It doesn’t meet the criteria in the albumchallenge community, but I had a request to repost it. Here it is.
1. John Coltrane — A Love Supreme (1965)
2. Beatles — Revolver (1966)
3. Keith Jarrett — The Koln Concert (1975)
4. Carl Orff — Carmina Burana (Eugene Ormandy/Philadelphia Symphony; remastered reissue, 2002 )
5. Patsy Cline — Greatest Hits (1967, the Decca Records release)
6. Sex Pistols — Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1977)
7. Elvis Presley — Elvis Presley (1956)
8. Hank Williams — 40 Greatest Hits (1978)
9. Robert Johnson — King of the Delta Blues Singers (originally recorded in 1936-37; repackaged in 1998)
10. Jimi Hendrix — Axis: Bold as Love (1967)
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11. Patti Smith — Horses (1975)
12. The Clash — London Calling (1979)
13. Ornette Coleman — The Shape of Jazz To Come (1959)
14. Various Artists — Stiffs Live Stiffs (1978)
15. Frank Sinatra — Trilogy (1980)
16. X — Los Angeles (1980)
17. Talking Heads — Fear Of Music (1979)
18. Beatles — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
19. Brian Wilson — Smile (2004)
20. Beach Boys — Pet Sounds (1966)
21. Anthony Braxton — Six Compositions: Quartet (1984)
22. James Blood Ulmer — Tales of Captain Black (1978)
23. Tony Bennett — Forty Years of Artistry (1999)
24. Ella Fitzgerald — Ella and Basie! (1963)
25. Aaron Copeland — Appalachian Spring (recorded many times since 1944; I prefer the original scoring for chamber orchestra)
26. Richard and Linda Thompson — Shoot Out The Lights (1982)
27. Richard Thompson — Rumor and Sigh (1991)
28. Ray Charles — The Genius of Ray Charles (1959)
29. Albert Ayler — Holy Ghost (recorded 1960-72; issued, 2005)
30. Various Artists — 400 Years of Folk Music (1964)
31. Various Artists — The United States of Poetry (1996)
32. Pink Floyd — Wish You Were Here (1975)
33. Bob Dylan — Blonde On Blonde (1966)
34. Bob Dylan — Blood On the Tracks (1975)
35. Otis Redding/Jimi Hendrix — Live At Monterey Pop Festival (1968)
36. George Gershwin — Rhapsody in Blue (Paul Whiteman Orchestra recording from 1924, with Gershwin on piano, reissued 2000 )
37. Ludwig Van Beethoven — Ninth Symphony (again, many recordings exist)
38. Woody Guthrie — Woody Guthrie : The Asch Recordings (released 1999)
39. Miles Davis — Kind Of Blue (1959)
40. Bruce Springsteen — Nebraska (1982)
41. John Fahey — Blind Joe Death (1959)
42. John Fahey — The New Possibility (1968)
43. Thelonius Monk — Live At The Jazz Workshop, San Francisco (1962)
44. The Who — Quadrophenia ( 1973)
45. The Rolling Stones — Exile on Main Street (1972)
46. Liz Phair — Exile in Guyville (1993) (NOTE: Can’t have #45 without adding this one!!! )
47. Benny Goodman — Carnegie Hall "From Spirituals to Swing" Concert (recorded 1938, released 1950)
48. Chuck Berry — Greatest Hits (this has been released and repackaged so many times it’s hard to pick a date)
49. Charlie Parker — Jazz at Massey Hall (2004 reissue of a 1947 concert — reissue is longer)
50. Weather Report — Live In Tokyo (1972)
51. Public Enemy — Fear of a Black Planet (1990)
52. Public Enemy — It Takes a Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back (1988)
53. Run-DMC — Run-DMC (1984)
54. BDP — By All Means Necessary (1988)
55. Van Morrison — Astral Weeks (1968)
56. Andres Segovia — Andres Segovia: Baroque Favorites (mid 70s)
57. Johann Sebastian Bach — The Brandenburg Concertos (the Deutschegrammaphon recording from the mid 70s)
58. Johann Sebastian Bach — The Goldberg Variations (as recorded by Glenn Gould, solo piano, mid sixties)
59. Parliament — Tear The Roof Off : 1974-1980 (1993)
60. Gal Costa — Gal Costa (1969)
61. D’Gary — Horombe (1996)
62. Various Artists — Duende! (no, not us; flamenco collection from the early 90s)
63. Paco de Lucia/John McLaughlin/Al DiMeola — Friday Night in San Francisco (1981)
64. David Bowie — The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972)
65. Nirvana — Nevermind (1991)
66. Sleater-Kinney — All Hands On The Bad One (2000)
67. Various Artists — Left of the Dial: Dispatches From The 80s Underground (2004)
68. Sonic Youth — Daydream Nation (1988)
69. Joni Mitchell — Blue (1971)
70. Joni Mitchell — Hejira (1976)
71. Stan Getz — Getz/Gilberto (1965)
72. Herbie Hancock — Headhunters (1973)
73. Branford Marsalis — The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1992)
