Rockissue

Two lists of the greatest albums in the history of popular music published in 2024 generated at least a modicum of the "viral" reaction their creators presumably, obviously hoped for. The first comes from Apple, a computer company that once had an out-sized influence upon the music trade due to its digital music software, circa 2006, serving as confirmation that the post-Compact Disc era, which became the streaming era, had begun. In fact, the list is credited to Apple's streaming service, and is clearly an attempt to help restore the parent company's "disruptive" status in the music world by including contemporary favorites by the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and even former presidential hopeful Kanye West alongside Boomer favorites by the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and other elderly/ dead persons. You know how that shtick goes: mythical "kids" and their magical "social media" habits, often spoken of with bated breath.

Overall, though, Apple's number crunchers know that the Boomers have money—even some members of Generation X do—and, besides, plenty people of any age enjoy music that our gross stereotypes do not assign to them. Their list, then, does not go too far in elevating present-day pop starts, instead attempts a big tent. The result is what you are likely to get when you do that: pace Nicholas Carr, "the Shallows" – "cover your ass" – fakery. Beyond a random Nina Simone album, two whole albums from "Electronica" artists (Daft Punk and Burial, don your tuxedos), and the nice surprise of Björk's Homogenic, the list is nameless, faceless: the aforesaid contemporary favorites plus a selection of albums commonly found in past lists from periodicals like Rolling Stone, Q, and New Musical Express. In short, like so much else about whatever passes as mainstream these days, it could just as well been created by the "large language model" program that Apple is selling.

Paste's list, on the other hand, being longer and including fewer high sellers, engages more with the past—in its pointed elevation of non-European and non-North American artists to the upper echelon, even suggests emendations to the Rock record—making its similar embrace of Twenty-First Century popsters a bolder move. The difference between the two can perhaps best be described as such: Imagine two co-workers. You have regular conversations when you run into one of them: there is uncertainty about the boundaries involved, conversational fits-and-starts, awkwardness. With the other, a person in a supervisory position, in a department on another floor or similarly-distant part of the building, the interactions, not only rare, are also terse, direct: small talk that gets to the point quickly—for heaven's sake, no dead air, no space in which breaks from routine could take place. The latter person is the Apple list, the former the Paste. You like the former, but he is still a co-worker; your interests do not quite match, you fail to understand the context that would explain "where he's coming from." If you are like me, and have gone off on so many weird cultural and intellectual tangents through the course of several decades of deep listening, close reading (you hope it's deep and close), the ideal of a shared social and cultural background with which meaningful conversations can take place increasingly seems impossible.

Is this all a belabored way of saying: Paste is no longer an actual magazine, as it once was (based in Atlanta) whose writers and their purpose can be discerned with any semblance of clarity? That it is now just another website and the list, despite its length (300 albums) and breadth, is barely more than click bait, sending us off another one of those tangents, maybe a new one, but more likely an old one that we are re-reminded of again? For example, I am reminded of how rarely I have listened to my nice C. D. copy of Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club. Or I ask myself if maybe Aretha Franklin's Lady Soul really is better than I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. And, for the millionth time wonder why people love the Replacements so much—I like them too, but their appeal comes via their progression—the development out of Hardcore Punk that was the central drama of non-mainstream/ non-M. T. V. American Rock in the Eighties—heard throughout their records, 1981-1987, not any particular one, especially given their ramshackle methods. Meanwhile, some of the list's top spots are taken by albums that are great but too long (OutKast's Stankonia, the Cure's Disintegration), a mediocre album by a group that "the Internet" discovered (Fishmans), a typical album from a terrible singer (Janet Jackson's Velvet Rope), and other signs of idiosyncracy (apparently someone there likes Fiona Apple).

But the list also ventures into artificial-intelligence territory, as several very-very-important albums lately often placing high in these "best ever" lists make their appearance, notably the Beatles' Abbey Road, Prince's Sign "O" the Times, the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, and Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life. These albums, I suggest immodestly, are the kind that we feel compelled to say are great, that we hope are the artist's best (because wouldn't it be awesome if they were?), nevermind that Revolver, Purple Rain, Sticky Fingers, and Talking Book, respectively, make for better singular listening experiences. If you honestly think that Abbey Road is the best Beatles album, you are in for a rough ride, perpetually seeking out great art approved by the received wisdom of your time. Thirty years ago, everyone and his aging Boomer uncle said that the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the greatest thing since... bread or the moon or love or something. Now they tell us that Abbey Road holds this exalted place, with its patched-together song suite with “White Album” leftovers, part of which is ‘Sun King’ (‘Here comes the sun king’) coming soon after ‘Here Comes the Sun’. Genius! Maybe a song about the moon instead?

Either way, differences of opinion are not reasons to suggest the unworthiness of a project. What does make me question the worthiness of these list-projects, what is incredibly galling about them, is the failure of the listmakers to conceptualize and create them in a way that actually corresponds to the history the lists seem to want to convey. For example, in Paste's list, you have (again) Nina Simone (very hip these days), Pharoah Sanders, Charles Mingus, Billie Holiday, Herbie Hancock, Eric Dolphy, Miles Davis, John and Alice Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman. Impressive, right? Jazz is included? Yes, but no, not in any meaningful way. There is no Duke Ellington, no Thelonious Monk, no Ella Fitzgerald, no Count Basie. You've got one modern Classical/ Minimal/ experimental album, Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air, for a different kind of tokenism. Why do this?

