Cash was a master of stage banter.
I know way more of these songs than I realized.
Bob Dylan is probably overrated, right? Nobody can be as good as his reputation, right?
This is his second album and it's basically perfect from start to finish. Damn it.
Bowie finding Jesus while strung out on coke is a thing to behold.
I was introduced to Public Enemy by another white kid at church youth group who exclusively listened to them. It was 1991 and the hardest thing I’d ever heard was Mc Hammer so uhhh that was an eye opening experience.
This is when I started to check out on Radiohead. They started crossing an experimentation threshold where I lose patience. Nothing against anybody who likes it, it's just not my thing.
With that being said, it makes for nice background music.
Hell yes. I'm usually more of a song/melody guy than a groove guy, but for whatever reason this hits the spot.
I am sorry to trot out the old cliche, but I don't know what else to say. AC/DC is fun as hell to listen to for about 10 minutes. The repetition just gets dull over the course of an entire album.
I like Taylor Swift in general, but it's funny to me that all she had to do to get the best reviews of her career was to make the arrangements sound appropriately indie enough to satisfy the tastemakers. Music criticism is a sham.
I'll bet this is great if you're on day three of a mdma bender trying to keep the vibes sailing, but in literally any other scenario this is interminable.
I understand every criticism people have about Bruce, I just don't care.
I'm not the biggest Guns N' Roses fan, but the amazing thing about this record is how they burst forth fully formed right from the start. Some bands start out tentative and take off over time. Some bands have a great first record and evolve. GNR is definitively already an iconic band on track 1, side 1 of their first album. It's pretty remarkable.
Is it a sign of a midlife crisis that I am rapidly growing to appreciate jazz more and more?
It's fine.
Judas Preist is one of those brands where I never remember to listen to them but when I do hear them they rule and I wonder why I don't listen to them more. Then I forget again until the next time.
I don't hate Coldplay, I'm just indifferent. Nothing here inspires anything in me.
The year before this came out, Kurt Cobain started off what would turn out to be the last Nirvana studio album with the lyric "Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I'm bored and old." That's a good summary of where music was that year. Grunge and alternative had been mainstream for a few years, and angst had become a commodity. Too many bands would sneer and mope and then take a peek to see if you were paying attention to how angsty they were. Into that environment came Trent Reznor kicking down the fucking door and demanding Fuck You, I'll Show You Angst. And so he did. This is dark, sad, mean, angry, demands to be heard, and most surprising to me, holds up better than I could have imagined. It's still hard to believe that something this nihilistic sold millions of copies and was a major hit. I guess we still had some real actual angst in us and needed the catharsis of a record like this more than we realized.
It's fine, but nothing really stands out either. I'll probably never listen to this again.
Okay! One of the main reasons I wanted to do this project was to get exposed to things I hadn't heard or wouldn't ordinarily listen to. This is a lot of fun. It turns out I've definitely heard a couple of these songs before, I just didn't realize it. A pleasant surprise, would listen again!
One of my favorites. So raw, so catchy. It grabbed me immediately back in the 90s and I revisit it regularly.
A little puzzled by its presence on this list. There are a couple of standout tracks here, but this isn't even one of the best Foo Fighters albums, let alone one of the best albums ever. It's a blueprint of better things to come, sure, but hardly essential.
"White Winter Hymnal" sounds lovely on a Christmas playlist. The rest of this is alright. Feels much longer than it is, I was shocked that it clocks in under 40 minutes.
I don't know what "chooglin" is and I'm afraid to ask why I should keep doing it. Also, it's hard to separate CCR from the context of being the band that soundtracks every Vietnam sequence in a movie. My favorite of theirs is "Travelin' Band" which isn't on this, but it's still decent.
Pretty good!
Pearl Jam was one of the earlier bands I got really into as a kid. I was not super into them for long, perhaps a year, before I moved on to other things. In the intervening years I and I feel like most people, kind of wrote Pearl Jam off as cheesy and uncool. You don't hear them talked about in the same hushed tones as their peers like Nirvana or Soundgarden. I have to say, revisiting this, it's kind of a banger. Pearl Jam's biggest sin here is that their version of grunge is rooted more heavily in hard rock than punk. This is VERY much more in the vein of Guns N Roses than The Clash. I had completely forgotten the flashy guitar solos and strutting grooves, and surprised myself very much with how much I enjoyed it. Will listen again much sooner than 30 years!
