and newer genres so much (particularly rap/pop/modern country). And the lack of representation of modern black artists in earlier lists is nothing compared to the overall lack of representation of non-western, non-English-language music in all of these lists generally.
I'm preaching to the choir here but there's no sound methodology for remotely being able to quantify the "best" albums. About the best you could do is use some kind of Metacritic-like review score aggregator, but that will still heavily favor in biases existing at the time in who societally was even allowed to win recognition, e.g. Elvis will rank a lot higher than the black artists whose music he was ripping off.
So it's always just going to come down to the editorial judgment of whatever team is compiling the list, and it seems like the team working on this at Rolling Stone now is likely younger and more diverse than the teams of years past, hence the forays into newer artists and genres.
I agree with pretty much all your points, and for me I use these lists to figure out what I have missed and what I ought to go listen to. Rolling Stone barely has any kind of grasp on the breadth of music. It’s part of an industry that seems to be surviving on reissues and super deluxe box sets and vinyl profit margins, it’s a cultural magazine but more a like dictionary that is way behind the language, or a driver fixated on the rear-view mirror.
or they can just leave it upto the judgement of masses and just rank on album sales(probably streams now).
You are right and that it is hard for any ranking like this to be objective. If I remove my bias for old albums and just look at two of the more accessible new entrants in the list, Taylor Swift's Red and Arctic Monkey's AM. AM was generally rated much better and even I would have personally rated it higher.
There are lots of lists out there by total album sales, as that's a simple methodology, but personally I don't find those lists useful for discovering good music or guiding me towards music I may already know about but haven't listened to in depth. Pretty much everything in at least the top 100 I'll already know about (because it's literally the bestselling music of all time), and to the extent I'm not listening to it already, it's because I know it's not my cup of tea. E.g. I know Michael Jackson has gotta be in the top 3, if not #1, but I also already know exactly my opinion on his music.
So best album lists, while of course not objective, are actually useful to me in a way that sales rankings aren't, so long as I find myself roughly in accordance with the editorial judgment of the list makers. And that is very much the case with the Rolling Stone lists, though not the recent list as much as the previous lists. Meanwhile, I wouldn't get much use out of a ranking of modern country / rap (either best-selling or "best") simply because I tend not to like those genres generally. Rock (particularly classic/hard/blues/prog/experimental) is my favorite genre, and Rolling Stone is more a rock music magazine than anything else, although based on the way these lists are going that seems to be less so over time.
As far as that era of music goes, I would think Franz Ferdinand, Hot Fuss by the Killers, or Silent Alarm by Bloc Party would be more deserving than AM. Why does Arctic Monkey need to have two albums on this list?
Edit: never mind, guess their debut was on the 2012 list and then removed in favor of AM on the latest list.
Which is well and good! The previous published lists aren't going anywhere, and it's quite interesting to see how the rankings are evolving over time. That's giving us more data about changing tastes and Rolling Stone editorial judgment. It's strictly additive. Albums that rank highly on all 3 lists must really be damn good and stand the test of time even as tastes and society changes.
Seriously. If you make a list called "The 500 Greatest Albums OF ALL TIME" and it doesn't include Beethoven's 9th Symphony, or anything before 1960 for that matter, or anything in languages other than English, it's clearly a garbage list. Rolling Stone is and always has been just another money-making echo chamber.
The rebuttal to this is simple: Symphonies aren't albums. Only actual albums are in scope for this list. The modern album as a musical concept is pretty recent and only dates back to the early 1900s at most (so roughly a century old), hence everything on this list is younger than that.
Symphonies are sheet music. An album is a recorded/edited collection of specific performances. There are for sure lists of the best symphonies/classical music of all time if that's what you're interested in, but that's not what a best albums list covers.
Music is art. There is no objective way to rank art. Any ranking of the "greatest" art is inherently just opinion. People reading this list who get worked up about it are just as bad as anyone at Rolling Stone who thinks this list is definitive. Just treat the list as a fun piece of entertainment.
there does exist partial subjectivity in judging the aesthetics or beauty of art, but are not fully subjective in aesthetic judgment. beauty has levels of objectivity. as such, "good" or "beautiful" art exists, and "bad" or "ugly" art exists. ranking could naturally emerge from this distinction.
