1.London Calling, The Clash
2.Purple Rain, Prince
3.The Joshua Tree, U2
4.Remain In Light, Talking Heads
5.Graceland, Paul Simon
6.Born in the U.S.A., Bruce Springsteen
7.Thriller, Michael Jackson
8.Murmur, R.E.M.
9.Shoot Out The Lights, Richard and Linda Thompson
10.Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman
11.Get Happy!!, Elvis Costello
12.It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy
13.Diesel And Dust, Midnight Oil
14.So, Peter Gabriel
15.Let It Be, The Replacements
16.1999, Prince
17.Synchronicity, The Police
18.Dirty Mind, Prince
19.New York, Lou Reed
20.Pretenders, The Pretenders
One answer is that they gave him the second slot for "Purple Rain" and even put "Dirty Mind" at #18. ("Sign o' the Times" is #74.) Another answer is that the list was made in 1990.
What looks really out of place on this list today? Maybe my younger readers will agree with me that this list reeks of Baby Boomer.
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27 comments:
Thriller at 7? Isn't that the best selling album of all time? I know it's up there.
Danny: It's a critical opinion, not a sales ranking.
Steel Wheels? Labour of Love? Colour by Numbers? I mean, WTF?
Where's Raisin' Hell from Run-DMC?
Tattoo You is infinitely better than Steel Wheels, which was total garbage. Garbage, I say.
Two tolerable songs does not a good album make. This list seems to ignore that entirely.
Here are my candidates for the obvious "mistakes":
(Critics' favorites that no one ever listened to again:)
10.Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman
13.Diesel And Dust, Midnight Oil
19.New York, Lou Reed
(Chart toppers that you heard too many times to ever want to hear again:)
14.So, Peter Gabriel
17.Synchronicity, The Police
20.Pretenders, The Pretenders
I think every U2 Album released in the 1980s is better than Midnight Oil.
And I don't know any REM fan who would argue that Murmur is superior to Reconstruction of the Fables (or even Document).
And where is Rush: Moving Pictures (1982). Or Pink Floyd: The Wall (1980).
The Clash?
Great discussion. I had over 30 albums on that list -- probably all of them on cassette -- everything from Prince to AC/DC to RunDMC to Paul Simon. It was nice to see some groups that I think of as being quintissentially from the 80s, like Culture Club, UB40 and Squeeze. Did anyone see that short-lived series on Vh1 where they tried to get some old bands, including Squeeze, to reunite for one performance "just for the fans?" If I am remembering correctly, Squeeze was the only band that refused to do it.
I do agree with the commenters who have pointed out that there's no funk or rap on the list. Indeed, there's very little music by black artists. The few there are primarily crossover artists. I know black people and I can assure you that they were not listening to John Fogerty in the 80s.
Finally, there really should be more U2 on the list. U2 owned the 80s.
Tonya: There's Tracy Chapman, who's the quintessence of the sort of black artist white Boomers like. I still hear that album played in cafés around Madison. So overrated! And whatever happened to her?
I left out Guns and Roses. Granted it was the late 1980s, but what a great album! It is certainly better than Lou Reed....
The funny thing is that black folks didn't listen to Tracy Chapman all that much. As for what happened to her, she was out of sight for over a decade I believe. She released a new album recently -- in the last couple of years -- but I don't know how well it did either commercially or critically.
Anyone of Generation X will immediately recognize this list for what it is: a narrow-minded Baby Boomer playlist. Rolling Stone magazine ad corporate radio represented the reactionary circle-the-wagons mindset of a generation that stopped listening to new styles of music around 1975.
For a real taste of 80's greatness, check this out:
http://www.rhino.com/store/ProductDetail.lasso?Number=76490
And to check out how completely the aforementioned arbiters of taste dropped the ball (for an entire generation!):
http://www.rhino.com/store/ProductDetail.lasso?Number=73926
Jann Wenner and his ilk have no excuse. Look at all of the rock acts that Ed Sullivan had on his show, and he got his start in the 1920's!!! Wenner and co. closed their minds before they hit their 30's!
I spit on them all.
Shoot Out the Lights reeks boomer. It's a good song even if boomers were the only ones who heard it in the 80s. (I know the song, but not the album.)
