The Greatest 10,000 Albums of All Time!

I’m kidding, right?

You know, ever since I was a kid, I had not only a passion for music, but also the conceptual and physical reality of an actual album, complete with packaging and artwork, stuffed with details like production notes, recording dates, release dates, etc. Call it a fetish if you like, but this obsession has only grown as I’ve gotten older. As a matter of fact, as long as I can remember, from the time when I first started going to record stores and staring at all the variegated forms of design skills employed to tease my curiosity and musical hunger, I have longed to be able not only to possess the best and brightest that my culture had to offer. In short, I wanted everything!

Well, perhaps not really everything. Just whatever was good - and boy, do I have an enormous range of good. I must have one of the most catholic tastes in music of anyone around, loving everything from Bach to Louis Armstrong, to Hank Williams, to the Rolling Stones, to James Brown, to the Meat Puppets, to . . . well, you get the idea.

Now don’t get me wrong. Despite this vast array of audible creativity that I find completely marvelous, I realize that it all sits very squarely in the midst of a much wider field of listening choices that I broadly refer to as "crap." No matter what art form (or any sort of product, really) that you’re looking at, the vast majority of mass-produced substances are mediocre at best: trite, simplistic, formulaic, soulless product. But that’s what makes it all the more remarkable just how much good-to-extraordinary, soul-heart-and-mind fulfilling music is actually out there. And no matter how much I get, hear, learn, understand, or maybe just hear about, I’m always fretting that I’m missing out on something. Or worse yet, I may be missing huge chunks of the BIG PICTURE.

Okay, I know I’m obsessive, I’m OCD as hell, and I know I’ll never be satisfied. Still, one of my greatest joys in life is the continual search for the ultimate, the ideal . . . dare I use the word . . . the perfect music collection! I don’t even have to own it - I just have to know that it’s there and that I can at least have reference to it on a conceptual level.

Oh, thank God, I’ve lived until the internet age!

Not only do I have almost unlimited resources for investigation (contrasted to my former method of taking a notebook and a pen to the record store), I also have actual access to the musical materials themselves!

Don’t you see what that means for me? It means that my goal is (theoretically) in sight! (Or at the very least, I can waste a lot more time very efficiently in attempting to throw my arms around the impossible dream.)

Okay, let’s look at just a few of the online resources that make me want to live another 10 or 20 years.

First of all, there’s Spotify. If you are a music lover, and you don’t have Spotify, you’re just plain insane. That’s all there is to it. I pay 6 lousy bucks a month, and I get on-demand, immediate access not only to the whole store, but the whole bloody warehouse! I can listen to the complete works of Duke Ellington, for Christ’s sake! Now that is an incomprehensible miracle.

This makes such an extraordinary difference in my life that I can’t even begin to explain all the benefits. Not only can I check out virtually anything that I read about from any reference source, but I can "virtually" expand my music collection into Never-Never Land. I will never even get close to hearing everything that catches my interest - and they keep making more music, dammit!

Next come all those marvelous online resources. My home base is Wikipedia, of course, because it has such an unbelievable wealth of data about discographies all in one location. And if I can’t find what I’m looking for there, I can always seem to search out and find some other fanatic that has a record of every Chuck Berry release date or Eric Dolphy recording session. This is like a dream world!

There are other great places to scope out musical data and critical assessments, such as Allmusic (which is terrific), Metacritic, etc. But let me tell you about this site I’ve found that has simply blown my mind. If you don’t know about it, you have to check it out. It’s called besteveralbums.com. And that’s precisely what it keeps track of: the best ever albums released from the 1940s up the present day, listed by year, artist, or whatever configuration you want to set up. It is the ultimate place for the obsessive collector/organizer who simply has to know everything there is to know about popular music albums.

Yes, I know - the best albums according to whom?

Well, that’s the great thing about it. They don’t decide it themselves. What they have is an enormous data base of listings of the greatest albums ever, from magazines, books, and even self-appointed music nerds. Hey, you can argue with a critic, but when you start to get close to something like universal consensus, well, then you’ve got something to work with!

Now, of course, so much of music is a subjective experience, and no, I’m not going to agree with every ranking in the damn data base. But that’s not the point. The point is that these people have gathered up such a wide variety of obsessives’ favorite fetishes that I look and see that they have the core collection right there, ready at my fingertips. It’s like somebody throwing a huge net into a lake where all the big fish swim near the surface. They’re going to get a butt-load of the best, even if they pick up a few stinkers on the way or leave out some real beauties.

Hey, but I can sift through all that myself. (It’s my job, after all.) The main thing is that I finally have the core collection! Give me that, and I’ll do the rest of the work on Spotify. (Are you getting the big picture, now?)

What, I didn’t have the core collection before now? Well, I thought I did! God-damn, there has been so much great music released over the last 60 years or so that I’ve never even heard of before! I’m telling you, folks, I’ve hit the mother lode!

Okay, so now what?

Well, you know me. I guess I’ll write about it. And where is a better place to start than with than a brief look at the best 10,000 albums of all time - taken one at a time? Hey, why not? Let’s see how far I get before I become distracted and start on another, different, completely irrelevant project!

 - petey