Art isn’t simply about aesthetics though. There is meaning, metaphor, context, intent, and all sorts of other nebulous characteristics that matter. This means that ugly art can still be good art.
philosophically, aesthetics is the study concerning the nature of beauty and taste. art is the field of human interest with beauty as its transcendental ideal. ugly art cannot be good art as beauty is what is good. metaphor, meaning, context, intent could be factors in the definition of beauty as it pertains to the art's integrity, harmony, and clarity.
>art is the field of human interest with beauty as its transcendental ideal.
I have no idea where this definition is coming from. I don't think many people would agree with it.
The most obvious counterexample that comes to mind is Picasso's Guernica[1]. It is one of the most renowned pieces of art of the 20th century. It is also ugly. There is no color. The characters are distorted in grotesque ways. It is too large, too chaotic, and almost confusing to look at. This is all intentional, it is after all a depiction of a war crime. It is a work of art that isn't meant to please its audience, it is meant to upset and challenge them. Is it bad art?
To your first point, would you argue art is not the field of human interest with beauty as its ideal? Would you argue art strives for ugliness? Art holds ugliness and "badness" as its ideal? I find that to be a very untenable position to hold.
"To produce the beautiful, art must imitate nature. Yet not every imitation of nature, merely because it is an imitation, is therefore beautiful, as realism pretends. The reality imitated by art must also be beautiful, or art must add to it the idea that will give it beauty." Br. Louis de Poissy
"Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally; for they are based upon the same thing, namely, the form; and consequently goodness is praised as beauty." Summa Theologica P1 Q5
Guernica imitates reality as it is a depiction of a war crime. However, just because it is a depiction of reality, it does not mean that it is beautiful. Further, it does not depict the beautiful nor give it an idea that makes it beautiful. As you say, the grotesqueness, horror, and chaos depicted was intentional. You yourself say it is ugly, and I agree. Following Aquinas's thoughts above, if beauty and goodness is fundamentally identical, then it follows that the antithesis of beauty and goodness is also identical. Therefore, since this work of art is the antithesis of beauty (ugliness, as you yourself say), it is also bad art, not to mention that the bad is not praised as the beautiful. I hope this answers your question.
>To your first point, would you argue art is not the field of human interest with beauty as its ideal? Would you argue art strives for ugliness? Art holds ugliness and "badness" as its ideal? I find that to be a very untenable position to hold.
Originally maybe, which may be why your quotes are so old. There are certainly some segments of the art community that put beauty as the ultimate ideal. If you are looking for decorative art to display in your home, you probably want something that is nice to look at. However I believe since the modernist movement the ideal has shifted to be more about eliciting an emotional reaction. Sometimes the emotions that an artists wishes to evoke are negative in which case ugly or upsetting imagery might be more appropriate.
>Therefore, since this work of art is the antithesis of beauty (ugliness, as you yourself say), it is also bad art
I really don't think you are going to get many art critics to agree with a "Guernica is bad, actually" take.
>However I believe since the modernist movement the ideal has shifted to be more about eliciting an emotional reaction
That does not mean that what they produce cannot be ugly or bad.
>I really don't think you are going to get many art critics to agree with a "Guernica is bad, actually" take.
...Okay? Does the existence dissenting opinion mean that I am incorrect? Let's say my claim about Guernica is true. It is indeed ugly and bad art (remember, this is objective). Art critics saying "No, Guernica is beautiful and good" essentially say "the truth is false". So, if Guernica is indeed the antithesis of beauty, it matters little what dissenting art critics say, as they are incorrect in stating that something is not what it actually is.
This book is great coffee table material, but I think it's a bit silly to treat Rolling Stone as any sort of meaningful cultural arbiter in modern times, where:
-niche music blogs exist,
-Spotify's related albums exists,
-Allmusic and Band Camp exist, and (most importantly)
-near-instant communication with your friends, peers, and social groups (who are still my biggest source of new music) exist
There are just so many sources of recommendations that are better suited to aligning to an individual's musical tastes. It really throws into sharp relief what a dinosaur RS is.
On the other hand, we’ve heard about the downsides of bubbles and echo chambers over the past few years — very broad lists like these can be good reminders that quality music (or good ideas of whatever sort) exist outside of the realm of what you and your friends are currently into. Not saying I agree with or care much about the actual rankings here, but it’s a decent list to scroll through and reconsider an artist or band I haven’t given much ear time to before.
