ein lesenswerter Kommentar zur neuen RS-Bestenliste von Sheldon Pearce im New Yorker:
The way forward for Rolling Stone was to consult a wider array of music enthusiasts, in the hope of covering blind spots. The biggest change with the 2020 list is the diversified voting pool—more than three hundred artists, journalists, and industry figures from across genres participated. Two hundred and seventy-three people voted for the original list, but, finally, the demographics of the voters has been expanded. The Alabama Shakes front person Brittany Howard voted. The Cash Money Records executive Ronald (Slim) Williams voted. I voted. From Beyoncé, Alice Bag, and Billie Eilish to Lin-Manuel Miranda, Herbie Hancock, and Gene Simmons, the 2020 list puts greater emphasis on variety. Poptimism is clearly making headway: more rap, more Robyn, more Shakira, more Lady Gaga. Britney Spears’s “Blackout” outranks albums by Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, and Ornette Coleman. But aspirations to fundamentally change the list, and list-making, are mostly thwarted by methodology.
[…]
The 2020 list does move away from the stranglehold that boomer rock had over the 2003 list: sixty per cent of the original’s top ten was composed of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and the highest rap album sat at forty-eighth. Now two rap albums released in the past decade rank higher than the original list’s greatest album of all time: the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (now ranked twenty-fourth). But, though some patterns have broken, the new results aren’t exactly a deviation from the norm. Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” is still the highest-ranked album by a woman; it’s just third now, not thirtieth. (It was third on my ballot.) The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” stayed at No. 2 (No. 7 for me), and the new No. 1, Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” was No. 6 before (No. 8 for me). The other albums that moved into the top ten aren’t exactly outliers: Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life,” Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” and Prince and the Revolution’s “Purple Rain,” which topped my ballot. These are some of the best-selling albums of all time. Three of them won Grammys for Album of the Year. All were inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress.
The music that has defined the new millenium—trap music, indie pop, and E.D.M., in particular—is still woefully underrepresented, and the mixtape format, which shaped the musical output of much of the past two decades, is all but ignored. Jazz and R. &. B albums that weren’t already given a prestige distinction are rare. There are only eight electronic albums, and four of them are by Daft Punk and Massive Attack. It’s worth noting that seven of the top ten albums on the Turning the Tables list were the seven highest-ranked albums by women in the Rolling Stone 500, which implies both an inclusive push and a continued homogeneity among lists. The needle is moving, but incrementally, and it isn’t yet reflecting the speed and lawlessness of the Internet.
Hier lang zum vollständigen Artikel:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-futility-of-rolling-stones-best-albums-list
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba