For starters, Rolling Stone has been around since about the late '60's and, since then, has built itself into the MTV of music mags-or, at least what purport to be music mags. It's really more of a pop culture mag, with an extremely left-wing bent (conservatives aren't welcome here).
I could go into a detailed review of RS's contents and formats. Unlike the misconceptions of the early SH commenters, I have enough familiarity with them.
But I'm not going to do that. This review is directed at people who might read Rolling Stone because they want to know something about rock and pop music, not because they want to know what's happening on campus or read shrill articles about why the Republicans are Hitler warmed over or why the government should pay for abortions. Those people can, and should, go read someone else's review.
This is a review about music, for readers who want to read informed articles about music, why Rolling Stone doesn't qualify. Are we clear? Clear. So much for that bullsh*t "Helpful" rating this article gets.
I quit reading Rolling Stone after my freshman year in college back in 1977. I had started reading the magazine because I was the rock critic of my high school newspaper—that role alone shows what a loser I was back then, as opposed to the 40’s something hipster I am now—and what better way to steal one’s opinions than from the icon of the rock press? But it only took one year of being exposed to a bunch of guys (my fraternity brothers) who knew something about music to realize what hacks the crew at Rolling Stone were (with the exception of Cameron Crowe, of course; anyone who is getting into the pants of the cute Wilson sister has to be OK). So the subscription lapsed. Forever.
I’ve read exactly one issue of Rolling Stone since 1977 (with the two recent exceptions noted below). That was the 1986 or 1987 one wherein the mag, with its typical sense of pompous uber-kill, announced the top 100 albums of all time. Number one, of course, was “Sgt. Pepper”. No cliché there, wot? Always priding itself on being cutting edge, number two was… “Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”. What a great record. Oh, those iconoclasts at Rolling Stone, you never know that wacky gang is going to be doing next, huh?
Anyway, the guy in the office next to me reads Rolling Stone and every now and then he brings in an issue. And recently he brought in two more “Greatest of” RS issues (which I READ, see comment #3) —one the 100 Greatest Guitarists of all time, the other the 500 Greatest Albums-- which brings me to the point of this “kind-of-but-not-really” magazine review, before of you “off-topic” epinionator bores start hacking at me for not doing line-by-line reviews of the different departments in the magazine, as if anyone who reads these notes actually gives a sh*t about that formalistic dreck. What I’m doing here is reaffirming my decision to stop reading this half-@ssed magazine and demonstrating what a second-rate music rag is Rolling Stone as manifested by its inability to get right the most important thing about rock music, viz, the MUSIC instead of all that pop-culture-cum-MTV-cum-Ralph-Nader-politics with which RS is boring that part of the country that has the spare time to read the tripe in its magazine.
So, let’s repeat the point: one expects a real-live professional-type rock music mag to actually, really, really know music. Right? Not Rolling Stone, Buckwheat. Which is why I'm not doing a department by department review of the mag: A music mag that doesn't know music isn't worth reading, and THAT's helpful to the voyaging consumer.
Let's start with my own bona fides. I've been a guitarist for nearly forty years, studied music pretty intently for about fifteen of them, have been a committed listener to rock/pop/classical music all my life (with some jazz and country thrown in for good measure), own something over 2.000 records, tapes, and CD's, own the sheet music, chord charts, and/or tab to over 10,000 songs, I think I'm safe in saying I know the genres pretty well. So when I say these guys don't know music as nearly as well as they'd like to think, and are instead captives of their own particular prejudices, inconsistencies, and pseudo-sophistication, I know what I'm talking about and AGAIN, why read a music mag by clowns who don't know music very well.
Let’s start with the 𣺜 Greatest Guitarists”. Even a dead guy can get most of the easy parts right (with one incomprehensible omission, as below): Jimi Hendrix as #1, Duane Allman, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Chuck Berry, B.B. King, Keith Richard, Jimmy Page, Ry Cooder, Robert Johnson in one place or another in the top ten. But, even when getting these names more or less straight (one can quibble, but leave it at that), the criteria are unclear. What makes a guitarist “great”, anyway? Is it technical skill? Influence? Song-writing ability? I don’t know and they don’t really say.