All non-white artists who have released an original recording (not a compilation) after Jane Jackson's Rhythm Nation in 1989 have been re-rated up since the 2012 survey. Without exception. Anything originally released in the 1950's rated down.
Really funny/sad that these guys as well as others have historically downplayed rap and other black music, felt the need to placeholder some in recent years, and now have the audacity to act like Kanye's MBDTF is the 17th greatest album of all-time. Meanwhile, Sketches of Spain no longer even ranks in the top 500.
Rolling Stone basically downplayed or ignored everything that wasn't "classic rock" or its close cousins until about 1990. They along with most radio stations really were a tool of the U.S. record industry for years, and didn't pay attention to what was bubbling up on the street and in the clubs until it hit them in the face.
An important moment in pop music history was when the charts switched to actual sales data instead of what record store managers claimed were the top selling albums. This happened in 1991. All of a sudden:
... SoundScan’s data collection returned the power to the people, the genuine fans who buy and listen to music. Twenty-five years ago, the firm started counting how Joe Music Fan was spending his bucks, instead of listening to a record store manager’s easily corrupted opinion.
It turned out that people were buying a lot more metal, hip-hop, country, R&B and alternative rock albums than the old system claimed. The change on the charts was immediate. The change in the industry was almost as fast. Artists that had been relegated to their genre pools (from Nirvana to Ice Cube to Garth Brooks) were now free to swim in the mainstream.
Rolling Stone was forced to change their coverage, although the "best of lists" have always reflected the tastes of their editorial staff, which has been slower to come around.
They stuck to their "dad/classic rock + some 90s/early 00s rock + the three jazz/soul albums everyone knows" until the ad revenue wasn't there and they're trying to overcompensate for it.
some of it feels sincere generational shift. Like Prince and Michael Jackson and Lauryn Hill, but Aretha Franklin which I might consider to be a needed correction does not feel like a generational shift - other than the new generation thinking previous generations undervalued women of color etc. which I guess they also did so, hard for me to judge the sincerity, although there sure is a lot of stuff I think really?
But 2003-2012 hardly changed at all, which makes sense. I wouldn’t expect 8-9 years to drastically change a decades-old album’s quality. How does a 50 year old album suddenly go from 30th to 3rd? Did the content suddenly change?
It looks like they just used a random number generator for 2020. I would love to read the article where they explain what changed about all these albums since 2012.
since I have absolutely no knowledge regarding Joni Mitchell whatsoever I have no idea what could have changed her status, since I know nothing about her it does easily come to mind to suspect it is because people decided to reevaluate women artists, and she came up on top.
However in the case of some people that I do know about other non 'political' motivations might come out, for example Purple Rain jumped 68 spots to come up #8 which strikes me as totally understandable based on these things:
1. Maybe people who choose these things now have more representatives of the 80s-90s generation than before.
2. His killer show at the Super Bowl really made people who had perhaps forgotten about him re-appreciate him.
3. He died recently and that kind of thing also tends to give you a big bump.
#3 reason also applies to Fleetwood Mac since Mick Fleetwood died recently, and there does seem to have been a big critical reevaluation in the past year regarding Rumours (and Fleetwood Mac used to be loathed by the Rock press in the previous generation, so if more of their opponents disappear it just might lead to their re-evaluation)
other examples -
I think critical reevaluations of this sort often have to do with someone reminding the public of themselves, perhaps through death but also perhaps by doing something kick ass, so -
I could go through and find other examples, but yes in a lot of cases I think what?! I just don't understand the reasoning (unless it's let's do a big reevaluation to make things more fair and we really need to put this great album down so we can bring this great album up). And in some cases like Joni Mitchell I really have to just drop it because I'm not well enough informed to really have any idea .
Why is Miles even in this list, though? What universe of music is under consideration? I see Coltrane but not Parker or Brubeck? It does not seem like Kate Bush and Miles Davis can be meaningfully ranked.
In theory it's all music that's under consideration, but in practice it's mostly western, English-language music that has been recorded since the widespread adoption of LP vinyl records starting in the late 1940s (before that recorded music was simply too niche, expensive, and low sound quality). Also, consider that modern music didn't really become what it is today until the Elvis revolution in the late 50s (which is why almost nothing on this list pre-dates the 60s). So Parker and Brubeck are suffering by these metrics.
Seriously, though, what we're seeing is blues, R&B, and blues-based rockers on the way out, and a new generation from the 80s and 90s on the way in, along with some seminal discs from various genres and periods that were under-appreciated for years (Blue, What's Going On, etc.)