This is just never going to be my style. With that being said, I like Play a little more than the usual fare in this genre because of how heavily Moby leans on blues, gospel, and soul. I'd still rather listen to the original recordings, but that's just a matter of personal preference than a judgment on the album.
In a Venn diagram of metal and showtunes, I am the exact center. Meat Loaf is still inside the part where they intersect, but a little more to the showtunes side. Result: I really fucking dig Meat Loaf, I just wish he could amp up the heaviness just a smidge more.
The sexist knock on this record is that it doesn't count because Courtney Love was married to Kurt Cobain, so he must have written it. That's such a stupid argument. Even if he helped, so what? Artists mention bouncing ideas off their significant others all the time, and it's never an issue when the artist is a man. But I think the most glaring evidence to dispute that notion is that while Live Through This is good, it is no Nirvana. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with that! This is still better than the average record of the time.
My knowledge of younger artists is woefully bad so I am glad to see some on this list. Pretty good! I love a good pop hook.
I don't have much of a frame of reference here, but I enjoyed it well enough. Why are the Spotify play counts so low?
Criminally underrated. Will never understand why he is not massive. This isn't my favorite of his but that's still better than most.
Every person I know who loves Aphex Twin suffers from crippling migraines. These two things may not be unrelated.
Everyone knows the saying "Greater than the sum of their parts," in which a group comes together and creates something beyond what they would be capable of individually. That is not the case for Led Zeppelin. Any one member of Zeppelin could be the genius virtuoso in a different band. That four of them came together in a single group and lasted as long as they did is a minor miracle. And this is upper echelon within their catalog...easily one of their two or three best records, if not the best.
Tough one to review. I get what the band was going for here. Take the attention off THE BEATLES as an entity, defy expectations and expand creative muscle, and write songs in a bunch of different genres and styles. And there is a lot of great stuff here. But like most double albums, it is overstuffed. Some of it is not all that pleasing to listen to, even though it fits the concept. Some may just call that challenging, and that's valid. I just don't have the patience for an hour-and-a-half challenge that I would for a 40-minute challenge. That being said, when the Beatles do it, it's still better than the average band, which skews the scale.
I prefer "house singer in a seedy 70s coffee house" Tom Waits to "carnival barker at a freak show" Tom Waits. This is the last hurrah for the former, he would start leaning more toward the latter a couple of years later. A great entry point for someone looking to see what he's about. I wouldn't call it accessible, but it's as accessible as Waits gets.
Credit to Jack White for knowing what he wants. The man has a concept in mind, from music, to packaging and presentation, to live performance, and assembles it all into a cohesive total in a way that almost no one else is doing these days. I enjoy the songs, but not in a way that I immediately gravitate towards repeat listens though. And isn't that sort of the end goal? This is a record that I admire more than I actually love.
Early contender for least favorite album of the project. It gave me a headache. Not for me.
If you only know "Take On Me," you may be pleasantly surprised. There are several above-average synth-pop songs here that are worth investigating. That being said, it clearly is dragged onto this list on the strength of that track, which is, of course, an all-timer if ever there was one.
I knew Gene Clark, of course, but not this particular record. Enjoyed it quite a bit. If this isn't considered a foundational record for alt country, it should be.
The definition of a supergroup. It’s funny how much internal strife there was juxtaposed against these gorgeous harmonies.
One of those things I enjoy in the moment but don't really revisit without prompting.
Pretty surprised at how low the Spotify listens are for this, I thought this was one of her bigger records. The production is extremely dated...one of the unfortunate side effects of current, fresh, cutting-edge music is that it sounds extremely of its time 30 years down the road. It's also overlong, clocking in at over an hour, with a fair bit of filler. All that being said, it's a solid release, and at its best, it's as good as anything else from that decade.
I like this more than most records by a DJ I've listened to so far. It's still so, so long though. Why are they always so long? Cut up a sample of me declaring this just isn't for me.
Should be right up my alley, but it doesn't really click. It has the style but not the songwriting. I like it all right, but there are a hundred other bands doing the same thing better, so why wouldn't I listen to those instead? Nothing here is inspired. How did this end up on this list?
