Member-only story
Featured
A Comprehensive Review of Rolling Stone Magazine’s ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’
475 hours of music. 6,800 songs. 197 days of nonstop listening.
Introduction
Back in late May 2024, my boss bought me the lovely hardback edition of the Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (the book) as a 40th birthday present. On flicking through — looking, as most people would, for the albums they knew and where they placed — I was struck by how much of it I hadn’t heard. I hadn’t even heard the top three albums in their entirety before.
The list, at least, contained a good chunk of the albums that I would have considered “the greatest of all time.” I remember my first feeling, on flicking through the book, was dismay that my own personal favourite album and the one that I considered the greatest, Radiohead’s OK Computer, was fairly low down at number 42 (although I did like this number in the context of it being the answer to ‘The meaning of life, the universe and everything’ in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).
I had immediately judged the albums ahead of my favourite as inferior without having actually heard many of them. We do this a lot with music. We talk about our favourite artists being “better” or “greater” when actually what we…