It's interesting how the tide has really turned for some artists like U2.
My impression was that the iTunes stunt was not received well because they had already lost popularity. The iTunes stunt didn't help, but I doubt it materially hurt their popularity either.
To me, it exposed U2 to a bunch of people that had never heard of them, in a very bad light. Killing off any chance of new fans. Not that they would have grown in popularity, but that the trail off got much steeper.
I agree. Other things are going on. Rock has long been in decline, the social messages and trends U2 focused on 30-40 years ago have passed, and U2 is no longer breaking new musical ground like they were from the late 70s until Pop.
As a lifelong rock fan, it's really been sad to live through the long slow inexorable decline of the genre. The vast majority of current popular music doesn't appeal to me at all, which simply wasn't true even as recently as the 90s.
I think the machine that leveraged interest and controlled attention for so long through radio, magazine, videos, and festivals has basically failed and young people have turned away from guitar-based rock.
My teenaged kids have no interest in what I listen to, with the possible exception of Queen, and I think that has more to do with the biopic than organic discovery.
I won't argue that young people are turning away from guitar-based rock, but I'm not seeing the connection between that and the changes in the popular music machine. Are you implying that people would not have liked guitar-based rock this entire time if not for said machine? That the natural state of things, which we're now reverting to, is to prefer other types of music? I think it's more just that tastes change and go through cycles, and guitar-based rock is on the decline (and might or might not recover; there are so many dead dead dead musical genres and instruments out there).
Wow, that drop for the Beetles is really surprising. I didn't care much for the Beatles in my teen years in the 90's, but I found a great appreciation for them in my 20's. It seems odd to me that they would stay #1 through 2012 and then abruptly drop. Some of that is likely other works finally being appreciated, but 22 spots?
I'm also kind of wondering how much of this is meme driven. What's Going On is amazing, but it's also immediately recognizable by title and main song chorus, and as such used to evoke the song through that alone to great effect to this day. Does that effect it's ranking here? Should it?
Edit: While a few Beatles albums on this list saw large drops, there are also a couple others that gained ground. Interesting.
I've been a huge Beatles fan since my early 20s, I can recognize and sing almost every song, but somewhere in the last 5 years the relevance of their music just fell off a cliff and I never listen anymore. Some of it is probably life stage related but I can't help but think a lot of it is just that they describe a time that now bears little resemblance to our own. We're entering some dark times, and hearing songs from the golden age of the 60s can create a kind of visceral rejection.
I'm glad to see Abbey Road surpass Sgt Pepper though, past cultural relevance aside it's just a better album to listen to. I'm fully in support of ranking What's Going On much higher, musically its fantastic and its themes are unfortunately still so relevant.
As a ranking criteria I'd say a mix of music & timelessness or relevance are the most important, followed in distant third by how groundbreaking or influential they were in their time, as that feels more like an intellectual footnote than a judgment of the music.
It is interesting to see 'OK Computer' jump so much. Did streaming benefit Radiohead more or just that the dystopian theme really goes well the current times.
Also, amusing to see 'The Piper at the Gate of Dawn' increase in rank while the other Pink Floyd albums have gone down.
I think it's the effect of sometimes only realizing in hindsight that something was truly groundbreaking and trend-setting. I still listen to OK Computer and Kid A frequently; they absolutely hold up. The same isn't true of so much other turn-of-the-millennium music that was massively popular at the time.
The trend-setting part is the real distinction here. You don't know what ends up being a dead end and what ends up being foundational to entire new genres of music until enough time has passed to see how things turned out. You need to wait enough time to see it all shake out. E.g. the first jazz and rock'n'roll musicians (who were all black) were not remotely appreciated in their time as much as they are now.
Yeah, Radiohead has stayed in my playlist from a long time. While they are known for 'Creep' mostly for some reason, the constant experimentation they did with their albums created some really nice records.
Creep is directly the reason that I didn't get into Radiohead until much more recently than when all of their ground-breaking albums were actually coming out. I've never liked that song (it's too whiny for my tastes; maybe it's nascent emo?) and yet it was getting all the airplay on the radio in my teens. So it directly discouraged me from delving deeper into the Radiohead catalog and listening to all those killer songs because that one song didn't gel with me (and of course one song is never a fair representative of an entire artist's oeuvre).
