One at a Time: Re-Ranking Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums

Here's how this will hopefully work. I will pick a number at random (using this random number generator), and then find which album that is on Rolling Stone's list of 500 Greatest Albums released in 2003, and then write about that album. It's sort of based on this website called Flick Charts, which is a cool website for ranking movies. It starts by asking you a simple question, "Which one is better?" and then shows you two movies. You have to pick, and once you've answered enough head to head, you've got a list of your favorite movies, ranked in the order that you just said.

This won't work exactly like that, because I'm not going head to head. Instead I'm just going to keep a running list of the ones I've already chosen, and then rank the current one against those. So whichever album gets picked first, that's going to be ranked number one right away, until it gets taken down by another one. So each time I choose a new album, I'll have a list of the previous ones to weigh it against, and then place it somewhere on that running list.

Also, as a side note, I do know about "Kill Your Idols," which is a book edited by Jim DeRogatis where a bunch of critics do take-down pieces on classic albums based on the same Rolling Stone list. It's a very cool book, I've read a number of the articles. The only real idea that's similar to what I want to do is to talk about the albums on the list, but also to talk about them without the context of what they are; the books subtitle is "A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics." I want to ape that a little in that I don't want to say something like, "this album was the most important album," or "everyone I knew bought this album," or "this influenced a whole new generation of X genre." I just want to write about the music as music, and eventually I'll have my own list of the way that I'd rank the 500 albums on Rolling Stone's list.

Now, I can't exactly commit to finishing this. Even at twice a week (which isn't going to happen), that's still almost five years. Because of this, I'm not going to limit myself to posting on certain days or anything like that, I'm just going to post when I can, and hopefully jump out ahead of that ten-year-pace.

And finally, I'm sure that this is going to seem a little off, and totally biased towards the music that I already like or don't like. I'm fine with that. For instance, there's five U2 albums on the list, and I dislike U2. Of course, when it comes to those albums, I'm going to give them their fair share and try to listen to them completely unbiased, but I'm just laying it out there now that it may not end up changing my mind on certain things. I've never been a fan of much hip-hop, but I respect its place in the music industry and in the canon. It's just going to be hard for me to talk about an album like, say, "Reasonable Doubt" by Jay-Z, because I haven't listened to enough hip hop/rap music to talk about it critically in any way. I promise I'll give each one a fair shot, though. But this is, after all, my ranking of the 500 albums, not necessarily one that is best. I'm not a professional critic or anything like that, so don't blame me when the bottom 50 end up being all hip-hop albums that I'm listening to for the first time and the top ten are all Bruce albums.