Top 100 Greatest Music Albums
by RawlsRE

This is my original chart intro. I've come to recognize that my intro should be very short since it appears at the top of EVERY page of my chart. I'm saving the original here in order to embarrass my future selves:

As far as I am able, I've designed this list to track aesthetic excellence. I'm aware that the view (call it aesthetic realism) according to which there ARE any aesthetic entities to track is not a popular one. This is because it is incompatible with aesthetic relativism, which is the most favoured metaphysical approach to aesthetics in the English speaking world today. Of course, no relativism can recommend itself without contradiction - we cannot as a relativist say 'it is right to list albums as you like' without in this way making an exception to our relativism - but there is nonetheless an undeniable plausibility to this view where aesthetics are concerned. I think that this is because of the complexity and inscrutability of the object. Schopenhauer categorized music as the most abstract and elusive of the arts - this is how it is able to mesmerize us with glimpses of primordial unities, noumenal manifolds, and other transcendent/transcendental mysteries. But it also means that it is especially difficult to hang any conceptual framework onto it.

Given this difficulty, we must recognize a set of burdens of judgment when it comes to discussing music. These burdens explain how reasonable, honest and perceptive persons can disagree about which album is best. Of course they will disagree! The problem of ranking the greatest albums of all time is an extremely difficult one - we wouldn't be so transfixed by it if it weren't. But to say that it is difficult is not to say that there is no answer. This is all to say that we can be aesthetic realists rather than aesthetic relativists while still being civil to one another, even when we can't see eye to eye about the brilliance of Gentle Giant.

Acknowledging aesthetic burdens of judgment doesn't mean that we aren't obligated to try to address them. More than anything else, this requires honesty, that is, purging biases, setting allegiances to the 'little guys' aside, forgetting happy memories of listening to the last vestiges of Canadian alternative in the summer of '99, etc. I recognize that I haven't done a good job of this (yet). There are certain genres that I'm disposed to overvalue, namely Prog and Industrial. While I think these genres deserve more attention than they traditionally receive, it seems likely that their significance is inflated in this list. I'm trying to account for this, but it seems disingenuous to simply subtract two spots, say, from every Prog album on the assumption that this will correct for some prejudice or other that I can't yet identify. More damning, my list is full of white men - as far as I can tell, it includes only one non-Caucasian and two women. I don't mean to suggest that one ought to subordinate aesthetics to political considerations, but it is awfully suspicious (my list is also predominantly British, but for the moment I don't find this terribly worrisome). The best I can manage for the time being is to register that this list is in a number of ways provisional. My hope is that by living with it for a little while, it will reveal its errors to me.

From Mercury TOP 100 COMMENTER 12/18/2013 17:43 | #97998

You are one of the most verbose users I've ever seen. But it's okay, because I'm interested in what you have to say.

And this chart is quite nice! I look forward to seeing your top 100 when the time is right.

You're comment on "You Forgot It In People" was a mighty impressive first post. I think my first post was something dumb like "I likey sis. It's coooooool".

Anyway, welcome, my friend.

Recs: check out "Ocean Songs" by The Dirty Three if you haven't already. It's excellent.

This is a reply to SuedeSwede's comments:

I really need to change that introduction. It's just a journal entry, really - I wanted to record my thoughts as I first built the list. I didn't realize at that point that the three giant paragraphs would appear over every page.

Evidently, the intro is misleading AS WELL as long and obnoxious. I didn't mean to suggest that this isn't a list of my favourites. It's as you said - "it's too hard to actually get a concrete list from best to worst by aesthetics ... unless you have included your own opinion." Opinions are great. They're a big help in navigating aesthetic truth. They're also extremely responsive to that truth, or anyway that's my experience. The second I realized as a teenager that I only listened to Matthew Good Band only because it was my first musical interest, I was able to see it for what it really is, and my opinion changed accordingly.

Quantitative and qualitative are categories used to describe social scientific methodologies. I do not believe that music can be the subject of scientific inquiry. But then, science isn't the only way to arrive at the world as it actually is. There are a number of alternate strategies at our disposal.

I prefer reflective equilibrium, which is a device that John Rawls came up with (hence RawlsRE), though the thrust of it goes all the way back to Plato's notion of knowledge via recollection. It's a simple idea, but I'm inarticulate... it's a matter of fitting gut feelings into systems, and then designing systems so as to capture gut feelings, then reconsidering the gut feelings, then reconsidering the systems, until we find an equilibrium between the two. Ideally, the systems will work the gut feelings pure, so that they come to accurately represent things as they (objectively?) ought to be. Systems by themselves are empty, and gut feelings by themselves are gibberish, so we find a way to mesh them together. I suppose this way of putting it makes it sound unwieldy, but we perform these kinds of calculations all the time (or so Rawls and I believe), and we're really quite good at it.

That's what makes this site so handy. I have plenty of gut feelings, but I have no structures with which to systematize them. BEA equips me with the means to compile and analyze lists - an ideal systematizing tool. This has made it a lot easier to get to know my tastes.

From Mercury TOP 100 COMMENTER 12/21/2013 21:43 | #98305

Ha! Yeah I suppose I, too, am overly verbose at times. ;-)

I appreciate that lil reference to Nick Cave's album. I will check that out. When I was listening to "Ocean Songs" the album I kept being reminded of was Dylan's "Desire". They obviously share the element of violin use, but also just some of the melodies and emotions on there stirred up memories of listening to "Oh Sister" and other "Desire" songs.

I am now getting really really into Neil Young more than ever. This very second I'm listening to "Zuma". It's awesome! Anyway, that was a TOTALLY random comment.

Yeah, my comments get lazier and shorter as I go later in the list so the top 30 is a nice stopping point.

I just saw you had NIN's "The fragile" in top 10. I am intrigued. That was my first album I ever owned. Got it for 10th birthday. To this day I consider that to be brilliant. And the rhythm and the just the production on there is so vivid and up front and clear. It's very nice. I recently learned that Steve Albini helped with the production on it! That explains a lot.

Anyway, keep it real. Keep posting and rating and commenting and get to where you can do a top 100. I'm VERY interested.

From SingingPeasant96 TOP 100 COMMENTER 12/21/2013 00:29 | #98239

You have very unique taste, Great to see another Kid A topping chart