When I started this project I was not anticipating that it would be 500 Albums You Need To Hear Before You Die and 501 Electronic Albums That Are Too Goddamn Long And Repetitive And Will Give You A Migraine.
Spotify only has half the album and couldn’t find it on YouTube. Fats is great. Wish I could have listened to the rest.
I never could get into Sufjan. Much of this is whimsical but humorless, and it is off-putting for me. I do like when he goes stripped down, but there isn’t much of that here outside of “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” Definitely not one of my favorites, but a lot of people seem to like it.
Mott the Hoople is a band that is the definition of being remembered exactly as much as they should be. Whenever they come up, it's "Oh yeah! They're all right!" Neither underrated nor overrated, this is passable glam-adjacent rock. Decent but never great.
It's fine. Come for Stepping Stone, stay for the workmanlike rest of the record.
You already know you love this.
The global reviews on this are pretty lackluster, and it didn't really move me much, but it also feels like it might be a grower. But then I'm not that motivated to revisit it yet either.
Is it possible for someone to be universally lauded and yet still be underrated? For my money, she's one of the best songwriters of all time.
Maybe the most impossible record to review of all time.
The music, the rhymes, the flow, the talent, second to none. Best record by one of the best rappers ever.
But how do you get past the homophobia and misogyny and glorification of domestic violence in good faith? He would argue that it was just jokes, or the backlash to Slim Shady made him push it further, that he's not homophobic. That may well be true. Elton John performed with him on the Grammys and they hugged and held hands! But that's the struggle of art, isn't it? You put something out into the world, it ceases to be defined by you and becomes defined by the audience. Some of the audience has a right to reject it...if gay kids are hurt by repeated f-slurs, you don't get to wave it off as just jokes. Some of the audience will take it literally, and Em realizes this...that's what "Stan" is about, after all. Dre doesn't mind that there's a song that fantasizes about killing him, so he's cool, but what about the woman already suffering from abuse whose husband knows every word to "Kim?" Aren't her fears valid?
So how do you review something that by every discernable metric SHOULD be an easy 5 out of 5, EXCEPT for the fact that it's full of hurtful lyrics that deserve the lowest rating I can give? I don't know what else to do except meet in the middle and write a long explanation as to why this is one of the few works of genius I can think of that most people probably shouldn't listen to.
"Layla," and some other shit, played by a racist stealing blues licks and sucking the life out of them.
What the hell with all the negative global reviews. I got this served up the day after Derek and the Dominos and it was such a palate cleanser. What if white boy blues had some form of passion and urgency behind it instead of an hour of Clapton's passionless wanking?
Just about as 5 as a 5 can get. Bursting with creativity. The ONLY record over an hour long so far in this project that earns its length and doesn't feel exhausting.
Abba is one of those bands where I am ideally satisfied with a greatest hits album. When they're great, they're phenomenal, but they're great like 2 or 3 times per album. Put those 2-3 together with a bunch of other top 2 tracks from other records and you have non-stop bangers. Put them together with 10 mediocre tracks and I just wonder why I'm not listening to Abba Gold instead.
I am firmly in the unique window of having been too young for Dire Straits. My parents were too old for them, I was 7 when Brothers in Arms came out, and then they kind of disappeared for years after that. It's not that I never visited other bands from that era, but you can't catch up to everything. I know the singles, of course. The main thing that surprised me is that other than those, this is a fairly plodding, introspective record. It feels like they trojan horsed their way into the MTV Generation with a couple of catchy videos and then saddled them with a bunch of sad bastard songs on the rest of the album.
Hell yeah this is great. Infinitely cool flow.
This might be something that would unlock for me with repeat listens, or it might not be very good, I'm pretty bad at guessing which direction a record is going to go in those terms. On this listen it didn't speak to me at all.
As perfect as perfect gets. The kind of record that has books written about it, and deserves them.
I can't for the life of me understand why Steely Dan is worshipped. But at least this is acceptable, moderately pleasing soft rock before they got too pretentious.
Great cover art, not one of my personal favorite Beach Boys records musically. Something feels off to me. Still some lovely harmonies and a couple of nice songs though.
