I watched a Charlie Rose interview with Jann Wenner on the eve of the R&R HOF anniversary show in which the RS honcho spoke of his love for those acts that fuse the musical with the political, the artists “making a statement.” Not that Wenner got his hands dirty crafting this song rundown - it’d be heavier on the trinity-of-holy-Bs (Bono, Bruce, Bob) if so, and the official methodology included a poll of artists and “industry insiders” - but his spirit is there. But in reality? Rolling Stone’s top 15 albums tends toward commercial appeal and Dylan over artistic risk. Not to say reaching outside the internet’s navel-gazing is without value! In theory, it’s refreshing to have an alternative to the hipster hegemony of most lists.
And in a time of increasing niche-ification, that could soon translate as “to be nothing to anyone.” So what’s Rolling Stone’s place in all of this? Take this 200-point list as the formalized answer: to be something to everyone. RS’s diminishing sway on the listening habits of people like us parallels MTV’s, that’s not really controversial most that frequent sites like ours look to the internet/blogs/sites-that-rank-albums-on-10-point-scales mindmeld for leads. And as much as a list like this is a way to assess the past 10 years’ art, in this case it’s also a time to look back at the assessing institution. Music mags and sites have been framing our noughtstalgic excursions via songs and albums for the past few months (see: Uncut, P4K’s albums and songs, Paste, NME, EW) yesterday, you guys weighed in. Some are proposing “The Noughties,” others “The Naughties,” so I’m gonna coin a phrase for this time of looking back: Noughtstalgia. I read this New York Times piece about how we’re frantically trying to find a pithy, reductive nickname for this decade that’s closing.
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