And yet tokenism persistently appears. Usually a few Jazz albums, by John Coltrane and Miles Davis (as seen in Apple's list or in New Musical Express's 1993 list)—maybe Frank Sintra (as in Rolling Stone's 2012 list), maybe one more (Coleman is in the same Rolling Stone list)—are thrown in. (New Musical Express ditched this Jazz tokenism for their 2003 list, replacing it with some Jamaican tokenism by including the Congos, then returned to Jazz tokenism in 2013 by including Davis again.) In short, do not make a list of the greatest albums ever if you are not going to cover Jazz or early Blues/ Rhythm and Blues thoroughly. A hint: if neither Bessie Smith nor Louis Jordan are present, you have failed. Or if they are excluded because the list is strictly limited to albums of original material, then perhaps a brief note is needed to explain that artists from a significant chunk of recent history are not represented.

Even with regard to the history of modern popular music that these lists can be said to cover or represent, the act of ranking albums by quality, from worst to first, starts the process of turning them into commercial products that happen to be usually albums. Worse still, commercial products that are decontextualized, existing only for the fleeting amusement of tourists-listeners denied any deeper understanding of the artists who made the album and whatever scene or culture that made those artists who they are. Indeed, commercial products... strictly speaking, that is what they are before reviewers get to them; we do not need reviewers' help keeping them in that social setting.

To be fair, before "music got free," a consumer-oriented guide to new and recent releases was valuable. But not anymore (such books now of value mostly as primary sources telling us how certain music was received when first released). What the listener needs know is well-organized information, presented well, at online databases (which he doesn't get). Either way, with those old consumers' guides, reviewers moved into critical and historicizing territory when figuring out something of critical import to write, regardless of how much they tried to consider their readers' budgets. Or reviewers always were in that territory, and only got involved in listmaking by being asked to participate a collective effort like the Village Voice's old Pazz and Jop poll. Many reviewers never wanted to give numercial scores or letter grades to albums, but were compelled to do so by editors—or, in some cases, the editors had alrealdy decided upon a score and imposed on the review, regardless of its content. The deluge of "listicle" "content" would seem to indicate that the proverbial listener is still desperate for this kind of simplistic (A, B, C, 1, 2, 3) guidance, as if clicking on an album that he eventually decides is no good somehow costs him something other than a few minutes of his time. Yet the deluge persists, has even led to an retrospective articles and books about individual years, including "best of" lists; for example, from none other than Paste magazine, who has published at least 20 retrospective annual lists. [See footnote for links to these lists.] What next? Will surviving Pazz and Jop participants (most of them still not listening to any Jazz music) continue to take polls for each year, over and over, until Silicon Valley tells them to stop?

An approach more mature and meaningful than ranking is necessary. If listmakers would only arrange the albums chronologically, they would at least be on the right path. Tom Moon offers a list in the form of a proper reference book, with each entry defined by genre or era, providing recommendations of other recordings, and emphasizing the relationship among the entries, in his 2008 book 1,000 Recordings to Hear before You Die. Unfortunately, he arranges the recordings alphabetically instead of a topical or chronological approach that would have been more helpful for readers. Less ambitious, but focusing on the question of influence, is Chris Smith's 101 Albums that Changed Popular Music (arranged chronologically). Though vastly superior to the lists published by magazines, these books are still reference books that attempt to be histories and music criticism at the same time, a task of stupdenous difficulty. Unsurprisingly, other books, like magazine lists, are collective efforts and have produced mixed results in terms of historical analysis and criticism. The major examples here are 1001 Albums You Must Hear before You Die, part of a shlocky series of books all with the same basic title not to be confused with Moon's. And All Time Top 1000 Albums, which involved the votes of a larger number of people, organized by Colin Larkin, already the editor of the remarkable Encyclopedia of Popular Music and its numerous off-shoots.

Like most popular-music lists, the Apple and Paste lists are limited to albums, attesting to the continued dominance in popular-music discourse of the album as compared to individual songs. In fact, the Apple and Paste lists turn away from trend in recent years toward lists of albums and songs accompanying each other, as seen from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. [See yet another note at the end of this article for more about these song lists.] Yet despite the album's dominance, critics and fans alike do not seem any more willing to address the difficult issue of how to talk about a form of art that comes to us in the form of collections wherein both the collection itself and its constituent parts are defined as art objects. In the visual arts, you view individual works as part of exhibitions, either of the artist in question or defined by a broader theme; the works of art are not always and forever considered to be part of a larger selection of works that never changes in content; the exhibitions, accompanying books, and so on remain distinct entities.

In literature, granted, sometimes stories and essays do become strongly associated with, or were originally and remain, part of a collection put together by the writer. Poems, to a greater extent, are like songs—appropriately enough!—in the variety of ways they are presented/ published. Some poems are published on their own in periodicals, then made part of a book of selected or collected poems by the author, much like songs initially might be available only as singles or on various-artists compilations. They are more likely, though, published as part of a collection by the author, that collection given a name, an identity, of its own, like a music album is. Do commentators on poetry address the difficult logistics of interpreting a book of poems, or merely recommending it, when they are actually only thinking of a few poems in the book? Do they ignore one poem that does not seem to belong in the book, or is worse than the other poems?