I hate this version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." Otherwise excellent, half funk, half traditional Motown soul.
Pet Shop Boys are always great. Gold standard synth pop.
In theory, this should be totally in my wheelhouse. Paul Weller and R&B? I regret to say it doesn't work. Sometimes it starts going in a good direction and then takes a turn for the worse. Few things in music history are as ill-advised as Weller rapping. Stick to The Jam and leave the Soul and R&B (and for god's sake, hip hop) to the professionals.
Slight but satisfying. There's not much of a hint of what was to come for the band, but it's clearly better than most of their contemporaries.
One of those records where every song is a classic but you're fatigued by hearing them so many times so you dock it a little even though you know you probably shouldn't. If you haven't heard this a zillion times you're in for a treat.
Great live album. Van Morrison is frustratingly inconsistent but is in fine form here.
Gotta be honest, I did not expect this to start with a Dracula ass keyboard solo. Perhaps I should have.
"Livin' on a Prayer," "Wanted Dead or Alive," and "You Give Love a Bad Name" are the pinnacle of hair metal. Arguably that is damning with faint praise, but they are genuinely good. It's just tough to suffer through the rest.
Smooth and funky in equal measures, so great.
One of those records where you're ready to give it five stars two minutes into it, but by the end it was too samey for too long.
He was a piece of shit in multiple different ways. He plays the piano real nice, but still a piece of shit. Did I mention he's a piece of shit?
Earliest Stones to sound like the Stones. Solid.
As good as it gets, easy five stars. Enjoyable start to finish. How can you not love that voice.
What if U2 before they became insufferable? Turns out it's pretty fuckin' good!
The first record in this genre so far that I haven't outright hated. It's still not something you're gong to put on your turntable and actively listen to, but it works reasonably well as background noise. I don't know if that could be considered a high compliment really, but at least it didn't leave me reaching for the Excedrin.
I mean, it's THE Jazz album. Everybody knows it. Dads are issued a copy in the mail when they buy their first Crosley suitcase turntable from Target. But it's inescapable for a reason because it's a masterpiece from beginning to end.
I have not done any research on this but it feels like the kind of record that got a lot of hype when it came out but that people have now turned on and pretend they always hated it. For me it’s just solid comfortable synth pop, I kind of love it.
What, and I cannot stress this enough, THE FUCK.
Everybody has those blind spot bands, right? You know the name, you hear it mentioned as an influential artist, but you can't listen to everything so somehow it bypasses you. You always meant to check it out but never got around to it.
So this is my first exposure to Roxy Music. I assumed based on the name, the association with fashion, the groups they influenced, and the era, that I'd be queuing up some Bowie-esque glam rock. Hooooo buddy.
How do I describe it? You know the scene in Spinal Tap where Nigel quits and they decide to do a jazz exploration at their next gig? Ever seen those videos on YouTube where someone overlays live footage of Phish with saxophone honks and random drum fills and out-of-tune guitar chord plucks? That's Roxy Music, friends. This is Grateful Dead on an off night after a bad trip. The last song sounds like a fucking jam band Monster Mash. This was so spectacularly unpleasant to listen to from start to finish that I'm kind of invested in solving the mystery of how the fuck anyone ever listened to it in the first place? Did you all just hang the cover on your wall and treat it as art? Did you accidentally put another record in the sleeve and spend the 70s confusing which band was which? Make it make sense.
"Fast Car" is a perfect song, the kind of bolt of lightning that a songwriter MAYBE gets once in a lifetime, if they're lucky. It's somewhat unfortunate that it came on her first record, because it overshadows everything else here, even though the rest is wonderful in its own right. She got unfairly dismissed as a one-hit wonder (at least until "Give Me One Reason" was a hit a few years later) for making a great first album with a generational pop song on it.
So yeah, the elephant in the room is the antisemitism and misogyny. You can make an argument that it is never okay and steals attention from the impact of the rest of the record, and that may be a valid point. You can make an argument that the importance of the messages about racism and the Black experience is so strong that it is undeniable in spite of those things, and that may also be a valid point. I think it may be up to the individual, and it likely is a spectrum. For me, it does make for a more challenging listen, but then again it's supposed to be a challenging listen for me as a white man, but then again is it a mixed message, and on and on.
