Musical note
The "best of decade" lists are out. I note that I own four of the titles on The Onion’s list, and eighteen of the titles on Rolling Stone’s list.
What Does the Protagonist Want?
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Wow, I’ve got 4 on the Rolling Stone list and 0 on The Onion’s list. Damn. Bruce Springsteen didn’t get nearly enough love from either one.
Thread is useless without titles. Or however the kids would phrase it.
Really doe, as an owner of exactly half the Onion list, I’d love to know what you have. It’s a very good list, but if I were picking four somewhat mainstream rock albums, I’d go with Clinic’s “Internal Wrangler”, The New Pornographers’ “Mass Romantic”, The Strokes’ “Is This It” and The Shins’ “Chutes Too Narrow”. (I’m thinking for some reason you already have the White Stripes.)
— Kent M. Beeson
Of your titles, I bought the Strokes and the Shins, but eventually sold them back. The other ones I haven’t heard of. Most of the Onion list I haven’t heard of.
The point is, I’m old.
I’m a bit of a music nut, so I’ve got 40 of the albums on The Onion and 78 from Rolling Stone, but I don’t listen to more than a handful with any sort of frequency.
Unsurprisingly, Rolling Stone’s list is pretty bad IMO. Any ‘Best of’ list that includes U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” as a ranked best should be pretty much disqualified.
Well, that’s kind of what depresses me. The Rolling Stone list is a consensus of well-mounted product, the Onion list probably more accurately reflects what is actually good. Which makes it that much more depressing that I’ve never heard of most of them.
I dunno, I find it depressing sometimes that I spend so much time digging through crap music to find good stuff. You could look at the Onion list as a sort of prequalified list, so when you decide to venture you’ve already got a guide. I imagine it wouldn’t take more than an hour to go listen to samples of the entire list online and decide from there.
One question – which Rolling Stone list are we talking about? There’s a user-picked list, and an artist-picked list. The artist-picked list is 100 albums, of which I have 16.
Both lists are pretty uninspiring. When I try to think of my favorite albums of the last ten years, they all turn out to be more than ten years old. The decade went by in a flash. An uninspiring flash.