In collections of poems, stories, and essays, the reader can more quickly move between the different pieces than the listener can with records that require greater handling themselves as well as usage of playback systems; though, now, with screen interfaces, this difference has become less pronounced. Undoubtedly in the past the listener was more likely to want an album that was good all the way through simply for practical reasons: getting up to change a record takes effort and one would rather not do so, instead relax through an entire side of an L. P. or cassette or an entire C. D. The reader of this essay may be asking, why does this person care so much about consistency within an album? We all know that any given listener is likely to find fault with a song or two on an album, or merely like some songs more than others. Big deal, right? Just skip the song. In my case, though, I love to listen to an album on C. D. on headphones while laying down. And I want to to listen to the whole album, uninterrupted. A few songs that do not match the tone or quality of the rest of an album make for something like a tragedy; this is why I write about the "long-album-itis" beginning in the late Eighties.

Regardless of one's personal listening preferences, the dominance of the album, relative to the single, has been a problem for understanding Rock history perhaps as far back as the Seventies, when the album truly took over. An interpretation of the history of popular music with songs as the central artifacts proves to be a difficult task. Writing in 1989, Dave Marsh, in the Introduction to his book The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made asserts: "Singles are the essence of rock and roll. They occupy the center of all the pop music that came after it. They're the stuff of our everyday memories. Everybody who listens with half an ear must know this. But nobody writes as if it were true. After 1970, when Charlie Gillett published his singles-based The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock & Roll, the first serious history of the music that descended from rhythm and blues, the story has always been told in terms of albums." Marsh does not speak with any authority about the Punk-Indie era of Rock, in which singles and E. P.s experienced a revival of sorts, especially in straight-ahead Punk and Hardcore. But for Rock as his American mainstream-Rolling Stone cohort define it, his assessment rings true. He adds, "If most singles are contained within albums, the singles are also the tracks that most often provide the definitive moments on those LPs. [...] However a record is made to be heard, it's inevitably recorded track-by-track, individual songs crafted one at a time. [...] Two decades after Sgt. Pepper's, a performer like Frank Zappa who creates compositions that extend over an entire side of an LP stands out as a creative anomaly."

There is plenty of debate to be had—and research to be done—addressing Marsh's argument in favor of singles' relevance, and how exactly listeners perceive and consume popular music. Suffice to say for now, that practically speaking listeners know how to handle the convoluted verbiage that comes when songs are a topic of conversation but those songs are primarily discoverable via albums, to the extent that is still the case. Usually the contour of the conversation is determined by which kind of artist is being discussed. For plenty of artists, we are comfortable talking about them in terms of albums, then perhaps getting more specific and talking about the individual tracks on those albums. The online listening environment has changed this dynamic, making us all more likely to jump straight to talking about a song instead of an album. You can type in a song name, for example “Cream,” and the artist name, Prince, and get what you want. But when you select it, you are still likely taken to the album on which the song originally appeared.

Marsh's perspective is especially spot-on with regard to Rhythm and Blues/ Rock music before 1965, and certain other areas of pop music in which albums of previously-unreleased material were rarely or never important, such as House and Techno especially tailored for dance clubs. Histories in book form sometimes relate well enough the relative significance of singles in these fields, but reference guides give precedence to the album. And list projects like Apple's blithely present a world apparently virgin-birthed in the Sixties or even later. This problem pre-dates our screen-dominant culture. Time-travel back to 1999 and take a look at MusicHound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, a massive entry in the "Hound" brand of reference books, specifically the entry for Little Richard. We learn that “Tutti Frutti” came out in 1955, as one of his singles recorded for Specialty Records; a compilation called The Specialty Sessions is noted, without any indication of how many of the Specialty singles are included—or, of course, how many there were to begin with. Contrast that with his alphabetical predecessor in that book, Little Feat, for which the reader, by reviewing "what to buy," "what to buy next," "what to avoid," and "the rest," is able to piece together, quickly with no fuss, a list of the band's studio albums and the year in which they were released from 1971 to 1979. The All-Music Guide books being published around the same time were similar; the website that has taken their place has not been an improvement.

Speaking of which... given the inability of streaming services to provide relevant, concise information about the music on their sites, we are not surprised that the presentation of information about singles at online discographies provides a classic example of "more is less." That is, it is both more extensive, simply due to the relative lack of spatial restrictions, and confusing. Go to Discogs or Wikipedia or Rate Your Music to try to get a clear, orderly sense of which singles were important, when those singles were released, and where to find them in their original form on later compilations—good luck! Wikipedia, with some artists' entries, does the best job but emphasizes sales-chart positions rather than differences in musical content (edits, remixes, alternates). But even there, information about, and lists of, albums are more common by far. As noted above, the popular online publication Pitchfork at times feature historical articles about, or lists of, individual tracks, but these hardly generate the same level of interest as articles listing albums or, to return to the world of print, the 33-1/3 series of books about individual albums (more than 200 and counting). Indeed, these books, in the era of print's inexorable, agonizing decline, have been a rare success story, their historicizing, nostalgia-inducing character seemingly more appropriate for cute, collectible books than long-form online presentations.