This is in the conversation for one of the greatest Side 1's in history. Starting off with Peter Piper, It's Tricky, My Adidas, and Walk This Way? I mean, come on. It does lose a little steam as it goes, but what wouldn't drop off from that high?
Just a delight from start to finish
Charming and likable with a ton of variety.
Let's get one thing out of the way, Tina Turner was a brilliant, electrifying singer who deserved every ounce of success she got. It's a shame this had the misfortune to come out during an era defined by the most hideous production techniques in history. Her vocals are fire and the songwriting itself is fine but the way it's recorded is just garbage. I wish someone had had the foresight to re-record this before she passed. It's really, really hard to recommend even though she was a genius.
I specifically remember being afraid of Sepultura and this album cover in particular as a sheltered church kid. Seems silly in retrospect. Pretty good thrash metal. I don't LOVE it love it, but it's impressive.
There are earlier punk records. There are better punk records. But is there a more iconic punk record? I'm not sure there is. It captures a moment that didn't exist for long, but has been emulated for decades in watered-down form. Lydon's sneering vocals are the highlight here.
Charles Schulz once wrote in a Calvin and Hobbes introduction "Bill Watterson draws wonderful bedside tables. I admire that." His point, I think, was that detail matters. Anybody can draw a funny joke, but detail enhances our enjoyment of the experience, and it takes a trained hand to take it to another level. I think about that quote a lot in regards to Frank Zappa. Zappa is well known for not coloring with the lines of rock and roll, straddling disparate elements like avant-garde, jazz, and humor and bringing them into the medium. But I don't think he would have been able to stretch those limits without being skilled at the base medium. He's not someone I regularly play unprompted, but I'm always impressed when I do. Frank Zappa, metaphorically, draws wonderful bedside tables with these songs.
People act like Nirvana was depressing when Alice in Chains exist. Everything about this band is tuned to bum you out. They're super good at it, but by the end I'm desperate for a sunny melody.
Something about this feels off. Every time I start to think I'm enjoying it, it takes a turn I don't like.
Global reviews on this one were wild. To me, this is one of the greatest power pop records ever, but all the most upvoted reviews hate it?
It's not fair that Bad Brains get dismissed as hardcore too often, their ability to switch up styles is unprecedented for the genre.
It's an Elvis album. The descriptions talk about how he stretched out on this one but I don't know, it just sounds like Elvis. He's best known for singles so if you are looking for a record full of Elvis songs you've never heard that aren't as good as the singles, have I got the record for you.
Hooks like these are my kryptonite. Just satisfying all the way through, and they have a ton of albums that achieve the same. Great underrated band.
You already know all the knocks on Coldplay, I will not repeat them here. I don't really care for them, I don't hate them outright, this is probably their best album.
I've been on the record several times during this project about my disdain for double albums. They are almost always overlong monuments to hubris and excess with too much filler padding the run time. Many, many decent double albums would have been instant classics by trimming the fat and making them single discs. Many more are just ill-conceived in their entirety. Billy Corgan is uniquely predisposed to believe he could pull it off, though, and relatively early in the Pumpkins career. It came out in the era of CDs, which means that two stuffed CDs translated to more like four LPs. Everything about it seems like a recipe for disaster. And then that crazy son of a bitch pulled it off.
Mellon Collie would be on a short list for greatest double (quadruple?) albums of all time. It is rock solid until well into disc two, and even then only lets the foot off the pedal slightly. Sonically diverse with interesting arrangements and compelling melodies and hooks throughout.
AND he put out a BOX SET of B-sides from the same era that is ALSO packed with tracks that could have made the cut here. This could have easily been four CDs/eight LPs and been nearly equally as good. This whole project is a remarkable feat.
This was just tedious to me. I don't hate it, but...
It's the peak of early Beatles. They haven't started branching out into exploring other sounds, so they would make better records later, but they're seasoned songwriters and performers by now, and it shows.
Title track is an all-timer for sure. He's a divisive rapper but I err on the side of liking him, I think some of the corny stuff is supposed to be funny. But, this is just way too long and loses steam fast after that perfect title track anchored right in the middle of the record.
I LIKE it, but lovely harmonies can only take you so far, and CSN is missing a crucial ingredient without Neil Young.
