I listened to the top 100 albums on Rate Your Music
Here's what it taught me about taste.
Over the last couple weeks, I listened to all 100 of the top albums on the infamous music website Rate Your Music, in chronological order.
This started when I realized my listening habits were far too narrow. Probably 80% (not even joking) of the music I listened to on Spotify in the past year has been either Logic1, Kanye West, or Daft Punk. If I really wanted to be able to have opinions, if I wanted to develop taste, I needed to go broader. I couldn’t trust myself to pick the right albums, however. When the Apple Music 100 Best Albums list came out, I decided to trust the experts and go through the list.
I started at the top with the intent of working my way down. #1 was Lauryn Hill’s classic The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which I loved. But after looking through the rest of the list, I realized that even a normie like me could tell that it sucked. Drake, Bad Bunny, and Travis Scott ended up on here? No To Pimp a Butterfly or Madvillainy or Graduation? I decided if I really wanted to develop taste, to become a true music bro, I had to turn to the dark side. I had to go to Rate Your Music.
RYM isn’t your average music website. You won’t find any Drake, or Michael Jackson, or Taylor Swift2. Though there are some popular musicians (the Beatles, Kanye West, and Kendrick Lamar come to mind), much of the list is dedicated to /mu/-influenced esoterica. Ever heard of Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin, or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, or Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven by Godspeed You! Black Emperor? Me neither. After deciding to listen in chronological order, to best trace the evolution of genres and tastes, it was time to dive in.
The 60s
Kind of Blue - Miles Davis (1959)
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady - Charles Mingus (1963)
A Love Supreme - John Coltrane (1965)
Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan (1965)
Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys (1966)
Blonde on Blonde - Bob Dylan (1966)
Revolver - The Beatles (1966)
The Doors - The Doors (1967)
The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
Are You Experienced - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967)
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles (1967)
Songs of Leonard Cohen - Leonard Cohen (1967)
Electric Ladyland - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1968)
The Beatles [White Album] - The Beatles (1968)
The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground (1969)
Karma - Pharaoh Sanders (1969)
In a Silent Way - Miles Davis (1969)
Abbey Road - The Beatles (1969)
In the Court of the Crimson King - King Crimson (1969)
The 1960s is the decade with the most familiar artists - the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys, and the Doors, just to name a few3. I had tried listening through the entire Beatles discography beforehand, but got bored after about four albums of early 60s mass-produced teenybop pop. Their four best albums - Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s, the White Album, and Abbey Road - written and recorded largely after their touring days, were different, and much better. I’ve never been much of a jazz fan, but I was very pleasantly surprised by Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane, plus Pharaoh Sanders, who I hadn’t heard of. One of the most unique albums of the decade was Songs of Leonard Cohen, a spoken poetry album delivered with a soft voice and strumming acoustic guitar, which I liked a lot more than I expected. Another was The Velvet Underground & Nico, a cult classic produced by Andy Warhol, with an experimental sound and lyrics about sexual deviancy and drug abuse before they were cool.
My favorite album of the decade was, of course, In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson: a fusion of progressive rock, jazz, and classical done incredibly well. Its five songs both work beautifully together and stand fully on their own. “21st Century Schizoid Man”, famously sampled on Kanye’s “POWER”, has almost metal-like intensity in both instruments and vocals. “I Talk to the Wind”, in contrast, is soft and ethereal. “Epitaph”, the group’s magnum opus, is a grand, nearly nine-minute-long symphony about the Cold War. “Moonchild” is two minutes of Mellotron and ten minutes of surprisingly good improv, and “The Court of the Crimson King” brings everything back in a grand finale. I had already listened to it before many times, but listening to it in the context of its time only solidified its supremacy.
The 70s
Bitches Brew - Miles Davis (1970)
Paranoid - Black Sabbath (1970)
What’s Going On - Marvin Gaye (1971)
Master of Reality - Black Sabbath (1971)
Led Zeppelin [IV] - Led Zeppelin (1971)
Pink Moon - Nick Drake (1972)
Clube da Esquina - Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges (1972)
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars - David Bowie (1972)
Close to the Edge - Yes (1972)
The Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd (1973)
Future Days - Can (1973)
Innervisions - Stevie Wonder (1973)
Red - King Crimson (1974)
Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan (1975)
Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd (1975)
Station to Station - David Bowie (1976)
Songs in the Key of Life - Stevie Wonder (1976)
Low - David Bowie (1977)
Animals - Pink Floyd (1977)
Marquee Moon - Television (1977)
Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division (1979)
The 70s, though again full of popular artists like Pink Floyd and David Bowie, started to show more of RYM’s more underground albums. My favorite of those was Clube da Esquina by Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges. One of my favorite albums of all time is Buena Vista Social Club, and I saw a lot of parallels between it and Clube da Esquina - created by an artists’ collective in a poor Latin American country, and rising to critical acclaim and commercial success. Where Clube da Esquina differs is its more experimental sound, and the clear and beautiful sound of Nascimento and Borges’ vocals.