But the devil is in the details, and why is that important? Well, take Chuck Berry, for example. One of the most important and influential of all guitarists of all time—he invented the 32-bar pop song structure and one doesn’t have to even deign to discuss his songs—he is not a very technically proficient guitarist. In fact, I saw him play live at the Chicago Rock and Roll McDonald’s back in 1985 and he was an embarrassment, couldn’t hold a candle to the guys in the Beatles lookalike band that opened for him.
So, we have incompetent criteria. It gets worse when (and this is the crux of the matter), after seeing the presence of the usual suspects, it occurs to one just who is and who is not on the list. And therein lies the rub: Who is, but shouldn’t be? Start with Jack White of the White Stripes, those fashionable darlings who will be long forgotten in ten years and even if not, he still isn’t a very good guitarist. Johnny Ramone? I don’t think so. Ron Asheton of the Stooges? Get real. D.Boon of the Minutemen? Right. Joan Jett? JOAN JETT?
And who’s missing, from the boys who are oh-so-careful to show how well-listened and sophisticated they are by studiously including T-Bone Walker and Lightnin’ Hopkins and Hubert Sumlin and Buddy Guy? Let’s start with Yngwie Malmsteen, shredder extraordinaire and highly influential to boot. Anybody in Manhattan ever hear of Steve Vai? No? I’m not f*cking surprised. Joe Satriani? Nope.
OK, I hear some of you beefing, buffoonery likes metal guitarists, so what, and he’s just miffed because his faves aren’t on the list. No, actually, I like important, highly skilled, highly influential guitarists, like all three of these fellows, and they’re more important than the punkers with whom RS is so infatuated. Or maybe buffoonery likes guys like Carl Perkins, who is also missing, and he ain’t metal, and he’s better and more important than Jack White, that’s for g*ddam sure. Or Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery, huh? Or JOHN F*CKING LENNON, MAYBE? Tom Verlaine and Glen Buxton make it, but NOT JOHN LENNON? Talk about brain dead. If we’re talking influential, let’s talk influential.
But that’s not why this list is full of sh*t, and why, accordingly, the magazine is full of sh*t. The reason is this:
Any magazine whose list of great guitarists that doesn’t include Chet Atkins isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. That’s right: Chet Atkins is missing. Chet Atkins, uncontestably one of the greatest, most influential, tasteful, and important electric guitarists of all time, universally reflected on lists compiled by informed listeners (unlike the writers at RS), missing from the Bible of Music’s Greatest Guitarists List.
What a disgrace. And these guys know music?
The Top 500 Albums List is no better. Giving the devil its due, RS again gets the easy ones right—Sgt. Pepper still #1, Pet Sounds #2 (the Sex Pistols fall to #41—what changed, guys?), Revolver #3, the usual lot of Dylan, Stones, Beatles, and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” to show that we’re multi-racial. But this list is also seriously dysfunctional.
First, a significant number of the albums are greatest hits compilations, which are not albums in the true sense of the word. Now, I can see greatest hits albums being important for artists who wrote and performed in the early days, when albums were often just a bunch of tunes thrown together and were not deliberate projects or conceptual whole. So, a Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley collection is more than appropriate.
But it doesn’t work at all for an important artist like Elton John, whose “Greatest Hits” album from 1975 duplicates much of the music on his other albums that are in the Top 500. Or for the Byrds, who “greatest hits” merely repeats the better songs contained on the three or four of their albums already on the list. Same with Simon and Garfunkel. And if you’re including these compilations, why not “Beatles 1” or the “Red” and “Blue” double-disks from the 70’s, or the Stones’ many compiliations, etc. and ad infinitum? The reason is that there is no reason at all and, as usual, RS is both incompetent and inconsistent.