103 albums in and we have our first that I was not familiar with going in, and is going to end up as one of my favorite records going forward. Holy shit this is incredible. I'm falling behind because I keep listening to this on repeat instead. An eclectic masterpiece.
I spent decades thinking I didn't like Bob Marley because I didn't like the stoners who were into him at my school. Turns out he's incredible. Who knew? My loss!
My nomination for most dated lyric in history: there's a song on here where they make fun of a rich man for having a 24 inch TV, lol
I was dreading the global reviews on this, and they were what I expected. Here's the thing. If you've never heard Damaged, it's going to sound like a samey racket. But if you were around 14 when you discovered it, it's going to be a foundational record. Guess which I am.
Equal parts sarcastically funny, furiously angry, and heartbreakingly sad, it's a vital touchpoint to the evolution of punk rock, hardcore, and metal. But, also very much a "you had to be there" record. I get the objections, but I will always love it.
It takes some real chutzpah to call yourself a genius in the title of your album (and not even a Greatest Hits, just a regular record!), but he ain't wrong.
I cannot emphasize enough how baffling it is that this album starts with 23 minutes of the worst jam band noodling I've ever heard in my life (seriously, nobody is paying attention to each other, every instrument is off doing it's own thing the entire time), and ends with 8 minutes of feedback. The four songs in between are actually all right, but I can't in good conscience recommend it, because why would I want to subject anyone to the bookends?
It's probably a four star record if you skip tracks 1, 6 and 7, but I'm docking it for having the audacity to waste my time.
I am of the opinion that Arcade Fire got too famous too fast. There is an almost indefinable air of self-satisfaction here that I can't shake. It's good, albeit probably the weakest of the first three Arcade Fire albums, but off-putting.
Just about perfect. Short, sweet, catchy. Nobody did it like Waylon.
OK! I like this! It's more a whole bunch of sketches of musical ideas than SONGS for the most part, but I don't hate it. Some good grooves here.
Wow. Might be his best work? A treatise on death by a dying man who knows he's dying.
I never knew there was a horse in this band.
Look, like it or not, your parents and/or grandparents (depending on your age) definitely got busy to this record. There's a good chance you wouldn't even exist without Anita Baker. Show some respect!
Lenny Kravitz has an annoying habit of writing choruses that are just the title of the song repeated over and over. I don't always mind it so much, but when it's most of the songs on the record it starts to really grate.
Boomers always complain about slang, but this record is from 1958 and EVERY SONG TITLE is slang. I don't know what any of it means and I don't care, this fucking rules.
It's 1977. Punk is in full swing. It is by and large stealing sounds Iggy Pop was making five years earlier. Meanwhile, Iggy is making a record that sounds five years ahead of its time.
One of the best live albums ever. Maybe the best, I don't know. It's so raw and energetic, the crowd is into it, Sam is into it, it's banger song after banger song. If you think you don't like live albums, listen to this and you may change your mind.
I'm not ordinarily into prog and prog-adjacent stuff, but I'm so impressed with Santana. Bringing authentic Latin influences into the music really brightens it up and makes this a great listen.
It's a funk masterpiece. Just layers and layers to unpack and enjoy.
This is interminable. The production is good and saves it from 1 star but raps come off as phony and it's so fucking long and drawn out. Please stop making records over an hour long, and for the love of God please stop putting them on this list.
Prince said I'm going to make one of the most iconic pop records of all time and then spend the next 30 years making whatever I want and y'all will lap it up. A genius with a genius plan, executed perfectly.
Pretty wild how a record can flop and then 30 years later all of a sudden it comes out of nowhere and influences every indie band on the planet.
The hysteria over this record is maybe a tad overblown, but it IS really good, just maybe not transcendent.
It's the Beatles. I've always sort of wondered if the suite on the second half was a clever stroke of genius or whether they were just sick of each other and quit writing songs halfway through. Probably both? I'm sure this information is contained in one of the ten million books and documentaries about the band.
Lovely melodies, hard to believe it took decades for him to posthumously receive his due.
I will forever be mystified by the mainstream success of Bjork, but putting that aside, this is really good mood-setting music.
This is the best Aerosmith would ever be, and it's bland and pedestrian. Sweet Emotion is the only thing preventing one star here.
