No Link Wray? This list is a sad joke.

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daspyknows

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a lot to be disappointed about in that list...to say the least.....yikes som eof those "top" records I have no interest in whatsoever

More than some.

Way to much Rap and Hip Hop. Dark Side of the Moon 55, Disraeli Gears 170 and nothing else in top 200 from Pink Floyd or Eric Clapton. Really? Beyonce's Lemonade is the 32nd best album of all time and Kanye West having 2 in the top 100 including 17 is ridiculous.

I think it's clear they're going for 'diversity', they've sacrificed a lot of 'white male rock' now. The list has about an equal number of males/females/blacks/whites etc.

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NilsHolgersson

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daspyknows

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a lot to be disappointed about in that list...to say the least.....yikes som eof those "top" records I have no interest in whatsoever

More than some.

Way to much Rap and Hip Hop. Dark Side of the Moon 55, Disraeli Gears 170 and nothing else in top 200 from Pink Floyd or Eric Clapton. Really? Beyonce's Lemonade is the 32nd best album of all time and Kanye West having 2 in the top 100 including 17 is ridiculous.

I think it's clear they're going for 'diversity', they've sacrificed a lot of 'white male rock' now. The list has about an equal number of males/females/blacks/whites etc.

That’s pretty much my take, too; and really do have a liking for some hip-hop.

RollingStone are really trying to move away from their previous preference for white rock-music. I mean, their lists were, in my opinion, getting stale, but perhaps they’ve taken it too far.

I'm sure everyone else is already aware, but I've just noticed that Exile on Main Street is placed at #14.

It isn't my personal favourite, but that's a realistic placing, all the same.

[www.newyorker.com]

The Futility of Rolling Stone’s Best-Albums List

By Sheldon Pearce
October 2, 2020

Pieces of a guitar and microphones on a pink background.
Rolling Stone’s updated list of the five hundred best albums does move away from the stranglehold that boomer rock had over the original list, in 2003—the needle is moving, even if it isn’t yet reflecting the speed and lawlessness of the Internet.Illustration by Aaron Lowell Denton
The canonizing of popular music began in earnest in 1983, when a legendary gatekeeper, the Atlantic Records executive Ahmet Ertegun, convened a cabal of music-industry professionals to create the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The hall was erected with the intent to venerate and deify, and the selections into it reflected the hubris of its creators. “Virtually no mistakes were made,” the Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner said, referring to the choices, when he stepped down as chairman, last year.

In 2003, Wenner and Rolling Stone engaged in a complementary act of canon-building with a list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” a massive undertaking. The list’s flaws were apparent from the beginning. “Predictably,” Edna Gundersen wrote, in USA Today that year, “the list is weighted toward testosterone-fueled vintage rock.” Here was an institution, Rolling Stone, made up primarily of white men, saying that most of the best music ever was made by white men, and leaning on their authority as a counterculture icon to do so. A new Rolling Stone list was revealed last week, with a hundred and fifty-four new entries and some major moves in the rankings. It reflects an admirable attempt by Rolling Stone to evolve with the times and exhibit a more comprehensive consideration of music history. The resulting list was clearly animated by a critical push toward poptimism and an attempt to diversify the critical class.

In a column in the Guardian, from 2018, titled “Bland on Blonde: Why the Old Rock Music Canon Is Finished,” the critic Michael Hann accurately summarized the problems with the current canon: the inherent superiority of rock assumed in the long-standing hierarchy of popular music; the domination of the conversation by white men; and the construction of the canon with albums, a format that many of us still value but which is, quite frankly, obsolete. Hann predicted the rapid fading of the rockist canon and the rise of a new one defined by a more inclusive critical tribunal.

By then, the shift was already taking place. In 2017, NPR started a reclamation project called Turning the Tables, a series that put women and their art at the center of a new canon and, by extension, the history of popular music and culture. “We came to a conclusion that, in 2017, will likely strike no one as a surprise: that the general history of popular music is told through the great works of men, and that without a serious revision of the canon, women will always remain on the margins,” the critic Ann Powers wrote. She later added a statement of purpose: “The point is to offer a view of popular music history with women’s work at the center.” Powers theorized that a foundational canon by women about women—one that wasn’t forced to play by established, patriarchal rules—would focus on the collective and not on a pecking order. She cited the poet and feminist Robin Morgan, who, in “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” from 1970, defined the women’s movement as non-hierarchical, and, therefore, almost antithetical to the ranked list-making process.

This critical uprising continued well into this year, with similar projects. As a supplement to massive best-of tent-pole list packages, fashioned in the Rolling Stone 500’s image, Pitchfork continues its exhaustive examinations of scenes and artists, including career recaps for Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell, and Nina Simone, and introductions to urbano, dancehall, outlaw country, and girl groups. The Zora Music Canon took the Turning the Tables series to its logical conclusion and focussed on Black women. Black Music Reframed, by uDiscover, focussed on letting Black writers contextualize Black music—which is to say, American music. NPR’s celebration of Southern rap sought to bring balance to a largely bicoastal hip-hop discourse. Notably, most of these projects went unranked. It isn’t just that critics are now rethinking what warrants inclusion; they are also rethinking the list itself and who it serves.