To return to our Little Richard-Little Feat example, the primary reason why information about singles is not presented well is that they are more complex, discographically, than albums. This at first seem contradictory. Albums contain more material, so one may presume they are more complex. But, post-1965, albums were the major releases for most artists. They are documented well, and a significant amount of the material on any given material is unique to that album. When presented with a list of singles, in contrast, the reader has questions: Which of these singles are not on a major album? Which compilations include non-L. P. singles, or the singles mixed differently from, or otherwise different than, album versions? And there's more. To go back to our Little Richard example, in the Fifties and early Sixties, labels released E. P.s that merely collected recent singles; the relations among these and other E. P.s, singles, albums, and compilations is a mess of overlapping Venn diagrams. The gist of this all is that reference guides need to spend more time and effort on singles than they do albums; that is, if they want the list to be anything other than an online "listicle" providing quick links to streaming sites and video promos.

"Poptimist" critics assert that the tendency to focus on the album is due to "Rockist" influence over popular-music discourse, yet the dominance of the album hinders our appreciation of early Rock and other pre-Sixties musics more than it does of present-day music trumpeted by the Poptimists. These contemporary critics have also failed some of their own favored genres—Hip Hop, Techno, and varied "ethnic" musics associated with certain nations, groups, or locales, but most of all the electronic pop that dominates the world—by continuing to emphasize the album at the expense of singles, mixtapes, and compilations. Indeed, the exalted status of albums by Beyoncé, Swift, and Lamar, and selected albums by similar artists (such as Rihanna's Anti or Frank Ocean's Blond) confirms that non-Rock artists show their dominance of both the marketplace and the cognoscenti by making albums that receive such high accolades. A feedback loop of "Poptimist" victories feeding perceptions of the electronic pop mainstream's victimization by Rock music.

Older writers like Marsh may be more effective on focusing on singles because they remember the era when singles were dominant and listeners had to make do with less "product." Granted, there are plenty of present-day listeners whose listening experiences do not include whole albums by a single artist; they listen to songs and playlists online. Not too long ago, there were consumers who bought only singles; or did not buy individual releases, instead only listened to the radio. But these people tend not to become writers on music who in turn make lists or reference guides or discographies. Avid listeners who grew up in the Fifties and Sixties, though, did experience the scarcity, and thus preciousness, of recorded music. Albums and E. P.s, as hinted above, were often after-the-fact, tawdry samplers, meant for unserious fans who needed catching up. Singles were the original release of a song, they were hot off the presses, giving enthusiasts and critics, when they got them first and proactively proclaimed their worth, the sensation of being part of an avant-garde right alongside the artists. As someone who came of age later, in the album era, I cannot match the level of attention these older listeners devoted to singles; there is simply too much to listen to, too much easily available: online streaming now, troves of downloads and stacks of C. D.-R.s from the Aughts and late Nineties, homemade cassette mixes before that, not to mention all the reissues and box sets, mostly C. D.s maxed out to their 80-minute run time, from the Eighties to the present.

Those putting together "all time" lists have the contradictory goals of wanting to reach a large audience and wanting to cover all of popular music. This leads to an emphasis on albums; it is the convenient path to take. The listmakers arguably want to avoid acknowledging that a list that actually focuses on albums as cohesive works of art, instead of being delivery systems for songs that are cohesive works of art, would exclude more than it includes. Certain artists rarely or never approached albums as singular listening experiences. Plenty others did try to make their albums good all the way through, but did not excel in that pursuit. Again, if listmakers would accompany album lists with song lists, they would not have to worry about certain major artists being excluded.

Hardly anyone wants to attempt such a list of the greatest songs, though. A few besides Marsh have tried, notably Paul Williams' Rock and Roll: The 100 Best Singles, but it sadly features some of his worst writing as he attempts to convey, through choppy overwrought prose, the thrills of a short song that seems both artistically perfect and socially significant. Not only is the creation of a list of songs a harder task, requiring that the listmaker adjudicate the claims of (we presume) thousands of songs, and undoubtedly leading to a greater number of critiques from readers. But also, being made more difficult, it is less fun, more like a research project than a bunch of music enthusiasts sitting around talking about their favorite music, which is, for better or worse, what most of the famous best-albums lists amount to. Those involved would accordingly probably receive better feedback if they prompted a discussion instead, via online message boards for example. Alas... if they did that, they would not have click bait. Albums listed in random order, not as part of an historical narrative or critical analysis of the music that they represent, incite the extreme emotions that drive internet Troll culture. The reader sees an album, he especially likes that album and approves of its place, or he doesn't and he thus gets riled-up slightly. He keeps moving, scrolling.

Putting all of these matters aside... can the individuals who are polled to make these lists really make a list of their favorite albums? Do the organizers of these efforts put forth certain guidelines for the writers to follow when making their lists? These could be: re-listen to the albums that you are considering, ask yourself if they are actually good all the way through. If they are not, is the quality of the good material so high, or is it historically so significant, that it out-weighs the bad, making the album overall as good as others that are more consistent?

