How Does The New Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums Of All Time Stack Up?

There may have been a bunch of different genres to go around back in 2012, but just a mere 8 years later, listeners are taking a little bit of everything and cramming it into their playlists. Thanks to the advent of streaming services, your average music nerd is able to access pretty much any music they want with the touch of a button. You may get a kick out of throwing on your favorite tunes, but curiosity will always get the better of you when it comes time to branch out into different material. As such, the additions of genres like hip hop peppered throughout the list is a welcome return to form for a magazine that could get a bit too music snobbish for its own good.

Even though it may seem like a simple change to be more inclusive of genres, this ended up being a bit of a skeleton key for the editors of Rolling Stone to include everything under the sun on their list. Make no mistake, the Beatles and Stones and the like all seem to get the just praise they deserve, but new faces like Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar also make an impressive showing on the list, with most of their material put towards the top of the new ranking.

Though most of this feels like a case of the magazine playing catch-up, there’s a lot more great acts other than hip hop that finally get their just due. For example, the more caustic sides of rock and roll like metal and prog make an impressive showing this time around. While nothing outside of Dark Side of the Moon or the Wall by Pink Floyd made the list in the earlier iteration, this latest version makes the conscious choice of adding titans like Rush to their hallowed halls. As any prog rock snob will tell you, Rolling Stone was notorious for bashing Rush at the best of times, so to see an album like Moving Pictures ranked among the greatest of all time shows that they’re at least learning from their previous mistakes.

Even the more tepid entries on the first list have come roaring back with a vengeance. While Metallica was flying the flag for metal throughout the previous list, their 1986 masterpiece Master of Puppets went from populating the mid tier to cracking into the top 100 at No. 97. Many metalheads would feel proud ranking this among the best albums ever made, but to see it rise to the occasion in such a short timeframe has made many a headbanger proud.

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