There were three artists - Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and King Crimson - who also had listed albums from the 60s. None of them were able to surpass their previous albums. In particular, I had high hopes for King Crimson’s Red, which, aside from “Fallen Angel”, just wasn’t as good as their debut. Interestingly, every member of King Crimson except band founder and guitarist Robert Fripp left between 1969 and 1974, which probably had something to do with it.
This was my first time seriously listening to Black Sabbath, David Bowie, and Pink Floyd, and I was pleasantly surprised to like all of them. Black Sabbath was heavy and absolutely foundational to the heavy metal genre, exemplified by the song “Iron Man”. David Bowie sounded like an alien, but in a good way - “Starman” and the rest of Ziggy Stardust was a ton of fun to listen to, like corny pulp fiction sci-fi come to life. Pink Floyd was the best of the three. The Dark Side of the Moon and Animals were solid, but Wish You Were Here was excellent - a touching tribute to band co-founder Syd Barrett, who went insane from substance abuse and had to leave the band before they made it big.
There were also a couple soul albums: What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye (famously rated by Rolling Stone as the #1 greatest album of all time) and Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder. Songs in the Key of Life in particular, was just a beautiful album, particularly “Isn’t She Lovely”. I never thought the harmonica could be used so well.
The 80s
Closer - Joy Division (1980)
Remain in Light - Talking Heads (1980)
Ride the Lightning - Metallica (1984)
Hounds of Love - Kate Bush (1985)
Master of Puppets - Metallica (1986)
The Queen Is Dead - The Smiths (1986)
Doolittle - Pixies (1989)
Disintegration - The Cure (1989)
For some reason, there were far fewer albums from the 80s than any other decade, even the 2010s. Curiously, nearly all of the most popular 80s artists are conspicuously missing, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, Billy Joel, AC/DC. Regardless, the albums left on the list are pretty good. Remain in Light was a preview of the next few decades of electronica. Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets were great follow-ups to Black Sabbath, and The Queen Is Dead was post-punk alt rock exemplified. Despite these, this was the most forgettable decade on RYM’s list.
The 90s
Heaven or Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins (1990)
Spiderland - Slint (1991)
Laughing Stock - Talk Talk (1991)
The Low End Theory - A Tribe Called Quest (1991)
Nevermind - Nirvana (1991)
Loveless - My Bloody Valentine (1991)
Selected Ambient Works 85-92 - Aphex Twin (1992)
Souvlaki - Slowdive (1993)
In Utero - Nirvana (1993)
Midnight Marauders - A Tribe Called Quest (1993)
Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) - Wu-Tang Clan (1993)
The Downward Spiral - Nine Inch Nails (1994)
Illmatic - Nas (1994)
Grace - Jeff Buckley (1994)
Dummy - Portishead (1994)
Symbolic - Death (1995)
Liquid Swords - Genius/GZA (1995)
Soundtracks for the Blind - Swans (1996)
LONG SEASON - Fishmans (1996)
Endtroducing… - DJ Shadow (1996)
Either/Or - Elliott Smith (1997)
OK Computer - Radiohead (1997)
F# A# ∞ - Godspeed You! Black Emperor (1997)
Homogenic - Björk (1997)
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel (1998)
Mezzanine - Massive Attack (1998)
Aquemini - OutKast (1998)
Now we’re getting somewhere.
The 90s had both the most albums and the most diversity of genres out of any decade on this list. There was Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, which pioneered the “shoegaze” genre “characterized by its ethereal mixture of obscured vocals, guitar distortion and effects, feedback, and overwhelming volume”. There were Nevermind and In Utero by Nirvana, grunge albums bursting with anger and frustration. There was the folksy, bluesy rock album Grace by Jeff Buckley, his only album before his tragic death at 304. There was The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails - if you like metal grinding on metal and people screaming, you’ll love this one. The two most interesting genres, however, were rap and /mu/core.
The 90s was both the first decade on the list to have rap and, arguably, the golden age of the genre. Illmatic by Nas is an enduring classic that holds up just as well 30 years later: “NY State of Mind” and “The World Is Yours” are songs you can really vibe to. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and its follow-up, Liquid Swords by Wu-Tang member GZA had pseudo-Asian influences before rappers being weeaboos was cool. Aquemini by OutKast was pretty cool, though I still prefer Stankonia and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. The Low End Theory and especially Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest were fantastic: perfectly blending jazz with rap, a fusion you almost never see in popular music today.
