Skip to main content

Announcing the Top Forty by Forty

Have you seen Rolling Stone's recent list of the Top 500 Albums of All Time? It caused quite a bit of fuss in the usual music nerd places on the net but it's not a bad list. It did get my ego wondering though - would I be able to come up with a better list?

Of course not.

However, my 40th birthday is in September 2021 and I thought it would be 'fun' to definitively decide what my Top 40 albums are by this point. And then why not ask my friends to do the same before the illustrious day and put it all together to make a Top 40 for the musical universe of me and my friends. It would almost certainly not be a more representative list but perhaps a more interesting list (perhaps only to me). And if you're a nobody then it's a chance to be polled for one of these things for once.

So, I need you. Do you think you can come up with an ordered list of your favourite 40 albums by the start of September 2021? If so, and you're what could technically be called a friend of mine*, then please get in touch using your preferred method and let me know that you're going to play ball. Forty records. Can't be that hard.

Compiling my Top 40 will be made a bit easier as I've already decided on lists for the two decades of 2000-2009 and 2010-2019 but there's a whole lot of recorded music from the 20th century that I love too. How to reduce this down to just 40 records... well at least I've got time. I've also rated half my collection already so only another 500 or so records to go... 

I hope discussing this with friends (hopefully including some of those I haven't seen physically for years) will be an enjoyable part of this pandemic-era time-waster. Future posts here will highlight some of my picks, some of yours, and some other stuff before the eventual publication of the Top Forty by Forty in September.


* -  I should at least know your name (already).

Comments

Popular Posts

My Top Forty

For posterity! Joe Grassby Position Artist Record 1 Guided by Voices Bee Thousand 2 Sonic Youth Daydream Nation 3 Pixies Doolittle 4 Godspeed You! Black Emperor Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven! 5 The Velvet Underground & Nico The Velvet Underground & Nico 6 The Flaming Lips The Soft Bulletin 7 Sonic Youth Goo 8 Frank Black Teenager of the Year 9 Pixies Trompe Le Monde 10 Sonic Youth Sister 11 Grandaddy The Sophtware Slump 12 Nirvana Nevermind 13 Hawkwind Space Ritual 14 Silver Jews American Water 15 Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols 16 Yes Close to the Edge 17 Neutral Milk Hotel In the Aeroplane Over the Sea 18 Dinosaur Jr. You're Living All Over Me 19 Pixies Surfer Rosa & Come On Pilgrim 20 Pavement Slanted & Enchanted 21 Pink Floyd Meddle 22 Fucked Up David Comes to Life 23 Nirvana In Utero 24 Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited 25 Liars Drum's Not Dead 26 Les Savy Fav Inches 27 Shellac 1000...

Selection: Mclusky - Mclusky Do Dallas

Mclusky - Mclusky Do Dallas (2002) Do Dallas [let's not argue about whether Mclusky is in the title] was included in a ballot by  Alan Stephen . These are his words on the record, followed by mine. Alan : The reformed mclusky are a joy beyond compare. Their sets are heavy on this album, which isn’t surprising because it’s got their best songs on it and nothing better than the bobbysoxer bop of ‘whoyouknow’ which I always assumed I would play at my wedding until I didn’t. Shamefully, I ignored mclusky while they were going the first time solely because of their name and therefore I assumed sounded like Hefner. (Who I still have never heard for the same prejudiced reason and might turn out to be brilliant after all.) Then I saw them at an ATP where the bassist gaffer taped his glasses to his head to stop them falling off, which would have been a masterplan had he not just wound the tape round and round and taped over the lenses in doing so. They played the Scala a few mont...

The Top 40 By 40

Well, here it is. A Top 40 of records compiled by myself and my friends on the cusp of my 40th birthday. Points were assigned to ranks in a simple linear fashion (1st = 40 points, 2nd = 39 etc.) and then totalled up for all records. All records with 2 or more votes were eligible for the Top 40. I also weighted the scores by popularity, so records with 3 voters had their score boosted a bit more than those with 2. More posts dissecting this project will follow in due course. After that, it's back to listening to records (without over analysing them!) and perhaps pondering an updated Top 50 by 50 in ten years time... Enough of that. Here's the list and voting data. Thanks to everyone who contributed. 40 - Sonic Youth - Sister (1987) (2 voters, 36 points) 39 - The Verve - Urban Hymns (1997) (2 voters, 37 points) 38 - Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks (1975) (2 voters, 39 points) 37 - The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses (1989) (2 voters, 39 points) 36 - Grandaddy - The Sophtwar...