[article] whither Husker Du?: Rolling Stone's "100 Best Albums"

Wow. I haven't posted on this site in ages (excepting the Jennifer Love Hewitt morass). Hey, I love lists; we all love lists, right? Trouble is, I just can't trust critics or readers to produce an honest, thoughtful list of the 100 best albums. C'mon. Linkin Park? System of a Down? The Strokes? Every Weezer album?!? It seems that we readers lack perspective.
Maybe everyone should wait a year or two before holding up a couple of nu- metal albums as superior to 'Astral Weeks'. Hey, I own 'Toxicity'; I enjoy it. But I'm not going to kid myself and claim that it's a better record than all but a handful in history. The Strokes are wonderful, no doubt, and hopefully they have a full career ahead of 'em, but to lift them up over seminal albums by the Velvet Underground (besides the first one), Sonic Youth, the Stooges, Television, and Joy Division seems incredibly short-sighted.

Garbage made the list? No Doubt? Weezer's 'Maladroit'? I wanted to expect more than this. We need to forget that these discs "stood out" in a pack of teen-pop filler. What's key is, will these albums stand the test of time? Will people still return to the records for the same reasons they first got them? I would argue that we can't do that now. We need to wait.

If we're just going to reward popularity, we shouldn't have stopped with Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Bob Marley's 'Legend' (instead of an actual studio album, not a greatest- hits package), and Mariah Carey, among others. Where are the Eagles, Billy Joel, Shania Twain, Whitney Houston, Kenny G, Celine Dion?

I dunno. I guess these sorts of lists shouldn't be turned over to the masses. Yeah, people like the Dave Matthews Band. A lot. But just because the most eclectic album in their collection is "OK Computer" doesn't mean that they have the ability to choose the 100 best records of all- time. 100 favorite, no problem. No complaints there (except that there's so much more beauty to hear than what you read about between the pages of Rolling Stone). But 100 best? There were some good records on here, no doubt. That's why the other inclusions confused me so much. Maybe next go- round, we'll figure out what we really want from lists like this.