Meanwhile, that station, despite very much being a modern rock station that would blast Nirvana and various other 90s rock bands all day long, nevertheless still had real DJs who would occasionally play older "classic" rock songs like those by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and those songs fucking rocked. So a few good representative songs from them led me down the rabbit hole of listening to those artists' entire catalogs N times over. Funny how Radiohead, which I actually lived through, I wasn't into at the time, but I did immediately appreciate the older classic rock. People like me are exactly the reason that Radiohead is moving up the list over time but classic rock bands aren't; they've already gotten their due for decades now. Now it's Radiohead's turn.
Kid A jumped significantly as well. I think we collectively/culturally embrace electronic and “experimental” (awful term but widely used) music much more now than in the 2000s. Radiohead while popular on the charts were quite ahead of their time.
Liz Phair is #56. There’s a 90s cohort in that voting bunch that is overweighting things. Just goes to show you how the people making judgements can change the landscape and make you feel like you’re the one that’s crazy.
It's funny how these things go. In my circles at the beginning of the 2000s it was somewhat of a mantra that Radiohead's OK Computer or My Bloody Valentine's Loveless were the best albums from the 90s (I would go for the latter). Loveless was somewhat of a rediscovered thing; before that, I imagine that Nirvana's Nevermind was one of the most beloved.
Although I don't think Radiohead are anywhere near as good as a lot of people say they, OK Computer - thematically at least - was very prescient in capturing the feel of a world rapidly accelerating towards the world we have now.
Came from the gym after listening to a compilation with Tool and Iron Maiden on it.I opened the link and searched for the ranking of any Tool album uncertain there is one on it (if it is, it would probably be Lateralus) but being certain that Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast" will be. They weren't. Found 6 Kanye West albums. One of his albums is 30 places above Dark Side of the Moon. (at least Public Enemy is higher). Respectfully, will never open the 500 list again
as a counter example, I dislike Tool and Iron Maiden, and, while I like DSotM, I would rank My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy higher. So the ranking suits my opinions just fine! :)
Yep. I don't actually feel strongly about the chart (or changes to it) at all. Trying to create a definitive "greatest albums" list is an exercise in futility.
The only music rankings I put any stock in are the Top 5's used in High Fidelity. Or anyone who does similar on their own: choose a narrow category ("top 5 side one track ones"), list them, and discuss with a group of people you know - because the prompted discussion is what's really beneficial.
Some of these choices are bizarre in my mind, including the new number 1, but I can take all of it just to see that they moved all of U2 out of the top 100.
Most overrated band of all time.
I personally like Al Green "I'm still in love with you" (306) and Curtis Mayfield's Superfly (76) more than Marvin Gays' What's going on (1)
I think they're overrated but I also like them still. I bet a lot of this is attributed to the fact that it's harder for big labels to monopolize our music choices. Distribution is much flatter. In 10 years I hope this list looks different with more older stuff being rediscovered and new stuff rising to the top.
Yeah, totally subjective at the end of the end of the day.
I think we are in a very new is cool mode right now that reminds me of the early 2000s and I think you will get your wish with old being rediscovered The next 10 years.
Rolling Stone ratings are made by old timers who rate the music they grew up with higher. It is heavily weighted towards 60s, 70s and cultural impact more than musical value. And I am saying this as a (relative) old timer myself. Sure, music is subjective, and that is why I don’t view ratings like that anything more than a curiosity. More targeted listS like “20 Greatest Death Metal albums” are of much greater value and interest to me because they are more relevant to me personally.
Although the whole aim of doing this is completely pointless and impossible (If you try to rank art or start waxing poetical about high or low culture, I'm gone before you've finished the sentence), these rankings just seem bizarre.
I won't bother making a list but I'm quite surprised Queen's News of the world isn't present - 2 songs, played at almost any sporting event for the last 40 years.
To counter the extraordinary volume of bland negativity in this comment thread, I'll add my own bland positivity. I came across the 2003 version of this list in my early teens, and listened to a bunch of the albums here (or at least some of them), and it strongly influenced the development of my musical taste in a way which I think back on very fondly.
Those two differences are a pretty harsh judgement on the wisdom of the crowd (or they should tell you you aren't using an especially culturally diverse crowd).
