And we've made it! So - what have we learned?

Wow - when I started out, I didn't REALLY think I'd make it all the way here!

Six months ago (to the day, hence the random switching between rounds featuring one and two albums!) I started listening to Arcade Fire's Funeral and worked out that if I listened to one album a day, I could finish the list by 3rd April 2022, which I didn't seriously believe was very likely to happen.  But, cracking through 3 albums a day for most of it brought the end date down to a more realistic target - and here we are!

Firstly, let's consider the 100 albums just gone with a vague selection of random opinions and statistics relating to them.

Best 13 - 100-1

10 albums I own, 1 I knew quite well anyway and 2 first time listens.

Automatic For The People - R.E.M.
Beyoncé - Beyoncé
The College Dropout - Kanye West
Jagged Little Pill - Alanis Morissette
Hounds Of Love - Kate Bush
The Dark Side Of The Moon - Pink Floyd
Graceland - Paul Simon
OK Computer - Radiohead
Tapestry - Carole King
Sgt Pepper - The Beatles
Thriller - Michael Jackson
The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill - Lauryn Hill
Rumours - Fleetwood Mac

Best new tracks uncovered for me were "I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)" and "Village Ghetto Land" by Stevie Wonder (from different albums) but there were a load of tracks from a whole load of artists I knew and loved but had completely forgotten about, so a lot of them felt like new tracks.

Worst 5 - 100-1

Of these, I only really hated The Stooges - for the rest of them I was just mystified by their presence in the top 100 (and top 20 for two of them)

Fun House - The Stooges
London Calling - The Clash
Kid A - Radiohead
Illmatic - Nas
Reasonable Doubt - Jay-Z

Albums that I enjoyed most from initially low expectations

Electric Ladyland - Jimi Hendrix 

(although, tbh, I was expecting to like it - but I liked it a lot more than I was expecting to!)

Albums that involve Brian Eno in some way

The lad's really let things go as we've got further up the chards - only Remain In Light by Talking Heads featured his knob-twiddling skills in this section.

Albums that involve Kanye in some way

Whereas Kanye managed to get two of his in there (College Dropout, My Beautiful Dark Fantasy - both of which are fine albums) and he also produced and wrote a lot of The Blueprint by Jay-Z (which is not).

Number of greatest hits albums

A slight relapse!

• 500-401 - 5
• 400-301 - 7
• 300-201 - 6
• 200-101 - 2
  
• 100-1 - 4

I can forgive Elvis and Chuck's presence, am less forgiving of Bob Marley's (whilst not blaming him in the slightest) but there's absolutely no excuse for James Browns' 4 CD nonsense.

Pale/stale/male quotient

To recap, given the somewhat arbitrary criteria of "albums more than 40 years old which are mostly recorded by white, male artists or newer albums recorded by white, male artists over the age of 60", the numbers areNot the horror show I was expecting but quite interesting when you consider that over half of the "offending" albums were supplied by just The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, Young and Bowie.  Over the whole list, it works out at just less than a third - which isn't a great statistic, I guess.

• 500-401 - 21
  
• 400-301 - 34
  
• 300-201 - 37
• 200-101 - 34
• 100-1 - 33

Not the horror show I was expecting but quite interesting when you consider that over half of the "offending" albums were supplied by just The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, Young and Bowie.  Over the whole list, it works out at just less than a third - which isn't a great statistic, I guess.

"First listen" ratio

My impression that I knew more of these albums the further we went up the list is borne out by the numbers

• 500-401 - 90
  
• 400-301 - 85
  
• 300-201 - 81
  
• 200-101 - 67
• 100-1 - 65

That's still a lot though, isn't it?  My unfamiliarity with Stones and Beatles albums certainly hit me hard here.   Over the whole list, it works out as a total of 388 first listens or 78% - which either suggests I've spent a lot of my life listening to albums that aren't great or my definition of great doesn't EXACTLY chime with Rolling Stone's definition.  I wonder which it might be?!?

