1001 albums you must hear before you die

I found this list online, and since I'm trying to listen to full albums at the moment, I thought this would be a good way to go.

My plan is to work my way through it, though probably in a random order.

Maybe someone else wants to join me, or maybe you have already listened to a bunch of them.

http://www.discogs.com/lists/1001-Al...e/18222?page=1

This is not an offical review thread, just a bit of chit chat.

I used to read this religiously in high school when I had a study class in the library. I discovered quite a few favourites thanks to this book.

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"George, this is a little too much for me. Escaped convicts, fugitive sex... I've got a cockfight to focus on."

Anyone you can recommend?

I'm considering getting the book.

It's easier and faster than completing the '1001 movies to watch before you die' ... but it's not like an offical challenge or anything, I probably won't listen to them all.

The list is interesting, but it could use more non-English-language artists.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

True.

I just started from the beginning so I'm listening to:

I like this one better:

http://rateyourmusic.com/list/Poohka...t_albums_ever/

It's a top 500 however.

One interesting thing I learned from posting here and living in the US is how "English Centric" the English speaking countries are. A natural consequence of having a population of over 400 million native English speakers in the industrialized world (which is nearly 1/3 of the industrialized world's population though only 6% of the world's population) is that it creates a massive cultural bubble, so that anything that's not English speaking is as if it never existed. Music, film, TV series, even comic books*, almost everything they consume is from inside the bubble almost as if the world was the bubble.

In Brazil it is not that different though. But we at least have a slightly more diversified sources for cultural products than the US for instance. Jiraffejustin even told me it's not expected from people of a country/culture to watch movies not made in that country/culture, well, actually that only applies to the English speaking world.

*comics are a specially interesting case because the proportion of world's comics consumed in the English speaking world is very small, less than 5% by volume (given the data I have).

Browsing through the list I notice the lack of Heavy Metal there as well as lack of classical. Classical is normal because they are not "albums". But metal is seriously underrepresented there. Some essential bands like Morbid Angel, Kreator, Destruction, Sodom, Blind Guardian, Kamelot, Ensiferum, Accept, X-Japan, Helloween, Bathory, Mayhem, Darkthrone, Manowar, Celtic Frost among others. That list only includes British/American metal bands which are only 1/4 of all metal bands (25,000 metal bands hail from US+UK+Canada, according to metal archives, worldwide is over 100,000).

They fail to include the best albums of the couple metal bands that are there as well, Heaven and Hell, widely regarded as Black Sabbath's best, is not there, neither is Powerslave, regarded by many as Iron Maiden's best or Judas Priest's Sad Wings of Destiny. Sepultura shows up with 2 albums there, too bad one is awful and the other is mediocre but they have produced better music before.

Metal though is essentially a "medium" in itself, we have mainstream popular music, we have classical music and we have metal. There is some overlap but not much, metal fans don't listen to mainstream pop music or classical, mainstream pop music fans don't listen to classical or metal, classical fans don't listen to much pop music or metal.

They seem to have a small bias for first albums (especially where more obscure-ish bands are concerned.) This is maybe understandable where "influence" is concerned but still unfortunate since (among others) they picked the wrong Einsturzende Neubauten, Magazine and Gang of Four and Suicide albums.

For genres I care about...

Their coverage of post punk is pretty good, overall.
Same with hip hop.
The coverage of industrial is pathetic. Poe. Thetic.
Same goes for (pre-90s) electronic music generally.

For albums I've heard if I had to pick one that stands out as not really deserving... might be Welcome to the Pleasure Dome. I like Relax as much as the next straight man but the rest of that album is filler.

And it's a crime that Lola isn't on there. I mean granted there are already 4 other Kinks albums but if I had to keep to that limit I would have bumped Something Else.

Forget Relax, this is the best song off of that album:




But aside from that and a few other singles (their cover of Born To Run is silly fun), I do agree that it is just a hits-and-filler album.

My vote for least deserving would be Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. It's the token hair metal pick and I get that it represents a certain time for music, but it's not a very good album.

Well, that only shows that these lists for a medium as enormous as music as extremely problematic. First, to have a good top 1001 list they would have to do a survey of all major genres of popular music (jazz, pop, rock, metal, hip hop, punk, etc), which number in the dozens, then hire specialists in each genre (not "general critics") to pick their top ca. 40-60 albums from that genre and to do that in a global fashion, including bands from major music regions of the world, not only English speaking countries. Then it would be a decent top 1001 albums list.

Sure it's problematic, but my point was that it's unevenly problematic. It's not really that big a deal if some of the genres have gaps, but it's a lot lamer that some of them are gaps. (Not that I'm trying to quarrel with you, just wanted to clarify myself).