Ah, music topic :)
I mostly lurk here but I can't let this one go by.
I've listened to (and own) most of the albums from this list. It's a pretty decent list, I think, compared to some others which are so biased towards certain genres or rated in the spur of the moment.
The trouble is, 100 albums just isn't enough. Not even close. Especially when you decide to include pre-album collections (The Robert Johnson collection and the "Sun recordings" by Elvis for example) then there's no way you can leave out Howlin' Wolf (surely an American icon?), "Bird" parker, Louis Armstrong (his "Hot Five And Hot Seven Recordings" are beyond essential), Charley Patton and Son House (the founding fathers of the Delta Blues sound, which eventually evolved into rock 'n' roll, with a lot of help of course but still...), Billie Holiday (one of THE female voice of twentieth century American music, equaled only by Aretha en Bessie Smith in my humble opinion. She didn't have the range of those two giants but with the overall warmth of her voice, her phrasing and her timing she converted some dour, meaningless songs into true masterpieces of human emotion.)
Ray Charles's "Modern Sounds In Country And Western" album is very nice but compared to his majestic work for the Atlantic label, it's inclusion is a joke. Sorry. There should have been more 'real' country or country flavored music on the list anyway. Jimmie Rodgers is one of the founding fathers of the genre and he is sorely missing. And what about Folk heroes like Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly?
Including Dylan's "Time Out Of Mind' is fine by me but excluding one of his true masterpieces "Blood On The Tracks" is a criminal offence in my book.
And why not choose something unexpected for a change. Sam Prine's first album is a perfect and often forgotten example. A ****c without the status. It combines marvelous lyrics ('there's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes...') with down to earth music. Emotional but never over the top. And that's just one album that comes to mind right away.
I'm not a big fan of Rap music so I would ditch a lot of those albums. Perhaps even ending up with only one or two left (Public Enemy's "One Nation..." and the Beastie's "Paul's Boutique") I must admit I haven't listened to that much Rap albums though but the ones I did listen to I found them to be pretty shallow. Probably great and exciting when you're fifteen or sixteen but once you've made love to a real woman it all becomes a little one-dimensional. Like the music of the Doors, which exclusion is okay with me.
No Gospel music and no World music? (Where's the first Buena Vista Social Club album?)
I'm glad they included "The Harder They Come" soundtrack but Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly" soundtrack album wouldn't have been out of place either.
Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" and Sly and The Family Stone's "There's A Riot-Goin' On" are ****cs too and would have really funked up the list.
I'm pleasantly surprised that they did put the Stone Roses debut album up there. I really love that album. Jingle-jangle trance and dance music at its best.
I better rest my case now. I could go on for hours. Truth is, there will never be a definitive list of best albums. Just like there will never be definitive lists for computer games, books, movies, etc.
Art just refuses to be judged objectively. (Unless we're talking about Elton John, Garth Brooks and the Eagles of course. They should be dragged of this list immediately!)
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