500 Favorite Albums

MY 500 FAVORITE ALBUMS OF ALL TIME

Here it is!  The King Mother Ass of All Lists!  Both me and my brother undertook this project some time last summer and like a jamoke, I waited until about Thanksgiving time to start researching.  Too many Howard Stern episodes to catch up on, damn it all.  Eventually though, I hammered down and played album after album after album plus a few hundred more a day, all while doing any and everything about the house.  Not to mention driving hither and tither and listening to even more.  A road trip around this time would have come in handy.

Both of us working on our own respective lists and a thousand placements between them, our topic of conversation for months on end revolved around little else besides "So, how high are you putting Pet Sounds?", "How many Pantera albums are making it?", and "What the hell do you mean you're not putting every Beatles album in the top ten?".  So it went on, endlessly banting away on what was going where, how much from whom, and what counted for placement.

We had virtually the same rules for inclusion, meaning no compilations, live albums, or spoken word/sketch/stand-up comedy ones.  These rules were occasionally bendy as one or two live tracks appear on otherwise proper studio releases, and most records put out pre-Beatles LP dominance adhered to the "collection of singles plus some unreleased shit" template.  Also, a few such releases with these credentials I fully intended on including and have.  Other classic artists such as Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, James Brown, and Frank Sinatra simply did not make the cut as I could not find a studio album that stood-out as representing them at their best, great as many of them were.

Sorry Roy, you were dwarfed by that one British combo here.  Of course meaning Gerry and the Pacemakers.

My brother also chose to exclude jazz, sans a few "fusion" exertions.  On this rule we agreed to disagree.  His logic was sound in that even though both of us have seen that little eleven-hundred minute Ken Burns film, he is a far more learned jazz enthusiast than I and owns and has listened to a boatload more of what the jazz is all about.  He has been planning on making his own 100 Favorite Jazz Albums list, one that I at this writing could not possibly put together.  For here, I have just over ten "pure" jazz albums and a small handful of fusion ones so shit, I would rather bring them to the party.  After all, this is a list of all the music that I like collected in my favorite medium for listening to it, the full length album.  Jazz is music, ergo it belongs.

Most genres that make my happy-center tingle appear here.  My rule is that there are no bad or good styles of music.  There is only bad and good music.  As a bloke raised on classic rock and then taking that foundation further to any and everything in the rock mold, naturally that kinda stuff dominates.  Yet therein lies a plethora of other types of song, band, and artist that tickle my fancy plenty.  You can find both Bob Dylan and Morbid Angel in the same section at the record store, (that is if you can find one of those anymore), hence my point.  Of course country and hip-hop are represented here, because why would there not be greatness therein?

Ultimately, I just really like albums.  Yes that picture at the top is my CD wall at my crib which I have been building since I got Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album and a CD player for Christmas when I was twelve years old.  Yes I am fully aware that both CDs and full length albums in general are going the way of the dinosaur ever so slowly, which does sadden me, but such is the way of things.  I may turn into one of those assholes who goes "Back in MY day we used to buy a BUNCH of songs at once from a band and they were all on this thing that looked like a shiny, flat, doughnut", but I am cool with that.  My affection for albums shall suit me fine for the rest of my days, as will my obsession with ranking them apparently.  Hopefully there is a little something here for all and plenty more to bitch or be confused at.  I would not have it any other way.  So, as Dwight D. Eisenhower would say, "Let's get bizz-aye!"