Another guideline could be: only select albums that you have been familiar with for years, even decades. If an album under consideration is still new to you, are you sure that you are not over-rating the album because it still seems fresh to your ears? When any of us list our favorite albums, we arguably are only listing our current favorites, ignoring albums that previously would have made the list but which we have gotten tired of. The notion that an album has "stood the test of time" does not necessarily make sense when talking about our own listening—instead, that depends on when we first heard it. An album released in 1973 that someone only heard in 2015 has not, for that listener, stood any such test. As for that question of influence... if an artist states that another artist influenced the work in question, then all is well: you, the critic, can say the latter is influential. Other efforts to describe influence are especially difficult in music. If an artist directly quotes or samples another, that, again, is good. Otherwise, we are in "talking about architecture" territory, as one listener says he can hear influence there, another saying he hears something else. Please do write about those connections that you hear—but they say little about the historical significance of the music. Granted, if you do write, you hope the results will eventually contribute to the subject's historical significance.

Among the online, self-published crowd, one will find listeners telling us which albums they have listened to most. This "objective," pseudo-scientific approach has its charms. It requires, though (if any sort of accuracy is intended), that the listmaker track his own listening. If this is an easy task, we know that he has mostly listened to music online; this is depressing. If this is a hard task, we know that he meticulously tracks his listens, even if on vinyl or C. D. or tape or other physical format; this is both somewhat worrisome ("do you really not have a better use of your time?") and, strictly speaking, likely to be subject to the "observer effect," in his context meaning: performing for an imagined audience, listening to what you think you should listen to. I once tracked my listening for an entire year; you can see the boring results at the Listening Log posts at 2009: The Blog/ Blob. "Never again," is all I have to say. Then again, if Paste staff members could provide some concrete evidence that they actually listen to Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, in its entirety, more than they do other Wonder albums, one might be less inclined to dismiss their list.

While undoubtedly a reader wants the author to write in a way that reflects the author's personal experience, in the Twenty-First Century, an era of endless autofiction and memoirs, the reader has received an excess of countless authors' personal demons and minutiae; the reader is justified in saying, "Min Kamp? Yes, indeed, it is mine!" So, yes, consider, what you have listened to most; but also, among these regular listens, which albums (if they are albums!) seem to warrant status as a cohesive listen, make sense as a singular project. And, on top of that, ask: which of these albums are representative of the artist's work, or at least a phase of his work? Which seem to perfectly reflect an era, or a genre, or a scene, or some kind of combination of the three? On the other hand, the truly great is often the truly weird; outliers, oddities. This is true in the literary canon, and it is true in popular music.

So I attempt to do so here. My Struggle—just kidding. Rockissue's Hot 102: The All-Time (1965-1997) Classic Rock Albums to Hear Before You Die or: A Lifetime Listening Plan for Adult or Teenage Devolutionary Self-Culture. Or, more accurately: Albums of the Rock Era as Singular Works of Art, with an Inevitable Bias toward the British Artists Who Seemed to Excel at Creating Such. Why 102? Because, after some revision of the list that I initially created, that number turned out to work better. Also, typographically it looks better than 100.

Some artists made such a great runs of albums that I cannot pick a single one that proves to be the most cohesive. Usually, though, in my opinion the albums in question do not quite match those in the top 102: for example, Steely Dan's best albums (probably Countdown to Ecstasy and Aja); Wire's early early three-album run, 1977-1979; or two of Judas Priest's best (Stained Class and Painkiller). Inevitably, certain albums are chosen over others to make the list more representative of the history that it reflects and embodies.

A couple selections that can be made to be sort of an album, because no list would be complete without entries that counter what the list name said it would include:

Frank Zappa, selection of best album tracks, 1972-1976: at least ‘I'm the Slime’, Over-nite Sensation; ‘Cosmik Debris’, Apostrophe ('); ‘‘Inca Roads’ and ‘Florentine Pogen’,One Size Fits All, ‘Black Napkins’, Zoot Allures.
The Rolling Stones, selection of singles and album tracks from the Sixties: ‘(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction’, ‘I'm Free’, ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’, ‘Paint It Black’, ‘Have You Seen You Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadows’, ‘Out of Time’, ‘Let's Spend the Night Together’, ‘Jumpin' Jack Flash’... As good as Sticky Fingers is, the Stones will forever be the greatest Sixties singles band.

Finally... The 102 Sexiest Albums Alive!

