![]() in engineering, who spent his off hours writing and recording in his basement. Scholz was hardly your typical rock-star-in-waiting then 29, he was a gangly project manager for Polaroid, with a Master’s degree from M.I.T. What was positively bizarre was the source of this blockbuster. It may have been unlikely that an album dominated by brawny riffs, harmonized guitar leads and multilayered vocal workouts would capture the imagination of America’s bell-bottomed youth. “But we stumbled onto a sound that worked, and soon everybody was imitating it.” “Everybody thought that it was impossible, because disco ruled the airwaves at the time,” recalls Boston leader Tom Scholz. When Boston's self-titled first album was released in the fall of 1976, few industry insiders thought that a guitar-heavy rock record could make much of a dent in the charts, much less become the best-selling debut of all time. ![]() ![]() WHAT THEY SAID Mark Morton: “We’ll always be a thrash metal band, but I’m interested in exploring what we can get away with within the boundaries of the genre.” Ashes may be leaner than its predecessors, but its more focused and precise, annihilating like a precision sharpshooter instead of a messy serial killer. Sometimes the axmen riff in tandem, other times they play against one another, but either way, they always demolish. Then came big-budget producer Machine, who worked with guitarists Willie Adler and Mark Morton to excise the extraneous elements without detracting from their jawdropping musicianship. Their previous two albums were musically engaging and technically sophisticated but lacked artistic direction and, just as crucial, financing. The classics are still the classics, but the canon keeps getting bigger and better.Major labels have been known to destroy a band’s soul, but entering the big leagues actually helped Lamb of God deliver their first truly lethal blow. But that was part of what made rebooting the RS 500 fascinating and fun 86 of the albums on the list are from this century, and 154 are new additions that weren’t on the 2003 or 2012 versions. Of course, it could still be argued that embarking on a project like this is increasingly difficult in an era of streaming and fragmented taste. (As in 2003, we allowed votes for compilations and greatest-hits albums, mainly because a well-made compilation can be just as coherent and significant as an LP, because compilations helped shaped music history, and because many hugely important artists recorded their best work before the album had arrived as a prominent format.) When we first did the RS 500 in 2003, people were talking about the “death of the album.” The album -and especially the album release - is more relevant than ever. The electorate includes Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish rising artists like H.E.R., Tierra Whack, and Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail as well as veteran musicians, such as Adam Clayton and the Edge of U2, Raekwon of the Wu-Tang Clan, Gene Simmons, and Stevie Nicks. To do so, we received and tabulated Top 50 Albums lists from more than 300 artists, producers, critics, and music-industry figures (from radio programmers to label heads, like Atlantic Records CEO Craig Kallman). So we decided to remake our greatest albums list from scratch. But no list is definitive - tastes change, new genres emerge, the history of music keeps being rewritten. Over the years, it’s been the most widely read - and argued over - feature in the history of the magazine (last year, the RS 500 got over 63 million views on the site). Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time was originally published in 2003, with a slight update in 2012.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |