I don't blame Robert Wyatt for making this album full of noodling nonsense; I blame the listmaker for pretending as though there were anything of merit here.

Starbucks created her in a test tube.

ahahaha this racist POS is so wildly overrated. just look at all the 5-star reviews for this boring soft-rock trash! amazing that people think he's a GOOD guitarist, let alone the BEST guitarist. anyone with a passing knowledge of the last 60 years in popular music would be able to name five better guitarists off the top of their head. i'll start: that dude from Limp Bizkit who wears weird contact lenses. so much better than clapton. in summary, fuck eric clapton and fuck all the dudes who worship him

stop sayin crazy shit bout vaccines, lady

Got pretty dodgy when it wasn't the hits.

Happy punk

Fun garage-y 70s rock with fuzz and keyboards.

Classic. Fuck the outro.

thppt. shoulda stayed in the Beatles.

Lotta flute. Lil too much piano.

Too sad for me.

He's not as sad a bastard as I thought?

Most double albums would be better as single albums.

Not really a house music guy. The single was enough for me.

Not my jam.

Nah.

Got pretty dodgy when it wasn't the hits.

Memories of the Dwight spot.

OK.

Weird and good, funky.

Fine UK alt-rock.

Sheela had the boogie

Lotta white dudes on this list

Lotta Brits on this list.

mumbleing nonsense.

That was fun!

I think this is one of those records I'm supposed to worship. It was fine?

Tremendous live album. (1995 expanded version)

Dolly is good.

Better than I feared?

Sinatra's heart wasn't in it, and neither was mine.

Holy shit, that was terrible. Like a parody of 60s psychedelic rock.

Fine.

Not bad, but not really my bag. Sorry, fellas.

80s, punky, British, not bad

snnnnnfm hgh omuhgradd

Aggressively mediocre. This list looks worse every day.

Didn't age well for me.

British. Can't sing. Can't pick a genre, can't do most of them particularly well. Perfect for this list.

Need to listen to this a lot more

Yes, of course

Not bad, solid New Wave.

Hearing a lot of Lush and Siouxsie, but it's not my jam.

MEH.

Fuck Eric Clapton.

Bad. Boring. House music probably shouldn't be on this list.

Not my thing.

Not bad, actually.

What? No.

that was too much DnB

That was great!

Can't always catch lightning in a bottle twice.

Like early Who.

House-y.

Three hours of this? Fuck off.

Glad Big's dead.

I get the concept, but that doesn't mean I have to love the concept.

Confusion is a walrus.

Wow, that was really great.

I started off suspicious, but there were good bones in there. Collins' voice sometimes drove me crazy, but I liked a lot of what they were doing musically.

Kid's got a future.

Yeah duh.

That was nice.

hahahaha this list is so dumb, this is a completely unremarkable record

That man can sing.

list so white

That dude's voice just ruins it for me, every time.

lol another noodly white guy from the 70s, what a surprise

"My slap and tickle made her giggle" haahahahaha this list is like "the 100 albums everyone admits are great and then 900 other pieces of shit like this"

See, I don't hate all white-dude UK rock.

Starbucks created her in a test tube.

Good shit.

People gonna be mad at me but I found it a little boring

man, kiedis is such a terrible lyricist

There's "here's an acknowledged classic of a genre you may not know well" and then there's "here's a piece of music that's almost intentionally impenetrable so you can feel dumb when you don't get it."

I don't blame Robert Wyatt for making this album full of noodling nonsense; I blame the listmaker for pretending as though there were anything of merit here.

::reads 'Bengali in Platforms' lyrics:: YO FUCK THIS RACIST TRASH

British guys doing blues and twang, huh?

Boring.

I wish I loved anything as much as the listmaker loves British guys who jerk off on tape and call it "music."

Prog is boring.

Nah.

oooof can i just be polite and say "I recognize that Brian Wilson is a musical genius"?

Very Black Flag, I liked it.

Lil dated but not bad

she's so fucking good

Great keyboard, great screams.

Still don't get it.

another english singer-songwriter zzzzzzz

Easy listening, in the good way.

Those guys really stole a lot from better bands.

I did not like her singing or this music!

Like a John Carpenter soundtrack without a John Carpenter movie.

Fuck the record executives who kept this classic in the closet for 20 years.

I just told someone "If there is such a thing as a 'mostly the singles' fan or Bjork I am it" but this was interesting and clubby in a way that was accessible for me

Stone classic.

The covers have long been the stuff of my nightmares, and I imagine this was pretty heavy stuff for its time, but it does feel a tiny bit ... softer ... than my expectations.

Different than I expected - more rock, less R&B? but good.

Gold.

Eh.

Great pop from a star in mid-explosion.

yeah der it's very great

This is a PERSONAL rating - I acknowledge Tommy's place in musical history, but ... there's too much non-rock in there, and I didn't like most of it.

"The Message" (the single) is legendary. Why in the world did the listmaker include this entire record, with the cringeworthy "Dreamin'" and the embarrassing "You Are"?

yet another unremarkable british white guy wankathon.

Good house music is barely tolerable if you're not on the dance floor. This is not really good house music.

yes duh, talking book kicks off maybe the greatest four-album run ever

hahaha this is not a "you-must-listen" album unless the number went from 1001 to 1000001, steven tyler is the anthony kiedis of singing about fucking

i like some steve earle, but i don't like this steve earle, sorry. (i also don't really like most country, so yeah)

i'm sure people on X love this, but, um, outside of the club (and possibly inside it as well), house music is borrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring (also LOL at this clown talking about how "robotic" EDM is and then making a super robotic album)

I enjoyed that!

slam dunk classic, absolutely stacked with great songs

lil long

"50 Or So Albums You Should Listen To Before You Die And Then An Unending Parade Of Mediocre White Men"

so much fun

XTC is boring! Sorry!

hahaha i am aware that some people actually think the Monkees were good musicians and that's fine i guess, but this is not a good record, very dependent on vocals and harmonies except they are not great singers, otherwise a very derivative 60s sound

there are moments - “paint it black,” “gimme shelter” - where the stones are of course transcendent but when i listen to their albums i mostly hear british guys playing pretty good versions of black and american music

starts off sounding like a cast recording of a rock-theme Broadway musical

"wow, the British folk revival of the 60s is a big deal!" -- no one who is not British alt name for this list: "fewer than 500 albums you should listen to before you die, plus a bunch of mediocre british acts from the 60s 70s and 80s"

non-western music!

whoever called it "wizard nerd rock" was right

you know what? life's too short to keep listening to Ol' Mumbly Joe just because some list said so. I DON'T LIKE ANYTHING LEONARD COHEN EVER MADE there i said it. on to "Led Zeppelin III." fuck yeah.

no hits, but not bad

yet another totally unremarkable album that makes me think the listmaker just grabbed a few albums he had heard of from various genres that he doesn't know anything about (I am from the generation that made "Karma Chameleon" a hit, it's a fine song, but the idea that I must hear this album before I die is laughable)

kid can sing, "Long Black Limousine" was good, a lot of the rest was schmatlzy and overdone

hoooooooo baby CCR is so fuckin' fire

a British singer-songwriter who doesn't suck! hallelujah! (also enlightening to an 80s kid who mostly knew "Do Ya" and "Forever Young" growing up)

if u don't like this i don't like u

john lee hooker is great; why is a "___ and friends" cash-in record on this list?

them boys can play

that was actually not bad New Wave?

seriously why do rappers think we want to hear skits where we hear them fucking

their songs kinda sound the same but we all luv u lemmy

that was very boring

i have never been to a rave, i only used X once in my life and that was when friends made me go see Phish with them, i was all relaxed and super flirty, when they played "Twist Around" i did the "Whoo!" in the wrong place and everyone nearby looked at me like i was a narc, anyway writing this review has been far more interesting to me than listening to this record was

trip hop >>> house

Some nice surprises. More albums should be half an hour long.

speaking for like a minute after half the songs is a cruel act but it still bumps

fuck johnny depp

::reads "Brown Sugar" lyrics hahahaha fuck these culture vultures and fuck their song about raping slaves

lol convinced that whoever chose these records fucking HATES electronic music, so they picked the worst shit they could find, like this lazy nonsense

like the Stones, but less terrible

i've got to listen to more Husker Du

Basically a perfect album (esp. musically), with only a little bit of Axl's burgeoning paranoia, instead of the mess that was Use Your Illusion.

Some serious bangers in here

i do not like house music and this list's many attempts are doing nothing to change that

50 Million Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong, But They Are, Because Aretha Was 50 Million Times Better Than Him

look, I called myself a "nerd" growing up, and I have since learned to let people enjoy what they're gonna enjoy, so, enjoy, nerds! but lord, this album irritated the shit out of me. like Rush but with worse singing and annoying show-offy musicianship (at least Rush rocks).

I haven't actually listened to a lot of Common - his rise kind of coincides with the time that my interest in new music began to wane and my habits hardened - but listening to this album made it clear to me that I'm not missing much.

cool story, dad

as tonally weird as "Tommy" but more accessible to me.

justice for the swan dress

gotta spend more time with Uncle Neil, he's great

(anguished crying)

"let's leave the studio chatter at the beginning of every song, that'll seem really cool!"

is this the worst album on this entire list? sure seems like it!

