Rolling Stone: 100 Best Albums of the Nineties (not really)
By Barry Ritholtz - May 19th, 2011, 7:20AM
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This months Rolling Stones magazine has a list of the 100 Best Albums of the Nineties.Trust me, they are not. By design, these lists are subjective, debate provoking and lots of fun. They are great link bait (I bit the hook).
However, it doesn’t take long to find a few WTFs in any such list. Subjectivity is one thing, but when the 2nd paragraph of the intro reads “Eighties holdovers U2 and R.E.M. reaching creative peaks with Achtung Baby and Automatic for the People,” I know we have crossed the chasm of opinion and entered the realm of cluelessness. We can debate Achtung Baby, but Automatic for the People ? C’mon!
Regardless, these are good for arguments and laughs.
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May 19th, 2011 at 8:59 am
100 page clicks?
Ain’t happenin’.
~~~
BR: Its in groups of 10, and you can click on the albums that are interesting to you, but yeah, click whoring at its finest
May 19th, 2011 at 10:45 am
Gotta dissent there. It’s true that Achtung Baby gets the status due to being the only listenable 1990s U2 album, but Automatic for the People is the peak of the efforts on Document, Fables of the Reconstruction, and, especially, Murmur.
And it’s actually produced so you can hear the musicians–and not in an End of the Century “who cares what the band is” type of way. So unless your idea of a great production is Husker Du or Bleach,* Automatic for the People remains the peak of non-commercial REM.
*That might be the one exception, but that is as much as anything else because the Nirvana sound went from Raw Power to Aladdin Sane, as it were, and the songs changed similarly.
May 19th, 2011 at 11:31 am
Wow that’s a crummy list… They have Oasis, but no Blur, no Suede, no Supergrass, no Verve (!!!). Without Oasis AND Blur, there is no britpop scene. (They at least have Radiohead, I’ll give them that, and Pulp). No Sonic Youth. No Beastie Boys – Check Your Head. No Tool. No Primus. No Sugar (Bob Mould). No Afghan Whigs. No Hole (Live Through This). No Weezer (Blue album)…but they do have some mediocre Tom Petty, Rolling Stones, Janet Jackson and Counting Crows in there. Awesome.
May 19th, 2011 at 12:25 pm
Rolling Stone writers are almost clueless enough to write sports for the Houston Chronicle.
May 19th, 2011 at 5:12 pm
The worst ever pick in RS was in the RS Top 500 albums of all time
They put Trout Mask Replica on that list by Captain Beefheart
I collected all 500 albums with the exception of the sun sessions by Elvis which I still havent’ found. Trout Mask Replica was easily the largest waste of money. I’ve listened to it once and probably only once.
Their worst ever list imo was the top guitarists lists they put out a year or two ago, I would have reordered nearly the whole thing.
May 19th, 2011 at 5:14 pm
I can’t wait for Spin’s Top 100. It will be fun watching them try and fill the entire list with only Radiohead albums. They’ll need to use a lot of imports, I guess.