Let’s look at another problem: the “Greatest Albums” include a bunch of country and jazz albums. Now, I have no problem with that music (unlike rap and hip-hop, neither of which are music at all but are agglomerations of random noise, when they’re not being misogynistic, violent, or obscene). But as usual, RS includes these albums merely to show how well-informed the list compilers are rather than from any sense of genuine importance. If it’s a rock/pop list, keep it rock/pop. Otherwise, if you’re going to include Hank Williams and Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, you’d better have George Jones and Eddy Arnold and Ray Price, or be prepared to explain the difference.
Likewise, we see guest appearances by Miles Davis (“Kind of Blue”, “Sketches of Spain”, and “Bitches Brew”—yeah, I own these albums, too, BFD) and John Coltrane and a few other jazz greats. But if we’re talking great albums—and these ARE great, but missing are many, many other genuinely great jazz albums—you’d better include them all, like Weather Report and Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett, and crowd off bilge by people like Joy Division and the Fugees.
But, again, this isn’t a genuine “Greatest Albums” list, it’s a list of the really, really great stuff that everybody agrees on, plus all the punk and new wave and rap stuff that we the cosmic hipsters at Rolling Stone really dig, plus enough jazz and country to show that “hey, we listen to great music and we’re really well-rounded and you’re not”. How contemptuous.
And even within the confines of the “Greatest 500”, there are extraordinary absences. Fans of my work (both of you) know that I listen to a lot of art rock and metal, stuff not to everybody’s taste. But some of the music is extremely important and, indeed, great. So how can King Crimson’s seminal “In the Court of the Crimson Kind” be missing, whose influence on both art/prog rock and heavy metal/hard rock is critical. What is the excuse for the absence of not even one of that superb trio by Yes, “The Yes Album”, “Fragile”, and “Close to the Edge”? Two albums by the Replacements but both of Genesis’s unreal “Selling England by the Pound” and the “Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” are DOA? One Peter Gabriel album? Nothing by Triumvirat?
OK, that last is a joke.
Some of you are saying, buffoonery, you’ve made your point. Wait, fair reader, there is more: Metal is virtually unnoticed, and what there is there, is crap. We get two albums from hair metal nitwits Def Leppard, but missing are albums such as Joe Satriani’s very important “Surfing with the Alien” and Steve Vai’s even more important “Passion and Warfare”. What is going on here? Hell, where’s something by Deep Purple (“Machinehead”, maybe) or UFO? Where is Judas Priest’s sleazy-and-great “British Steel”? Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast”?
Important mainstream music is also overlooked. Present on the 100 Greatest Guitarist list is the wonderful Ry Cooder, but all of his music is missing (with the exception of the “Buena Vista Social Club”, and that isn’t really his work) and that includes the extraordinary “Paradise and Lunch” and the almost-as-good “Into the Purple Valley” and “Bop Til You Drop”. What gives, guys? Not a single album by boogie greats Little Feat, including the sublime “Sailin’ Shoes” and “Dixie Chicken”. That pop masterpiece by Nick Lowe, “Pure Pop for Now People”(which RS has always raved about in its books and divers encyclopdiae) is absent. The enormous Van Morrison has but two albums, which do not include the monstrous “Into the Music” and “St. Dominic’s Preview”. The late Warren Zevon: unmentioned. Fairport Convention: ditto. The Isley Brothers: who? Ricky Nelson? Rush? 10CC’s “The Original Soundtrack”? Traffic? Thin Lizzy? Hell, there isn’t even a Stevie Ray Vaughan or Jeff Beck album here.
Instead of this essential music, we get music by:
Cindy Lauper
Eminem
All four Velvet Underground albums (one is enough, already) plus two Lou Reeds
The Go-Gos
Bjork
Hole
The B-52’s
The Meters
Moby
Madonna
Weezer
The Strokes
Plus a long list of unlistenable pop crap and rap
Enough said. I hope the point has been made, and if it hasn’t let’s say it ONE MORE TIME: The business of a music magazine is music. A music magazine that can’t get the music right is better used as toilet paper. Rolling Stone CAN NOT GET THE MUSIC RIGHT. The magazine is a waste of time, paper, and money. Trash it, right where it belongs.
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