So synecdochic has this post up asking people for lists of, in their opinion, the fifteen best albums of the past thirty years.

If you're like me (and several of the other people I've seen comment about it) your first reaction to seeing the lists that were generated was along the lines of "Ugh, Radiohead? Really?" So much of the music listed in those comments is by white American rock guys, it's kind of oppressive. And boring.

(Not that I have anything against Radiohead. I just don't have anything for them, either. I can put on an entire Radiohead album and come out of it unable to remember a single thing about it, nor able to come up with any reason why I'd want to. I can't actually listen to it long enough to dislike it before I get distracted and zone out.

Perhaps it's an influence thing, and OK Computer was just a new and amazing thing that defined music for a generation! And if I'd been listening to anything in the mid-'90s except Tom Lehrer, the Muppets, old Moog albums, They Might Be Giants, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Tapes, I would know that! But I've been spoiled by all the stuff that's come after Radiohead that they influenced and can't understand how important they are.

...which is possible but you know I came to Johnny Cash and Howlin' Wolf and, I dunno, Karlheinz Stockhausen at least as spoiled, and yet I was still able to recognize them for the brilliant trailblazers and great musicians they were. So I think it is just "Ugh, Radiohead? Really?")

Anyway, sara egged me on. I consider myself completely unqualified to name the "best" albums of anything, (well, no, okay, Songs By Tom Lehrer is the best Tom Lehrer album. And I have an original 10" LP of it! And I bet you don't! :P) but there were actually a lot of good albums by people other than white American rock guys scattered among all the Radiohead and Greenday and MCR, so I have gone and pulled out a sub-list.

I could have gone all out and really complicated! But that would have been too much work, considering how busy I was today not cleaning the house, so instead, I only pulled out the list of albums on there which are not rock (regardless of whether or not they are by white American guys.) Which was what I was most interested in, because I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what the important and influential rock groups are - I can't really help it, given the people I live among (Radiohead? Why?) but learning about all the other amazing musical subcultures and histories out there will never not be interesting to me.

Specifically, I put an album on the list a) if someone included it in their top 15 in a top-level comment on that post; b) if the sidebar on the artist's wikipedia page did not at any point use the words "rock," "pop," "alternative", "indie" or "new wave" to describe the genre; c) if the artist works in several distinct genres including pop/rock, but the page for the specific album had none of those words in the sidebar; d) if the artist had no wikipedia page at all or the page had no sidebar (points for obscurity regardless of genre).

I know genre is squishy and also wikipedia is not always entirely accurate (believe it or not) so this might not be the same list you'd come up with, and the genres I listed are approximate, but it's informative anyway! And I kind of want to listen to most of these albums now. (I still don't want to listen to OK Computer. I've tried, okay? Lots of times. I think. I may have blocked some of them out of my memory.)

( To be honest there were more than I expected! )

As of when I posted this, there were 80 top-level comments on that post, and there are 140 albums on my list. Assuming each commenter averaged around 10 albums, that means that a ballpark of 80% of the songs on that list were something in the family of rock music. synecdochic said "Wildly Divergent Tastes"! Live up to it, people! :D

...I would also like to note for the record that even this list is leaving out a lot of diversity to really be any list of the "best". Nearly all of the albums on it are in English, just to start with. (Most of the not-in-English nominations were jrock or jpop.)