The New RS 500: Counting Down the Rolling Stone Greatest 500 Albums list
Hey. My name’s Patrick. I write stupid tweets about music sometimes, though I’m trying to do that less, and write music, which I’m doing more and will be releasing for the first time in a long time next year. I used to write about music a lot and occasionally get paid to do so. It was fun and cool and I made some great friends doing it. Eventually, I got burnt out writing reviews of albums, because that shit kinda stinks. However, I recently got the bug to write about music again. What better way to do so than critiquing and commenting on the dumbest ranked list ever.
Every few years, probably for clickbait reasons, it seems Rolling Stone will dust off their 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list and shake up the order for the sole purpose of making people Mad Online, with the most recent update being September 2020. I get it. Most of the time I spend talking online, I am inevitably making someone Mad Online. It happens. However, there is something about the 500 Greatest Albums list that is particularly fascinating. I believe it to be how definitive or authoritative Rolling Stone seems to position their own list. It’s baffling. In this blog series, I will count down the list from 500 to 1, one album a week, on Monday afternoons. Math tells me I will be 41 when I finish this endeavor. What the fuck.
With each piece, I’m going to provide my own mini-review (around 250–500 words, with some exceptions), examine whether or not I believe the ranking to be appropriate, and look at how the album has moved through previous iterations of the List. Hope you stick around and enjoy it. Hopefully it doesn’t make you as Mad Online as this list frequently makes me (sorry in advance, Fleetwood Mac fans). Mostly, I’m just happy to be writing about music again.