1965: Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
Surprisingly brutal, and long; launching a new era, the alpha dog of Rock albums.
1966: The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds
Maybe omit ‘Sloop John B’ or consider it a light-comedy intermission.
1966: The Beatles, Revolver
The cold, unfriendly Beatles; in case you forget how good they are. The "White Album" is more fun but a double album is simply not going to surpass a comparable single album.
1966: Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde
In contrast, if you make a double album that feels like a single...
1967: The Doors, self-titled debut album
1967: Aretha Franklin, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
The pinnacle of the Rhythm and Blues/ Country and Western side of popular music (Race and Folk, as the charts once called them) as it was before Dylan, the Beatles, Hendrix, the Doors, James Brown, the Rolling Stones, in the years, 1964-1967, blew it all up. Pet Sounds, with its band-in-name-only doing the singing, the Wrecking Crew backing them, and orchestral arrangements, somewhat anachronistically presents another pre-Rock ideal, more exactly represented byJazz and other artists not covered by this list: for example, the Ella Fitzgerald songbook albums.
1967: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced?
U. S. version, which includes the hit singles. The C. D. versions make for a too-long mess by including all of the tracks on the U. S. and U. K. versions.
1967: Love, Forever Changes
As a "Psychedelic" "Sixties" album, it breaks many rules such a thing is supposed to follow. Does it mean it is better than the prototypical Sixties Psych albums? No, of course not. It just happens to be so.
1967: Pink Floyd, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
This is more like what we expect from a "Psychedelic" "Sixties" album.
1967: The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico
1968: The Band, Music from Big Pink
Before Robbie Robertson took over. Much better.
1968: The Beatles, self-titled "White Album"
Listening to it its entirety is the point.
1968: The Byrds, The Notorious Byrd Brothers
1968: The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
Being a "Brit Pop" fan in the Nineties when I was young and stupid, this one has been a big thing for me for a long time.
1968: Van Morrison, Astral Weeks
1969: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Green River
1969: Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul
Though most known for its very-long version of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ on side B, the two songs on side A, ‘Walk On By’ and ‘Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic’, provide the best model for the 2-track L. P. side. There should be more 4-track albums.
1969: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica
If this were as good across all four of its sides as it is on its A side, it would be in the top 25, top 10, maybe top 5 ever, of everything.
1969: King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King
Parts of their later masterpiece, Larks' Tongue in Aspic, are superior, but the band's debut set the template for an album as an integral work of art.
1969: Sly and the Family Stone, Stand!
Why is this not on "classic Rock" radio all of the time? Nevermind.
1969: Frank Zappa, Hot Rats
1970: Black Sabbath's self-titled debut album
A song called ‘Black Sabbath’ on an album called Black Sabbath by a band named Black Sabbath.
1970: Black Sabbath, Paranoid
Even better.
1970: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Déjà Vu
Most of us have been missing the boat about this "supergroup" and its only important album, one of the most popular and iconic in all of "Classic" Rock. Multiple contributors, forced to limit what of theirs gets included equals: better results. Not only a harbinger of the "singer-songwriter" soft Rock to come, but a summation of the tumultuous few years that preceded it.
1970: Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge over Troubled Water
1970: The Stooges, Fun House
1970: The Velvet Underground, Loaded
The mono version originally only released as a promo but available now in the super-deluxe version is especially nice, the right sound for these songs. This is both de facto the first Lou Reed solo album, and the best one.
1971: Can, Tago Mago
1971: Funkadelic, Maggot Brain
Edges out a couple others by them by a hair; if the long concluding track had more going for it, this album would be great as people tend to say it is.
1971: Led Zeppelin, untitled fourth album
1971: Joni Mitchell, Blue
1971: The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers
1971: The Who, Who's Next
As good as "Classic Rock" gets: the best "Rock god" singer, the best bassist, and the best drummer, backing the composer-guitarist-storyteller-Meher Baba acolyte Pete Townshend, who around this time also became quite masterful at the use of early synthesizers. Like Neil Young, Townshend took Dylan's verbiage and reined it in. Quadrophenia is nearly as good, but as a double it is less likely to keep the listeners' interest in such intense music.
1972: David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
The Glam Bowie, soon to embark upon the amazing transition across "five years" to the Berlin Bowie. This concept album effectively conveys its narrative.
1972: Neu!, self-titled debut album
1972: Roxy Music, self-titled debut album
The first side of the debut album is as close to perfection as Who's Next, but their later masterpiece Avalon is for when you want to feel like the Eighties.
1972: Stevie Wonder, Talking Book
1972: Frank Zappa, The Grand Wazoo
The consensus pick is Freak Out! or Hot Rats, but by Zappa's standards those are primitive, as amazing as they are. The Grand Wazoo is not only more representative of Zappa's work overall, but surpasses most classic Seventies Rock albums in being a thorough listening experience (you really need to listen to this one all the way through in one sitting). For example, the majesty of ‘Eat That Question’, in its catchiness, its orchestration, its tour de force solos, makes most popular music seem pitiful.
1973: Eno, Here Come the Warm Jets
Repeat after me: Another Green World is not Brian Eno's best album.
1973: Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
1973: King Crimson, Larks' Tongue in Aspic
1973: Willie Nelson, Shotgun Willie
1973: Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon
Sometimes the masses are right. This record was so ubiquitous in my childhood that it embodies an entire era of popular culture: not just the long stretch (until 1988) when it stayed on the Billboard album chart, but beyond that. When Rock stars were public intellectuals making serious music; your stereo system starting sounding good; comics and Sci Fi and all sorts of collectorist/ enthusiast niches became high art; you called up hotlines for advice about playing video games; you subscribed to magazines that defined who you are; a few television networks were all anyone needed and cinematic treasures were available for home viewing but in a limited, cheapo way; you stayed in the suburbs unless you really had a reason to leave them; cities, despite being "dangerous," still looked much like they always did (that is, before the suburbs invaded and gentrified them). 1973-2001. An era of economic disclocation in much of the world, but in the West, especially America, overall one of blissful, numbing stasis.
1973: Iggy and the Stooges, Raw Power
I first got to know the 1997 remix, much criticized for its distortion. But it has been remastered since then. So has the original mix. They're both fine, the songs and Iggy Pop's performances are extraordinary, defining a intense, depraved take on the Punk persona, cartoonish but very real for anyone who experienced the casual violence of so many of the Punk and, to a greater extent, Hardcore scenes of the next couple decades.
