Out of TIME

Perhaps someday I will be an old man, with fifteen grandchildren, and I'll be deaf and mellow and completely oblivious to rock 'n' roll lists penned by hack journalists who wipe their asses with art just to sell magazines.

But I'm not there yet, so the TIME 100 list gives me chest-ripping agida. In a world full of asinine, fatuous tripe, this is worthy of special recognition.

That Hole's Live Through This made their best of the '90s portion is easy to shrug off. There will always be shite albums on these kind of lists. But what I can't accept - as Jen can attest based on our long conversation about this last night - are the picks from the current decade.

First, the rational ones.

Acceptable:

Kanye West - The College Dropout
Radiohead - Kid A
Outkast - Stankonia
PJ Harvey - Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP

These work well enough. Kid A was my album of the year for 2000; The Marshall Mathers LP is genius, as is SFTC,SFTS; Outkast and Kanye aren't my bag as much, but they're decent choices nonetheless.

But then come the unacceptable choices, picks so awful that I refuse to believe they're only the result of bad taste or faulty assumptions.

Unacceptable:

Hank Williams - The Essential Hank Williams Collection
Sam Cooke - Portrait Of A Legend 1951-1964
Elvis Presley - Elvis: 30 No. 1 Hits
Muddy Waters - The Anthology, 1947-1972

These selections, to me, are a conscious slap in the face to a whole generation of music fans. All of the above artists are dead, and, what's more, they've all been dead for at least 23 years. And Hank's been gone for more than half a century. Yet these "albums" make up slightly less than half of TIME's 2000s list.

Do I like these four guys? Absolutely (especially Sam and Hank). But do posthumous compilations of decades-old hits deserve to rank among the best albums of the 21st century? If your answer to that is yes, then you, my friend, are an idiot.

Ahem.

Review of a new album by a living artist coming later tonight or tomorrow.