74. Velvet Underground — Velvet Underground and Nico (1968)
75. Sam Cooke — Portrait of a Legend (1951-64) (2003)
76. James Brown — Live At The Apollo (1963)
77. Buddy Guy — Can’t Quit the Blues (2006)
78. Muddy Waters — Hard Again (1978)
79. B.B. King — Indianola Mississippi Seeds (1970)
80. Howlin’ Wolf — The Chess Box (1992)
81. The Who — Who’s Next (1971)
82. Jefferson Airplane — Surrealistic Pillow (1967)
83. Black Sabbath — Paranoid (1970)
84. Metallica — Master Of Puppets (1986)
85. Ralph Stanley and The Stanley Brothers — Clinch Mountain Gospel (2001)
86. Django Reinhardt — In Paris (1939)
87. Various Artists — Township Jive (early 70s collection of South African Pop)
88. John Coltrane — Interstellar Space (1967)
89. John Coltrane — Ascension (1965)
90. Duke Ellington — Fantasy in Black and Tan (again, too many release dates to pick one)
91. Sister Rosetta Tharpe — Complete Recorded Works, Vol 1 (1996 — someone needs to collect ALL her stuff into one box!)
92. The Staple Singers — The Ultimate Staple Singers (2004)
93. James Brown — Sex Machine (1970)
94. Sly and The Family Stone — There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971)
95. Jimi Hendrix Experience — Are You Experienced? (1967)
96. Madonna — Ray of Light (1998)
97. Pink Floyd — Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
98. Ella Fitzgerald w/Joe Pass — Take Love Easy (1973)
99. Bob Marley and the Wailers — Catch A Fire (1973)
100. The Master Musicians of Joujouka — Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (recorded 1968, released 1971)
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Notes:
— Placement and position in the top ten was easy, surprisingly enough.
— 11- 100 shouldn’t be taken as a measure of my appreciation for a specific album, except when there are multiple entries from one artist. Then, the ranking reflects my feeling about the merits of the albums compared to each other, e.g., Pink Floyd’s "Wish You Were Here" is a better album than "Dark Side of the Moon," in my opinion.
— This isn’t a list of my favorites, although there’s nothing on here I don’t love or at least like a lot. I tried to answer the request in the spirit in which it was asked: albums people should listen to before they die. The intent, as I saw it, was to expose a person who was dying to great moments in music. Hence, my effort to go far beyond the pop genre itself, to get a broad variety of music to share, and to reach beyond the modern, album based industry to get at stuff recorded pre-LP, from alternate ways of thinking about music releases, and to provide broad overviews of significant artistic careers.
If I’d had my druthers, for instance, there’d have been a lot more Richard Thompson and Bruce Springsteen on the list, but I chose to simply pick things I thought best represented who these artists are. I also left off a lot of stuff I personally love simply because I had to choose a broad spectrum of work — hence, nothing from the GY!BE world of music, from Captain Beefheart, from a variety of alternative noise/folk/jazz artists, and some other folks whose work I love a lot. It became a problem of limits with only 100 recordings to choose from.
— I also assigned myself another criterion: I have to have owned all these albums at one time or another. Many have been sold in the last few years, while others pass through my hands to other people who I thought would appreciate them or needed to hear them, and I never got them back. That’s life, and it’s cool with me. But if I’d owned stuff like Bollywood film music, a better selection of ragas, a Balinese monkey chant, gamelan recordings, rai, etc., they would have been considered and it’s likely some of it would have showed up here.
— Many of the artists I chose, especially those outside the rock and jazz arenas, either predate the advent of the LP or have released so many albums (B. B. King, for instance, has released over 100 albums, although I chose a single LP for him) that finding an "album" to represent them was difficult or impossible. in order to reflect my feeling that these artists were important, I included various greatest hits and compilations to get them out there for people to think about.
This is especially true of things like "Live Stiffs" and "Township Jive," which are more than just comps; they represent important moments in the history of modern popular music.
Dark Matter 