The two and a half songs I didn’t skip were OK, I guess.

pretty good

confessing my ignorance: I did not know Dylan (and The Band) could rock like that!

i like the Pet Shop Boys, but I cannot underscore enough how unremarkable this album is. Recycled, dated beats with nothing special. Yet another terrible choice by the listmaker!

holy shit, the sampling on "Testify" was so fucking annoying

man, i have TRIED with Tom Waits. really. and I don't like him. sorry not sorry!

a prog double album by a bunch of English dudes about a Puerto Rican teen from NYC? no fucking thanks!

james taylor singing White Guy Mellow Acoustic Songs: good job. no notes. james taylor singing the blues: WHO DIPPED THESE RIBS IN MAYONNAISE

yet another thoroughly unremarkable album. Is the author of the book friends with these guys or something? This album wasn't bad. It just wasn't even close to "you must listen to it before you die".

what production alchemy did 70s punk bands use to make their drums sound like that

sorry, jonathan richman's choice to sing flat and whiny doesn't work for me

sinatra's a great natural singer, and nelson riddle's band is tight as a drum, but, like, people DO talk about how all these songs sound the same, right?

whew that hit my sweet spot for orchestral mid-century twang fronted by a golden voice, i am not joking

ahahaha this racist POS is so wildly overrated. just look at all the 5-star reviews for this boring soft-rock trash! amazing that people think he's a GOOD guitarist, let alone the BEST guitarist. anyone with a passing knowledge of the last 60 years in popular music would be able to name five better guitarists off the top of their head. i'll start: that dude from Limp Bizkit who wears weird contact lenses. so much better than clapton. in summary, fuck eric clapton and fuck all the dudes who worship him

yet another "why is this on this list?" pick. exactly as self-indulgent as you would guess it would be, given that it's the debut by a guy who quit a prog group over clashing egos. "Excuse Me" and "Waiting For The Big One" are straight-up embarrassing. ("Solsbury Hill" is, of course, gold, and keeps this in 2-star turf.)

i am legitimately sorry that your son died, Nick Cave. truly a terrible tragedy. there are some beautiful, ethereal and haunting moods on this album. it's the meandering, pretentiously lyricized singing that ruins most of it for me.

moderately bland, another british white guy playing the blues, whatever

bjork is my tom waits? some people can't stand or don't "get" her, and i'm not sure i fully "get" her either, but I can't deny the emotional power of her music for me. she creates musical landscapes that are like impressionist paintings. brava!

some good production and beats from Dre, some decent lyrics, buried in an avalanche of gangsterism, homophobia and misogyny

much better when not literally trying to sound like black artists

"i don't like rap" just say you hate black ppl, we know already

phew. there are like 10/12 songs on here that i would consider formative pop hits for me. i can sing most of them from heart. i don't know what michael jackson actually did. the things i have read and seen are damning. i can't ever listen to michael jackson the same way.

utterly forgettable. monotonous. boring. why?

oh, you put South Asian instruments on top of your boring-ass techno. cool, i guess.

bland. The Dude was right

Orange is way better

the vast majority of double albums should be single albums.

that was fine ambient whatever music until dude started screaming incoherently toward the end there

i got like 521 albums to go but i'm gonna die now because this noise robbed me of my will to live

yeah, I didn't get laid in high school either

so pop music with guitars?

i did not like this

another one i'm apparently too stupid to appreciate; I just heard this guy's very bad singing!

did you guys ever see "Loqueesha"? there's no reason you should. it's a very bad movie with a very bad premise. but, like, if you watch it (maybe because you, like me, are an appreciator of bad movies), you see that, despite having an awful script, no stars, and a terrible "actor" in the lead role ... the film still seems technically very competent. it's no Marvel movie, but it's far from "Birdemic" levels. it's well-lit, the sound is good, most of the side actors are better-than-local-theater quality. it's just inexplicable how such a terrible idea and lead performance somehow had enough money behind them to make the finished product a quality representation of the Extremely Bad Ideas that were behind the whole thing. so yeah. this album. I guess the main difference is that the presence of names like Nick Cave and Tom Waits mean that in my metaphor, the equivalent would be if Lars Von Trier and David Lynch got together to produce "Little Nicky." addendum: my god, this album is so bad without this Neil Hannon guy. and then it is SO MUCH WORSE when he appears.

sounded less culture vulture-ish than the other Stones stuff I've listened to. good job!

pre-prog in its boring indulgence

singles OK, the rest pretty bad

If skills sold, truth be told, you'd probably be in a dustbin somewhere. solid production, weak ass rhymes.

hasn't aged well. by that, i mean it wasn't really that good twenty years ago, but i grew up.

no.

lol this isn't even a real live album, it's a bunch of live recordings with overdubs on top. almost every live album from the 70s that is mythologized is mostly held in that esteem because the very idea of live recordings of rock 'n' roll bands was revolutionary. and they're not bad. but "you must listen before you die"? GTFO with that, boomers.

part of me thinks Kurt would have been absolutely miserable growing old in this world; part of me is sad that we don't get to experience the art he might have made in it.