I would change out the Clash's London Calling for X's Los Angeles. The Clash made some good music and they hit the top 40, but I don't think their legacy stands out over time as being particularly broad or unique. U2 wrote political songs better (U2's War is a better ablum than London Calling) and musically the Clash borrowed from all the usual sources. X, on the other hand made it up as they went along, borrowed music from a deeper well, wrote damn great poetry and exerted a direct influence on a generation of top bands including Nirvana and Wilco. X defined the punk ethos; the Clash exploited it.
Stranger: I've got an old issue of Mojo (1996) listing the 100 greatest guitarists that puts Richard Thompson at #10. (Ahead of him are only: Neil Young, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, Peter Green, Steve Cropper, and Jimi Hendrix.)
Rolling Stone is the "People" magazine of music. It's generic and irrelevant and at some point in the 90s I noticed that they simply resorted to plastering T&A on just about every cover to entice people to buy it. And yes, the list itself is totally boomerified. Somebody needs to tell their critics to retire along with all those aging rock "stars" who refuse to give it up.
Bauhaus should be on there, as the forerunners of the goth/industrial/darkwave sound that is the only danceable music left today (e.g. Evanescence.)
Hip hop fans: rap is noise...moronic doggerel chanted to a boring beat. Three words sum it up: "Ice, Ice, Baby." Vanilla is your Elvis; own him.
One point for Bill in the comments above. Technically, there is only one Metallica album on this list: "Kill 'Em All." I don't know who did "Rapture," but it certainly wasn't Metallica. Personally, I think "Ride the Lightning" would have been a better selection for this list. However, I do think that Metallica belongs, given their influence on metal and continuing popularity.
Jim:
Yeah, the Beastie Boys made albums before Vanilla, but how many did they sell? "To the Extreme" went 7x platinum. That's my point: like Elvis for rock, Vanilla made rap commercially viable; without him, there might not be any today. And for that, I hate him as much as you do.
A quibble about R.E.M. -- it's Fables of the Reconstruction (not Reconstruction of the Fables), and, yes, that's their best album.
Everyone is missing the obvious. This list was put together in 1990, so they missed the most important album of the decade, which was from only one year earlier in 1989.
I'm talking of course about The Stone Roses, which some people rate as the best album of all time.
http://www.rocklist.co.uk/nmes_100_best_albums.htm
The Beastie Boys and 3rd base both brought rap to suburbia. Which was necessary to get the diversity and tension that would identify the path of the musical form. A little context:
In the late eighties, rappers were diversifying in ways that would, with a slight delay, transfix all those kids who started out with the B-Boys, 3rd Base, and maybe the PE theme from Do the Right Thing. It begin to diversify, and in doing so a bunch of different artists began to create rap milestones:
N.W.A.
Slick Rick
EPMD
Heavy D. & the Boyz
Eric B. & Rakim
Nice & Smooth
Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth (might have been early 90's)
How should these artists and their albums be rated? Definitely not on the same plane as the rock artists of that time; there was very little crossover musically or fan-wise. But the whole "Top 100" thing is more interesting as a time-capsule piece than in any definitive sense anyway.
But eighties rappers laid the groundwork for all the hip-hop albums that mongrelized pop music in the 90's and became top-100 material in their own right. You had everything from Fear of a Black Planet to Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, & Easy-E (separately now) to the suburban feel of "new school" rappers like Kwame, Kid n' Play, and Digital Underground to the more eclectic, socially conscious Native Tongue groups: De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest, and the Jungle Brothers. And Nas, who set a gold standard for "real life" rap made by, for, and about the streets.
Meanwhile, there were some beneficiaries of circumstance and A&R gimmicks that enjoyed flashbulbs of popularity, like Hammer and, a bit later, Vanilla Ice. But they never even got Pat Boone status.
Which is to say, this statement by smilin' jack shows an absurd level of naivete:
"Vanilla made rap commercially viable; without him, there might not be any today."
While I agree Fables is R.E.M.s best work form the 1980s, I still think Automatic for the People is their best.
And I still cannot believe that Rush: Moving Pictures did not even make the top 100 list. Maybe I am a sucker for outrageous stadium shows.
