Karla Clifton Reviews Rolling Stone Magazine’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”

13 min readJan 5, 2021

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There are a few reasons that I’ve begun this maniacal project that nobody asked for, but the main one is this: Last December, I suddenly had to take two 25 hour solo road trips.

It’s not important why I took these road trips; just suffice it to say that 2020 was a real crappy year for all of us. (Since I took these road trips in the Year of Our Lady of Corona, I’ll add that I did test negative for the virus before embarking on these road trips, and tried to limit my social contact outside a handful of people.) Anyway, the realization struck me at some point while I was packing that this would be the perfect time to take on my longtime nemesis: Rolling Stone Magazine.

I’ve been enslaved by — sorry, subscribed to — Rolling Stone (RS) since I was a young teen, and have pretended to know what music is ever since. Frankly it’s been exhausting and unrewarding. I’ve been listening to this stuff since I grew ears and all I have to show for it are a bunch of t-shirts from Hot Topic and a rock-star-zombie romance novel.

Last October, RS released their updated list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The magazine itself is obnoxiously huge, like all copies of RS are nowadays, and has Bruce Springsteen looking very pensive on the cover. There were two previous versions of this list published, one in 2003 and one in 2012, but it was a different RS list that kickstarted my animosity towards the magazine’s “authoritative” rankings.

(Most musicians I’ve met have scoffed at my fascination with these lists. This is because most musicians can’t read.)

No, the first RS list to truly agitate me was its list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, published December 2011. I was obsessed with it. In college, I was able to take on the list in a philosophy paper, writing with the unearned confidence only an undergraduate philosophy minor possesses. Eddie Van Halen should be #2, not Eric Clapton! And wasn’t it a crime that Lindsey Buckingham was listed as #100 when Kurt Cobain was #75? And why was John Mayer, maligned as he is, not ranked on the list at all (though he was included in an insert titled “The Young Guns” [pg. 64])? I retrieved my copy of the magazine to double-check these numbers but, friends, I knew them all off the top of my head; that is how ingrained this list was in me. My professor was intrigued, playfully suggesting that Jerry Lee Lewis should be #1, balking at my love of Van Halen. I wanted to prove to him that hair metal was better than rockabilly, and that I would be the next Cameron Crowe.

However, I proved something much more important than any of those things to myself: that these rankings are bullshit, and nobody should listen to magazines. Any list that tells you what to listen to is selling you a lifestyle that isn’t actually linked to anything real or true or canonical.

Why did I decide to listen to the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, then? I don’t know. I can’t tell you. All I know is that it felt right, perhaps because of the odd musical rut I’ve found myself in lately. My Spotify 2020 Rewind consisted of Grimes, Ween, Frank Ocean, FKA Twigs, Guided By Voices, and quite literally no other artists. I don’t know what that says about me, but I do know that I’m ashamed of it. My mega-road trip felt like the perfect time to start expanding my own musical limits, even if my means of doing so was the dreaded Rolling Stone Magazine.

Feeling like a vagabond about to take on a dragon, I put together a spreadsheet, a Spotify playlist, and a cooler full of junk food. Then I set out for my trip.

This futile project has begun to completely dominate my thoughts. I have thought of nothing except for these albums. The people in my life are sick to death of me talking about Jay-Z and Stevie Wonder and Radiohead. However, if I don’t make sense of this incessant inner monologue, I’ll die.

So this is the coping mechanism I have devised: I will put all my thoughts about RS’s top 500 albums right here, until I am through with it or until I get bored. Then, hopefully, I will never have to listen to music again.

The purpose of these reviews is not to act as a musical authority or arbiter of taste. I am neither of these things. I once listened to Goldfinger’s cover of “99 Red Balloons” fifty consecutive times because I was convinced it was the only cure for my hangover. I have terrible taste.

No, I am simply sharing my journey from Fake Music Fan to Even Faker Music Fan.

One final note: I opted to listen to the albums from “best” to “worst” and started from #1 rather than #500. I wanted to hear the “best” stuff first, not last! If you dislike this choice, simply wait a year and a half for me (Ed note: Hahahahahaha) to finish; then you can read the reviews in the correct order.

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Karla Clifton Reviews Rolling Stone Magazine’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”

Written by Karla Clifton