1973: The Who, Quadrophenia
1973: Yes, Tales from Topographic Oceans
Not even being a huge "Prog Rock" guy, I have difficulty understanding the dislike this album inspires. There is nothing wrong with this album; considering its complexity, its bold conception (four compositions, one each per side), that is quite a feat.
1974: Big Star, Radio City
1974: John Cale, Fear
1974: Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
1974: Robert Wyatt, Rock Bottom
1975: Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
The emotional gravitas that Dylan imparts in several of these songs, as well as ‘Sara’ on the follow-up, Desire, still leaves listeners dead in their tracks.
1975: Eno, Another Green World
1975: Parliament, Mothership Connection
1975: Patti Smith, Horses
1975: Neil Young, Tonight's the Night
1976: The Modern Lovers, selt-titled debut album
1977: Blue Öyster Cult, Spectres
Multiple singers, composers: you'd think Fleetwood Mac made the best album with such, but Nicks' and McVie's better songs were not on Lindsey Buckingham's masterpiece Tusk so it's not the band's masterpiece—Rumours still being good enough to make this Sexy Hundred—whereas the Cult reached their peak here.
1977: David Bowie, Low
If I had to choose a Best Rock Album, this would be it, edging out Here Come the Warm Jets, but unfairly, since half of it isn't Rock. I can confirm that I have loved the album since a high-school afternoon, probably early 1997, my junior year, sitting in history class, when several of the songs on side A popped into my head; they were suddenly catchy, drawing me back in to an album that I had previously found less appealing than other Bowie works. Also... to go back to the German Kosmische music that, intersecting with Brian Eno, would lead to Low, Tangerine Dream's Zeit is the best, even as Cluster or Ash Ra Tempel might at first blush seem more experimental or challenging. But really only the first track on Zeit, ‘Birth of Liquid Plejades’, ranks among my favorites, so I'll save it for a list of greatest songs if I ever make one.
1977: The Clash, self-titled debut album
U. K. version only, not the butchered American version.
1977: Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
1977: Kraftwerk, Trans-Europe Express
1977: Television, Marquee Moon
Punk was always Prog and (... in matters unrelated to this album) Funk was always Disco and Hippies were always Freaks and Mods were always Rockers. O. K.
1978: Devo, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
1978: Pere Ubu, The Modern Dance
1978: Van Halen, self-titled debut album
Those of us who grew up in the Eighties, with the Sammy Hagar version of Van Halen, and mostly exposed to the David Lee Roth version via videos for the 1984 album, were in for a quite a surprise.
1979: Talking Heads, Fear of Music
1980: A. C./ D. C., Back in Black
1980: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Armed Forces
1980: Peter Gabriel, third self-titled album, a. k. a. 3 or "Melt"
He and Kate Bush picked up where David Bowie had left off, directly so on this album's influential use of a "gated reverb" drum sound.
1980: Joy Division, Closer
Another one, like the Bowie albums, or the Smiths' and the Talking Heads', that I've been listening to since high school.
1980: Motörhead, Ace of Spades
1980: Talking Heads, Remain in Light
As with the first Roxy Music album, side B is fine, but side A is otherwordly (and the first track of side B, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, is nearly as good). Its predecessor, Fear of Music, perhaps works better as an album; then again, Remain in Light's being split like it is, with Byrne's speak-singing prevalent on side B, works in its way, making two mini-albums in one.
1981: Black Flag, Damaged
1981: The Raincoats, Odyshape
Thankfully at least the writer Simon Reynolds knows how good this album is. Too many still don't.
1982: The Fall, Hex Enduction Hour
1982: Michael Jackson, Thriller
Like ‘Sloop John B’ on Pet Sounds, the Paul McCartney duet is a vaudeville intermission.
1982: Roxy Music, Avalon
1983: New Order, Power, Corruption and Lies
1984: The Meat Puppets, Meat Puppets II
1984: The Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime
1984: Prince, Purple Rain
1985: Kate Bush, Hounds of Love
1985: The Cure, The Head on the Door
I want to like Pornography and Disintegration more, but the former tends toward rhythmic monotony and the latter is long, the tracks becoming a bit "same-y" (for lack of a better word). The Head on the Door, more of an "Eighties" Cure album, rather eclectic in its sonic palette (leading to a similar approach on the double Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, works better as an album.
1985: The Fall, This Nation's Saving Grace
Hex Enducation Hour, the peak of a different version of the band, may have had more peak moments, but that hour-long length, especially the last track, ‘And This Day’, is wearing, so I rank this one ahead, though the Can cover/ tribute, ‘I Am Damo Suzuki’, is one track too many: incipient long-album-itis!
1986: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Your Funeral... My Trial
1986: Metallica, Master of Puppets
1986: Slayer, Reign in Blood
1986: The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead
Despite Johnny Marr's guitar being too low in the mix on the title track.
1986: Sonic Youth, Evol
1987: Sonic Youth, Sister
1988: Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation
Evol has become a personal favorite over nearly thirty years of listening to it, though it is arguably not as consistent as its follow-up, Sister, or Daydream Nation, which has a song called ‘Trilogy’ but is not the third part of a trilogy, in fact sounds like it was created 10 years after the other two.
1989: Faith No More, The Real Thing
1990: The Flaming Lips, In a Priest Driven Ambulance
1990: Sun City Girls, Torch of the Mystics
1991: My Bloody Valentine, Loveless
1991: U2, Achtung Baby
A top-albums list is not always going to result in what is most representative of an era, or even an artist, as in this case. Is War a better choice? Perhaps, but for me Achtung has songs and a sound, with masterful electroacoustic manipulation of the base material, especially electric guitar, that pointed the way toward OK Computer. At the same time, in an alternate universe in which there was a single album combining the best of The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, it would be better and certainly capture U2's overall history more effectively.
1992: R. E. M., Automatic for the People
Would have been better without ‘New Orleans Instrumental No. 1‘ and ‘Ignoreland’; a mild case of Long-album-itis; inexplicably, Peter Buck says that maybe ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite’ should have been cut.
1996: Gastr del Sol, Upgrade and Afterlife
1996: The Olivia Tremor Control, Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle
1996: Stereolab, Emperor Tomato Ketchup
Model no. 1 for "peak Nineties"; model no. 2: Underworld, Second Toughest in the Infants, but this list only covers Rock, except the aforementioned half of Low (in other words, this is the part where every listmaker indirectly admits that the entire thing is a vanity project).
1997: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Boatman's Call
Only Bob Dylan with his best songs on his best albums melds poetry and music as effectively as Cave has with stunning consistency. And Cave, unlike Dylan, has even been known to care about the recording process. Your Funeral... My Trial is nearly as good, better at times, but its opener ‘Sad Waters’ is so-so.
1997: Radiohead, OK Computer
Consider the robot-talking track a piss break.