Remaking the Rolling Stone 500 in this image required not just adaptation but a bit of soul-searching for the magazine. The publication historically mirrored the sexism of the music scene that it covered, and was restricted by the narrow perspective shared among its mostly white staff. In an oral history of the women behind the transformational Rolling Stone run in the mid-seventies, the copy chief Barbara Downey Landau recalled a sign hanging over the desk of Wenner’s secretary that read “Boys’ Club,” in huge letters. The former associate editor Christine Doudna described it as “a guy’s magazine” with a very male sensibility. The effects of that framework lingered through the release of the 2003 list and beyond.

There is also a persistent perception of Rolling Stone as a stodgy institution standing on hard-line rockist ideals that seems tough for some to shake—it’s the magazine that gives Bruce Springsteen five stars for everything, that championed U2’s invasive iPhone experiment as the best album of 2014, and that will find any excuse to write about the Beatles. (Ten years after writing about why the band broke up, they did it again.) All of those things are true, but the characterization isn’t entirely fair. The Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield has enthusiastically received next-generation stars like the One Direction front man turned rock proxy Harry Styles or the K-pop supergroup BTS. Lil Baby and Bad Bunny were recent cover stars. The magazine’s best album of 2019 was Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next.” Despite these choices, many readers still see Rolling Stone as the standard-bearer for the antiquated “rock” mainstream.

The way forward for Rolling Stone was to consult a wider array of music enthusiasts, in the hope of covering blind spots. The biggest change with the 2020 list is the diversified voting pool—more than three hundred artists, journalists, and industry figures from across genres participated. Two hundred and seventy-three people voted for the original list, but, finally, the demographics of the voters has been expanded. The Alabama Shakes front person Brittany Howard voted. The Cash Money Records executive Ronald (Slim) Williams voted. I voted. From Beyoncé, Alice Bag, and Billie Eilish to Lin-Manuel Miranda, Herbie Hancock, and Gene Simmons, the 2020 list puts greater emphasis on variety. Poptimism is clearly making headway: more rap, more Robyn, more Shakira, more Lady Gaga. Britney Spears’s “Blackout” outranks albums by Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, and Ornette Coleman. But aspirations to fundamentally change the list, and list-making, are mostly thwarted by methodology.

Even with new voters, the list still favors “classic” rock music and older music, though their presence doesn’t feel as overwhelming. The new albums deemed worthy of inclusion are consensus picks that would fall in line with review aggregators such as Metacritic. Because a ballot has only fifty slots, there is a tendency to prioritize music that feels important or influential in some way, even if those value judgments don’t necessarily say anything about quality or taste. It feels like splitting hairs trying to separate “Purple Rain” and “Sign o’ the Times,” but it also feels like overkill voting for them both. I didn’t vote for any Beatles albums because I assumed their contingent had them well covered. I did vote for Joanna Newsom’s “Ys,” to no avail. A more effective balloting strategy would probably be to front-load albums that you want to make the list, regardless of how you might feel about their order or place in history. There is an argument that participants could be voting for different reasons, and with differing intentions; some trying simply to promote music they love, others trying to establish new criteria by which great music is measured.

The list-maker’s focus on naming accepted classics also doesn’t leave much space for thinking about albums that don’t fit neatly into narratives, such as those of undervalued or misunderstood musicians like Patrice Rushen or Mtume, whose canonical doom was sealed by lukewarm contemporary reviews. There isn’t a way to recognize marginal or ephemeral albums that don’t take myth-making so seriously: DJ Drama tapes, DJ Screw mixes, footwork and noise albums, drone metal like Sunn O))), with epic ten-minute songs. A ranked list rewards order and penalizes disruption. As a result, the most heard albums still get upheld for simply being the most heard.

The 2020 list does move away from the stranglehold that boomer rock had over the 2003 list: sixty per cent of the original’s top ten was composed of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and the highest rap album sat at forty-eighth. Now two rap albums released in the past decade rank higher than the original list’s greatest album of all time: the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (now ranked twenty-fourth). But, though some patterns have broken, the new results aren’t exactly a deviation from the norm. Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” is still the highest-ranked album by a woman; it’s just third now, not thirtieth. (It was third on my ballot.) The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” stayed at No. 2 (No. 7 for me), and the new No. 1, Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” was No. 6 before (No. 8 for me). The other albums that moved into the top ten aren’t exactly outliers: Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life,” Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” and Prince and the Revolution’s “Purple Rain,” which topped my ballot. These are some of the best-selling albums of all time. Three of them won Grammys for Album of the Year. All were inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress.

The music that has defined the new millenium—trap music, indie pop, and E.D.M., in particular—is still woefully underrepresented, and the mixtape format, which shaped the musical output of much of the past two decades, is all but ignored. Jazz and R. &. B albums that weren’t already given a prestige distinction are rare. There are only eight electronic albums, and four of them are by Daft Punk and Massive Attack. It’s worth noting that seven of the top ten albums on the Turning the Tables list were the seven highest-ranked albums by women in the Rolling Stone 500, which implies both an inclusive push and a continued homogeneity among lists. The needle is moving, but incrementally, and it isn’t yet reflecting the speed and lawlessness of the Internet.

It feels futile to predict the future, but it’s hard to imagine that another decade won’t bring an even more dramatic shift in thinking. Perhaps Drake and Taylor Swift will rise as Fleetwood Mac did, an über-popular act reborn amid retrospective critical appraisal. Prolific and beloved rap stars like Future and Young Thug could surge into contention. Maybe we will even see greater inclusion for non-English-language pop from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. If anything, the new Rolling Stone 500 makes a strong case against any sort of definitive historical accounting even being possible. After all, the open secret is that any canon requires the tacit recognition and participation of its public. It only has as much power and influence as the next generation will allow.