More sympathetically, Album vs Band seems like a confounding factor... the Beach Boys released some astonishing albums, but their overall standing as a band has to also consider the drivel they released. OTOH, Linkin Park are enormously popular as a band, but (in my memory as an alt-rock obsessed teenager in the 00's) none of their albums really broke the surface (relative to the ludicrous levels of play their singles got).
In my opinion, the first 9 are fine enough, and then it starts going off the rails at #10, heavily favoring modern bands in the current era of music streaming. E.g. Lynyrd Skynyrd isn't even on that list, and Twenty One Pilots ranks significantly higher than Jimi Hendrix?!?!
It is sorted by the number of people who named the artist as one of their favorites.
I also would have expected Jimi Hendrix to be more popular then the Twenty One Pilots. But looking at Google Trends seems to confirm that the Twenty One Pilots have been on top over the last years:
Rolling Stone's list, for all it's flaws, is a comparison of albums not artists. A meaningful comparison of artists isn't possible in the broad sense. It's literally a popularity contest. Stop pimping your website.
Interesting to see on the 'Sorted by Net Shift' tab that a lot of the big risers are hip-hop. Sorted by the rankings in earlier years, these were nowhere to be found.
Well, it’s good to see that net shift. However, the net shift still indicates that they still don’t know what’s good. Kanye and Amy Whinehouse are ranked almost 100 places higher than The Fugees - The Score and Biggy Smalls - Life After Death.
I’m just glad cinema is so international and most of it’s rankings always had diversity internationally that new top lists don’t have to literally over correct in a shallow way to make up for the pure exclusionary judgement making of the past.
I sincerely doubt a Bad Bunny album is part of the best 500 Puerto Rican albums of all time, let alone the world. Most of the albums post 2000 are underwhelming to put it mildly. Great music is still made of course but great music + popularity + influence in the overall cultural landscape is pretty much dead.
Music appreciation is very much tied to its era. I noticed a few days ago that Sibelius wrote 7 (~ romantic) symphonies in 30 years, then none in the next 30 years as Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky et.al. changed the face of music.
When it comes to music,'greatest' is judged in the very long range. In the short range, Webern and Salieri were highly regarded, Bach forgotten. 99% of the 50s-60s-70s 'oldies' are gone from the radio. Radiohead's 28-year-old 'Creep' (foreshadowed by famous 60s Roy Orbison and Left Banke choons) now sounds ... like satire. Today everything on the radio sounds like rap or pap to me.
Isn’t rolling stone a rock magazine? Obviously this is a super subjective list but I would expect a rock magazine to favor classic rock albums. Kinda weird they are moving away from that.
Tool is one of those bands that, despite having a truly massive fan base for decades, never quite gets the accolades it perhaps deserves from the mainstream at large. It's just a little too "weird", as anyone who's seen their music videos or live performances can attest.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, a band having won Grammies doesn't mean much when it comes to whether their albums show on this list. The top several award-winning groups aren't represented on the list at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_records#Most_Gram...
It seems like very odd rankings. Of course, there are a great many bands in the list that I've never even heard of. That doesn't invalidate the list. I just point it out to say that my tastes aren't wide enough to recognize everyone.
It's even very odd for all the bands and albums that I know very well. I would have expected to see Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon much further up the list. I was completely shocked to find that Supertramp's Crime of the Century album is not even on the list! On the other hand, there are very many mediocre albums that made it.
Of the Led Zeppelin albums on the list, I was shocked to see the first album (self-titled) ranked higher than II and Physical Graffiti. That's downright bizarre to me. Rush's Moving Pictures at #379 on latest list and not even present on earlier lists. Gasp! Other bands that I would have expected to see somewhere in the list: Journey, Styx, Bad Company, Foreigner, Boston.
Comparing it to lists of best-selling albums [0], the major artist that isn't even present in the RS list (vs. ones that are but not by their best-selling album, e.g. Santana's Supernatural) is Celine Dion (Falling into You), which record sold 32 million claimed copies. Once you get down to 20-29 million copies you see a lot more best-selling albums without their artists appearing on RS's critical list, from Bon Jovi to Linkin Park to Norah Jones to the Backstreet Boys to the Spice Girls.
Also, film scores (such as The Titanic OST) are not on RS's list.
If you scroll to the bottom you get mostly new-to-2020. Interestingly Alanis Morisettes mega hit album Jagged Little Pill didn’t make it until this year.
It seems like the oldest new entry is Nina Simones With an 1966 album.