If you need something to wash your mouth out after all this, I recommend Sam Kriss's 'Against Lists of Books'.

The Pitchfork lists of albums and songs: 'The 100 Best Albums of the 1970s', 'The 200 Best Songs of the 1970s', 'The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s', 'The 200 Best Songs of the 1980s', The 150 Best Albums of the 1990s', The 250 Best Songs of the 1990s', 'The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s', The 200 Best Songs of the 2000s', 'The 200 Best Albums of the 2010s', 'The 200 Best Songs of the 2010s'. Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time has not been updated as much, and certainly not gotten as much attention as, their list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, but as with Pitchfork's efforts, sometimes an "A for effort" is deserved when the competition comes from the likes of Apple.

The Paste retrospective annual lists that I could find, mostly written by "listicle" master Josh Jackson: 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1998, 1999, 2001. I know what the voice in my head is saying: do you not do the same thing? No, the Rock Annual is really intended to serve as a reference guide; its annual lists are long, historical-minded, and not necessarily guaranteeing the quality of any given recording. Besides, no one reads my website. Probably around 50 people read Paste.

Another footnote of sorts: Jazz Tokenism can surface in absurd, yet well-intentioned, ways among Rock critics. The long-standing online publication, Fast 'n' Bulbous, provides loads of reviews as well as lists that, in some fashion or other (the reader is not told), rank the albums that the anonymous author has listened to. As of September 10th, 2024, there are 33,303 "Best Albums Since 1949" (you have to do a lot of scrolling to get that number, nearly destroying your computer in the process). Among these are some high placements for Jazz artists. Do you want to guess who? You don't have to, it's obvious: in the top 200, we have Charles Mingus, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and Mingus Ah Um; John Coltrane, A Love Supreme and My Favorite Things; and Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. At that point, I stopped looking. Having skimmed through the list of 33,303, I had already got the point: there are a fair number of Jazz albums but they are limited to a small selection of Hard Bop/ Free Jazz/ Fusion titles of the Sixties and Seventies, plus a scattering of others, with two artists, Mingus and Coltrane, arguably represented in a meaningful way, everyone else being tokens (even if, in a list of such extraordinary length, these tokens are plentiful compared to other lists, leading to, for example, eight Duke Ellington albums among the thousands of interchangeable Metal/ Stoner/ Prog albums from recent years). Why does this person engage in such foolishness? Why can he not say, "I listen to Jazz music very rarely and know little about it. But based on what I have listened to, here are a few great albums you should listen to as you hopefully engage in years of extensive Jazz listening. In the meantime, I will not pretend that I do know a lot about Jazz and make the absurd suggestion that there are only a tiny number of Jazz albums that are good enough to be included in a list of more than 30 thousand albums, most of which are of piddling interest." I guess that wouldn't make readers feel impressed about Mingus and Coltrane being included in the top 10.

–Justin J. Kaw, September 2024