I didn’t read the list, but from what had been said earlier, there’s a problem with complaining about this list. It sounds like it was compiled by asking a lot of different people their top 50 albums, so there wasn’t really any thought put into the list by RS themselves. Maybe they should have asked more people. Or different people. Or for 100 albums each. Or weighted things differently. Or allowed people to pick their own relative weighting. Or whatever. Those are the thing you should complain about, not about what the people they picked to vote on it actually chose.
The biggest issue that I see is that you’re going to be biased regardless of who you pick because you’re not going to be “fairly” representing a certain point of view. There will always be the ability for any group to say “you didn’t ask enough of our group”. I would much rather see a list lovingly crafted by the top music critics, not a bunch of random people, who actually discuss things rather then handing in lists and not bouncing things off of each other in terms of things they may be forgetting or not recognizing as much as they do.
I highly doubt any of the recent music I listen to is on the list, because I like stuff from a bunch of different very narrow subgenres, only one which is remotely rock-influenced. I don’t expect to see any Spanish Guitar or Movie Soundtracks on this list, so I’m not going to complain about it, even if there’s clearly certain albums in those genres I’d consider much better than the pop-centric dreck that most people think of.
Yes, and a magazine which mainly features English language rock, pop and rap will also reflect these biases. More so if there is an implicit wish to show how “relevant” albums still are.
I can see why they are excluded because of a groups vision, or lack of creative control, or just because a random bunch of songs may not be an album as such. And they are traditionally excluded from these lists.
One could also make arguments for including them, though. Especially things like the Beatles “red album” where there was creative control, they were popular and one is being objective about which is best.
And if your vision of an album is conceptual, you might argue for including Thick As A Brick or upgrading The Wall. Really don’t mind if I sit this one out, though.
It’s strange that nowhere and no one mentioned such a phenomenon as Phantom’s Divine Comedy, this mysterious and little-known group, which recorded only one album in 1974, was heard by everyone, because the singer’s voice sounded like the voice of Jim Morrison, they went rumors that it was actually Morrison who faked his death, while the other side claimed that the singer was Iggy Pop
The one and only reason for a magazine to release a list is to get people complaining about the list. No article will ever get as many readers. No article will ever get as much media attention. No article will ever get message boards to devote whole threads to it. Lists work because they do exactly what they are designed to do: make people complain.
There’s a US bias as well. Meet the Beatles was one of those Capitol Frankenstein records that the Beatles and EMI had no say in the track listings or order. I wonder if it’s the truncated Capitol version of Revolver at #11 or the legit EMI version. The label is erroneously listed as Apple.
I think the Smiths are very good, but I would agree with you. They definitely aren’t in my top twenty groups and I can’t think of any album which I would include in the top fifty. And these numbers are extremely generous.
I love the Smiths but yeah, that’s pretty absurd. This list was put together by a Smiths fan who wasn’t really attempting any sort of perspective; there is no sane way to defend that.
I’m a huge Tragically Hip fan but if I was making a list of the greatest albums of all time they might at best crack one album into the top hundred, and to be honest I think it’d slip lower. They might get two into the top 500, and one would be below #400.
There’s a reason why the NME was nicknamed New Morrissey Express for a while. The Smiths are to that magazine what Dylan and Springsteen are to Rolling Stone.