Beck has built a great career out of creating new soundscapes out of a wide variety of influences. Good job, Beck!

thoroughly ordinary. like Oasis, but even more middling (even the fucking album cover looks like Oasis!). yet another album that serves more as an indictment of the listmakers' tastes (SERIOUSLY, BRITISH MUSICAL OUTPUT IS NOT NEARLY AS GOOD AS YOU THINK IT IS) than of the artist in question.

if u told me i had to listen to this before i die i would kill myself first to spite u

honestly i love hip-hop and i'm a fan of turntablism and DJs more than most of the people I know but fuck dude, not every song needs to be punctuated by long clips of people talking

i was there in the 80s, this record is somehow emblematic of much of the style (overuse of electronic drums, tinny slap bass, wall to wall synths) and yet not very good

i think i appreciate Frank Zappa, Legendary Weirdo and Anti-Censorship Crusader, more than I appreciate the music of Frank Zappa

stop sayin crazy shit bout vaccines, lady

i'm roughly halfway through this list and I'm wondering if the rest will be like the first half: one-third classics that are beloved by most people one-third stuff I don't know - and may not like - but that are clearly interesting works of art and then the third like this: garbage tripe that can only be on the list because it hit a sweet spot with the listmaker. this is THOROUGHLY ORDINARY AND BORING MUSIC. it's a genre -- oversynthed, underbaked 80s pop -- that wasn't that great to begin with, and then it's not even one of the best examples of the genre. just because you used to stare at the album cover in your childhood bedroom and wish you were cool doesn't mean this record ever was.

yet another "White Dude Makes Shitty Music, Is Praised By Other White Dudes For It" pick

11 songs in 34 minutes. they don't make em like that any more.

all the white dudes who seem so upset that this album talks about sex should probably re-evaluate their feelings for AC/DC and aerosmith and RHCP and all the other middling bands that primarily sing about fucking

Imagine Dragons but without drums

i can't offer a real review because listening to the whole album reminds me of just how formative a document it was. a delicious stew of weirdness and hipness that showed that while you might care about being cool, true coolness came from self-confidence. a dramatic curtain pull on a possible future for hip-hop and sampling as art forms, it instead became the victim of being so successful as Art that Commerce demanded tribute, silencing most of De La's catalog for years and then only making it available in neutered form. RIP trugoy.

def not my bag, repetitive song structures and off-key singing

"white soul" isn't a genre, it's cultural theft

more british folk blah blah blah

you guys accidentally turned the treble all the way down

omg while i was listening to this album the ghosts of geddy lee and ayn rand gave me sexual pleasure while whispering in my ear that i'm so much smarter than everyone around me (adding: jesus christ, they remastered this record during THIS century and they still didn't get rid of that racist-ass riff on "A Passage To Bangkok?" it was gonna be 2 stars until that shit, fellas. go fuck yourselves with that White Foolishness.)

that moog raga was embarassing

take away the blues singers and it's the blandest type of starbucks music

i will likely never become a regular listener of Dwight's brand of country, but man he does it well. great voice, great music.

nah

stocked with bangers

yet another double album that should have been a single album

good reminder that the greatest hits on that ubiquitous record came from somewhere

it's a good record! too bad Van Morrison turned into an anti-science shitbag

nah

if i heard this in an airport it would be a 5 for sure, relaxing and not distracting

man, I grew up with the same classic Beach Boys singles as everyone listening to their parents' music in the 80s, but now as an adult, all I hear is the overproduction that I heard on "Smile," which I got in this project before "Pet Sounds." And that overproduction - the xylophones, the timpanis, the million-part harmonies - makes me think only of the scene from "Walk Hard." "I need more didgeridoos. A thousand didgeridoos!"

Moby + more appreciation for funk. I appreciate DJs and turntablism, but this ain't it

i always thought wu-tang was kinda overrated and this record might be the best example for me. pretty ordinary stuff both in terms of beats and rhymes.