Also, we shouldn't forget the best of Simon & Garfunkel and the Best of Steve Miller, two CDs that every college student in the 1980s seemed to get with their 8 CDs for a penny deal with Columbia.
Murmur is clearly the best REM album. I don't think Fables comes close.
Murmur is the most "important" R.E.M. album, but Life's Rich Pageant is my favorite.
The primary "it was done in 1990" problem of the list is that it didn't foresee how music would change in 1991. Which is another way of asking why are there no Pixies albums on the list? Both Surfer Rosa and Doolittle make my top twenty (as compiled now); "Debaser" is a song so perfectly constructed it all but brings me to tears when I listen to it.
Also, Nebraska is better than Born in the USA. So is The River. Duh.
I don't know anyone who was in their teens in the 80s (like myself) who ever read Rolling Stone.
Imported copies of NME or the style specific magazines like Circus were the slick-papered full color music press that everyone I knew gravitated towards, but what really was taking off then were small run self published fanzines that were very local, specific and DIY.
You could draw a straight line from the aesthetic nutured by those Zines to the same ethos later expoused by early weblogs.
It was obvious then, and continues to be obvious now, that Rolling Stone was just a bunch of Bay Area Hippies and they didn't get what was going on currently (now or then).
It was a mammal v. dinosaur situation and even if the Zine scene never reached critical mass with Big Media they had a profound effect on who taste-maker types enjoyed.
My knowledge of this scene only extends to SoCal, but the bands that were incubated through these Zines covered many styles and bands like The Bangles, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Guns and Roses, Jane's Addiction went on to wider audiences in part because of the fanatical local followings they developed through these small black and white cheaply copied fanzines.
If I had compiled a list in 1990 my top 5 might have been:
1.Prince, Parade (still his best album)
2.Violent Femmes, Violent Femmes (a nearly perfect album)
3.Aztec Camera, High Land Hard Rain (amazing writing and guitar, one of the songs is an english sonnet for chrissakes)
4.Eurythmics, Touch (Annie Lennox, one of the greatest voices ever)
5.The Bangles, All Over the Place (Purely a personal choice, but really solid garage-pop with great harmonies)
If I made a list now, GnR's Appetite for Destruction would replace the Femmes in 2nd and The Bangles would be replaced by the first Pretenders album, but I will defend to my grave Prince's Parade album as the best 45 minutes of music ever put to vinyl.
The Rolling Stone's list isn't nearly as depressing as some of the comments here. A list is a list is a list, everyone is always gonna bitch about something not being on the list (what, no Echo & the Bunnymen, no Teardrop Explodes, no Dream Syndicate, no Rain Parade, nothing from the Church, no John Hiatt and on and on).
But some of y'all are just downright mean dissing on some great music. Maybe it isn't in the style you like, or maybe you don't understand the geography or the sociopolitical issues the creators are concerned with, but some of the opinions expressed here read as the harbingers for the fall of civilization as we know it.
X (a band I dearly love) defined punk and the Clash (a band I rather enjoy) exploited it? Granted, "London Calling" was released in 1979 and therefore shouldn't be on the list, but that's an objective detail. "London Calling" is a fine record and the Clash was a fine band. So was X, and so are the Knitters.
XTC's "Skylarking" has embarassingly bad lyrics? I can't believe anyone would say such a thing. Do you actually speak English? Correctly?
And what's the deal with Midnight Oil? Y'all actually listened to what the Oils were saying? The tunes were catchy as hell and the "message" spot on. One may disagree with what they are saying, or one may feel a bit guilty by what they are saying, but dissing their music is uncalled for.
And why quibble over whether Murmur is superiour to Reckoning? They are both great records. Just enjoy both of them.
Like Ann's mention of the top 10 guitarists - all of them are great, if you haven't listened to any of them do so. Everyone will other faves here too (Adrian Belew, Steve Vai, Robert Fripp, Bill Nelson). Listen to them too.
Cherish this fine music, for none of it is awful. Let folks know of other records you feel worthy of recognition. But dissing music, good music, because your personal fave wasn't listed?
We're doomed.
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