Although I don't agree with their top 10, they are all great albums and many of them are contenders for greatest album, especially for the audience of people that are fans of Rolling Stone magazine. The fact that the choices are tired and predictable doesn't really change that they are great...not that it makes the list any more interesting.
Maybe I sympathize a bit since Sgt Pepper, Revolver, and Highway 61 Revisted would all probably be in my own top albums list at this point.
When I was just seriously getting into music, I would scan through the Rolling Stone top 500 greatest albums list looking for stuff that looked interesting. Most of it was completely unknown to me at the time, so I found it pretty helpful as a resource for discovering which albums and artists are considered historically important by the mainstream. As a collection of albums that are seen as important it's neat, but taken as a straight list of the greatest albums ever made it is miserable.
It also irks me that they never give a clean-cut criteria by which they judge the albums. Greatest as in most influential? Greatest in an artistic sense? If they explain what they meant, I missed it.
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