Which leads us on to the fact that I kinda knew when I started this exercise that the whole concept of "The 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time" was nonsense, but I don't think I had the faintest idea how nonsense it would turn out to be.  The idea that any one person or group could definitively list the X greatest albums is patent madness, but having seen the job they made of it, I really shouldn't have trusted Rolling Stone to do it.  Mr Stanniland has suggested I try NME's list - I think that would fit better with my tastes, but I suspect I'd still find an awful lot of albums on their list that I would have issues with.  I also haven't actually got any closer to understanding what constitutes a "great" album - personally, my prime consideration is always "do I like it?" but there are also albums on the list that I didn't like but I'm still perfectly happy about their inclusion based upon their musical/cultural legacy/impact (Never Mind The Bollocks being a good example here).  There were also a load of albums where I didn't know enough about the genre in question (often hip-hop) to challenge the claims of legacy/impact - I like to think I was mostly kind and took their word for it, but I know I had doubts at times.

And, talking of hip-hop, there was far, far, far too much of it on the list - and it doesn't feel like it would have a natural home in Rolling Stone, so the accusations of over-compensation that some people have made out there on the internet do ring true to me.  And there were far too many 70s albums, but that wasn't a surprise in the slightest - they feel to have a natural home in Rolling Stone (and apparently things were far, far worse in the earlier versions of the list)  I also found the presence of greatest hits and compilations on the list baffling - yes, I can see the argument that a collection of tracks by Robert Johnson from the 30s is musically significant, but it wasn't released as an album at the time and it's just the thin end of the wedge, so you need to ban them all.  End of discussion.

There were also a mystifying large number of entries for some obvious artists who are the critics' darlings - Young, Dylan, Kanye, Jay-Z, The Clash - but also for some less obvious ones - D'Angelo, Janet Jackson, Pavement, Outkast, Fiona Apple (all of whom had three entries in the list).  And yes, I know that Fiona won all her rounds, but she was very lucky with the quality of the competition.  I'd also like to call out some albums which seemed ridiculously low on the list, particularly given the quality of material that came after them - Screamadelica (#437), Ace Of Spades (#409), Dookie (#375), The Stone Roses (#319), So (#297), The Bends (#276), American Idiot (#248), Different Class (#162) and Achtung Baby (#124).  There are countless albums I could call out for being on the list at all, let alone too high, but I think London Calling and Kid-A have to be the entries from the top 20 that I struggle most to understand their inclusion in the list at all, let alone their position.  But I also fully realise how subjective the whole thing is and that people haven't always agreed with my point of view!

As part of the set-up for this blog, I get to see statistics for page views and the level of readership has been reasonably consistent across the pages, but some pages have been nudged upwards if they have particularly familiar lyrics or artwork or if there are various links from other pages offering encouragement to the casual reader.  I don't know whether any of these factors are responsible but, at the time of writing, the post covering A Tribe Called Quest, Radiohead and The Rolling Stones is way out in front as the most popular page and conversely, let's just say that not many of you decided you fancied reading about The Ronettes, Marvin Gaye's divorce album and Bonnie Raitt (and, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure I blame you).  And no, I'm not going to provide links to them here because that would just spoil things!

I also think a special mention is due to Liz Phair and Public Enemy because I've also been posting the pages on Twitter and @ing in the artists and they were only ones to respond in any way.  And yes, I know it's not like Chuck D was personally reviewing their feed and found himself particularly impressed with my prose, but interaction with people in this manner really drives engagement - I once had a Twitter conversation with Tanya Donnelly and didn't clean my keyboard for weeks afterwards.  Although, to be honest, I rarely clean my keyboard anyway, but we don't need to tell her that now, do we?  Additionally, Curtis Mayfield also deserves a special mention for being the only person (or the only one I noticed anyway) who was involved in every album in a round - which was even more impressive given the 3 albums involved spanned 36 years.  And one further special mention for two tracks that appeared three times in the list - "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" and "A Change Is Gonna Come" - both of which had versions by Aretha on the list (I suspect she could sing most things and it would still sound good).

And finally, a huge thank you to everyone for reading and for your comments - I've enjoyed discussing my general ignorance and being told I'm completely wrong (but that doesn't mean that I'm going to change my view that Hole were worthy winners over The Rolling Stones in THAT round).  And, of course, when I say I finally, I'm conveniently ignoring the huge entry I'm about to post about potential omissions from the list.  But once that's done, the frequency of blog posts is going to drop dramatically - I will pick another list of something to attack at some point, but I feel I've earned a bit of a break from writing about anything, let alone music and it feels like it won't be a bad idea for me to spend some time listening to music I actually like!

Cheers, everyone!

#1 - And the winner is...
So - did they miss anything?