New Project: Blogging Rolling Stone's Top 250 Albums

enerally speaking, I don't take much stock in the meaningless popularity contests of endeavors like Rolling Stone’s “Top 500 Greatest Album’s of All Time.” Much like the annual farces that are the Grammys, Academy Awards and Emmys, these sorts of grand gestures are tiring parades of frivolity and the public at large's unabashedly blunt sense of taste. If I’m being too discharitable, it’s probably because I’ll never get over the fact that Leanne Rimes beat out No Doubt for the “Best New Artist” Grammy, Wall-E wasn’t even nominated for Best Film this year, and Battlestar Galactica was awarded a Peabody but not a single Emmy over it’s genre-breaking five seasons.

Yes, I am bitter.

Now that I’ve spent a good paragraph explaining why I find these sorts of things to be utterly inane, I suppose I’ll have to explain why on earth I’ve decided to launch a new personal project to listen to and blog the top 250 albums on Rolling Stones’ epic Top 500 list. As someone with a great love of music and who listens to A LOT of it, it elicits some pain and embarrassment to admit that I haven’t actually heard most of the classics. Consequently, I have a particularly underdeveloped grasp of musical history and context, which probably hampers my capacity for understanding and appreciating music to a much more informed degree. So, in a larger sense, this is project of self improvement. To make a clarifying point, I don’t think you need to know everything about the history of rock ’n’ roll to enjoy what artists are currently doing, but it would certainly provide a higher degree of insight to be familiar with their musical influences and forebears. The quest for knowledge and higher understanding aside, the RS 500 is also an effective tool for systematically expanding upon my music library and listening to the albums I’ve procured but not yet enjoyed (of which there are many). So there are philosophical as well as practical reasons for this project.

Onto another matter: Why the top 250 and not the list in its entirety? First of all, the latter half of the list seems, frankly, somewhat arbitrary and at times just down right inaccurate, unabashedly flying in the face of both reason and logic. Take for example the fact that No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom” (#441) -- undoubtedly the band’s magnum opus and an amazing album to boot -- comes in 100 places behind the much inferior (though admittedly still enjoyable) “Rock Steady” (#316). As an inveterate No Doubt fan (yes, many things come down to No Doubt for me, this is the universe that I operate within) AND an appreciator of a wide variety of music, I have at least some authority in arguing that this ranking is simply flat out wrong. (Parenthetical Aside: Having awarded both albums four stars, All Music Guide is frustratingly neutral on the matter. And to make things even more interesting, “Return of Saturn” was given four-and-a-half stars, and rating that I would also take issue with.)

Ultimately, this is a large reason that the list seems pretty bogus to me, so I figure I can get around that by ignoring the latter 250 albums. Also, I tried to start the project by listening to #500, Eurythmic’s “Touch,” and while it wasn’t as bad as I was anticipating (certainly deserving of a spot on the Top 500), it was a difficult album for me to sit through since I was frequently terrified by the mental image of Annie Lennox’s gaping maw.

Obviously, the bigger issue here is the sheer quantity of 500 albums. While doing just the Top 100 felt as though I was leaving out a lot of potential listening, 500 is way, way too many. Having already attempted one false start with this project, I was quickly overwhelmed by the daunting task of tackling 500 albums. 250 seems much more manageable, therefore drastically mitigating the likelihood of failure by forfeit. In other words, 250 is literally and figuratively good middle ground from which to begin.

Finally, it seems prudent to set down some ground rules.

RS Top 250 Rules of Engagement (subject to change):

1. All 250 albums will be listened to in the order in the descending order presented by Rolling Stone. No albums may be skipped regardless of how much I may dislike them.
2. Each album must be listened to in it’s entirety in a single sitting.
3. All album reviews shall be read after and not before listening to the album at hand.

Let the listening being