Another one that caught my eye was how Radiohead’s “Kid A” has been on all 3 lists and consistently climbing from the bottom, to the middle to the top 100.
I remember when it came out I had actual discussions with classmates as to whether it was music or not (!) and it caused a huge fuzz in all the music magazines.
Listening to it today ... I mean it’s not a bad album, but nothing about it sounds weird or out there. I guess that means they truly pushed popular music.
I always feel it's a shame these kinds of lists are mainly limited to the English-speaking world. I myself have taken a liking to many Thai music (e.g. "luk thung" [0]) and this kind of music would never appear in these Rolling Stone's Greatest Albums lists.
I think it's fine if they're honest about it or their readership/public understand "ok, they don't actually mean the greatest albums EVER from EVERYWHERE". It's essentially impossible to consider every music from everywhere.
You don't have to go all the way to Thai music. Rolling Stone has been _the_ "Anglo Saxon rock music between 1950-1980s is the only music out there" publication till recently. Until the last few years there's been almost no hip hop, almost no electronic music, jazz is relegated to some token pics, etc.
Sure, but those lists exist as well, and are curated by much more qualified people than the Rolling Stones editors.
/block of unsubstantiated opinions/ I don't think Rolling Stones claims to be a full list of all music of all time, nor do I think their editors would claim to be experts in all music. I dare say they hardly claim to be experts. I'd imagine they'd say they were more interested in being entertaining.
/going off the rails a bit/ Now that I think about it, it would honestly be pretty disgusting if they did try to make a list encompassing all of music. Either it's strictly analytical, at which point you're really asking "What's the best selling of all time", or it's saying "our opinion is a proxy for every other opinion". The hubris of that kind of project would outweigh any good it could do.
I don’t know Luk Thung, but when was in Laos they play these really fun guitar + synths bands that are pretty great. On the buses, in the bars and cafes, everywhere.
Very difficult to find any of the music on YouTube though, because Lao script alphabet is so different, same as for Thai, I don’t even know how to type any of the letters.
I'm glad to see albums like The Cure's Disintegration move up, but the Beatles Sgt Peppers clearly needs to be 1 or 2. It's albums that go beyond just being random songs and provide such an influence that deserve to be near the top.
While posterity often sorts things out what a list like this misses is how big, and important, some records were when they came out. U2's Joshua Tree dropped quite a bit but it was an absolute monster when it came out.
For 2020, Rolling Stone decided to elevate many seminal hip-hop and rap LPs, and upvote some alternative rock LPs at the expense of many classic rock albums.
The bias is the critics who make the list aren't dead yet and humans have a tendency to revere music not based on some aesthetic appeal, but the way it reminds them of who they were at the time they first heard that record. So music criticism has a natural tendency to move by age cohort.
Hmm... I honestly cannot perceive this as the "absolute" list of greatest albums, as was stated before every listener formulates their own opinion based on preferred media communication. Furthermore (as was stated), this list does not include any entry from pre-1960 or a country outside of the Anglosphere. Consequently, such a skewed artistic representation does not provide an appropriate framework to evaluate music.The spreadsheet might be interesting to observe/record crude statistical variability among certain artists, yet not a consensus of the greatest albums of "all time".
And of COVID no less, early on in the pandemic, perhaps the most famed person to have died from it yet in the US at the time. The circumstances of his death thus drew a lot more attention to him than would the typical news story of "old musician decades past their prime died of old age today" which would make page 8 in the paper.
...as did Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne. FOW was never an "important" band, but Welcome Interstate Managers is a masterpiece that surely has a place somewhere in the top 500.
Ok (although this isn't reddit yet): Tomorrow Never Knows (Chemical Brothers' breakbeat, just 30 years earlier), A Day in the Life, Helter Skelter, Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey and I Want You (She's So Heavy). What would you draw in your sketchbook?
BTW, I also miss say Hot Rats in this rag, no King Crimson either, but then there's Ege Bamyasi, Kimono My House and Different Class which are favourites of mine and hadn't noticed before.
A lot of Boomer garbage falling off the list, which is good, but this list is obviously cursed if Superunknown isn't even in the top 500.
The math seems a little dodgy. I can't view the formulae but some new-for-2020 albums show up as having fallen into their new positions. For example Little Earthquakes (a great album!) is at position 233 with a change of -233.
Hey, can you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and it's not what this site is for.
This is more about pandering to 2020 ideologies and taste than about a somewhat objective album ranking.