The other genre is /mu/core, characterized by unique vocals, erratic instrumentation, sometimes deliberately low-quality sound, and tracks that often go 20 minutes or longer. In other words, albums designed to deter normies. Soundtracks for the Blind by Swans is a nearly two and a half hour long concept album reminiscent of Everywhere at the End of Time, complete with recordings of dialogue from a nursing home. LONG SEASON by Fishmans consists of a single, 35-minute-long song and is the only Japanese album on the list. F# A# ∞ by Godspeed You! Black Emperor is over an hour but with just three songs, each consisting of multiple movements, plus a spoken intro and lots of slow, instrumental parts. Homogenic by Björk has one of the most unique vocals I’ve ever heard, especially the song Jóga (it’s hard to even describe, you just have to listen to it). Perhaps the biggest cult classic on the entire list is Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, with surrealist lyrics, peculiar instruments (a singing saw!), and a “psychedelic folk” style.
The best album of the decade, however, was Radiohead’s OK Computer. I fucking love this album. Radiohead went from a decent but totally undifferentiated debut pop album (Pablo Honey, known for the single “Creep”) to a pretty good, relatively unique second album (The Bends) to the absolutely fantastic, completely irreplicable third album that is OK Computer. “Airbag” hypes me for the rest of the album; the first beat drop in “Paranoid Android” gives me goosebumps; “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is weird and delightful; the finale of “Exit Music (For A Film)” is powerful and moving; “Let Down” is uplifting without venturing into normie pop territory; “Karma Police” is just one of the great songs of all time; “Fitter Happier” is an eerie and fitting interlude reminiscent of Stephen Hawking; “Electioneering” emulates Led Zeppelin’s rock without losing Radiohead’s sound; “Climbing Up the Walls” is dark and introspective; the glockenspiel-and-soft-guitar melody in “No Surprises” is beautifully bittersweet; “Lucky” is a solid banger; and the call bell at the end of “The Tourist” is placed perfectly. Not a single song is less than great, and they all work well together: just a 10/10 album throughout.
The 2000s
Kid A - Radiohead (2000)
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven - Godspeed You! Black Emperor (2000)
Since I Left You - The Avalanches (2000)
Discovery - Daft Punk (2001)
Vespertine - Björk (2001)
The Glow Pt. 2 - The Microphones (2001)
Velocity : Design : Comfort - Sweet Trip (2003)
The College Dropout - Kanye West (2004)
Madvillainy - Madvillain (2004)
MM..FOOD - MF DOOM (2004)
Illinoise - Sufjan Stevens (2005)
Late Registration - Kanye West (2005)
Donuts - J Dilla (2006)
In Rainbows - Radiohead (2007)
Deathconsciousness - Have a Nice Life (2008)
The aughts are much like the 90s: also full of rap and /mu/core. Radiohead’s Kid A and In Rainbows are excellent albums, but nothing can top OK Computer for me. MF DOOM’s Madvillainy and MM..FOOD are masterpieces of both production and wordplay, layering multiple rhyme schemes, some mid-sentence, into the same verse. J Dilla’s Donuts is nearly perfect instrumental hip hop, from which I caught so many samples from other songs that I lost count. A common theme in /mu/core albums is that they’ll have one, and only one excellent song out of an otherwise hard-to-interpret album. “Dsco”, on Sweet Trip’s velocity : design : comfort., is a perfect example of this. Go listen to it right now.
My two favorite artists of the decade are Kanye West and Daft Punk. Though I wish they’d included Kanye’s Graduation (which, strangely enough, ranks at #622 overall5), The College Dropout and Late Registration are fantastic albums - they blend soul with rap in a way that would typically be experimental and esoteric, but Kanye does it in a way that sounds fun and poppy. Both of these albums contain a dizzying variety of moods, from the fun of “The New Workout Plan” to the passion of “Through The Wire” to the free-flowing reminiscence of “Last Call” on College Dropout, or the the catchy “Gold Digger” to the sad “Roses” to the absolutely triumphant “We Major” on Late Registration, but they all sound like Kanye. Even Kanye’s most stupid lyrics (“Plus my Aunt Shirley, Aunt Beverly, Aunt Clay and Aunt Jean/So many Aunties we could have an Auntie Team”) manage to sound good.
Daft Punk’s Discovery, however, is the best album of the decade. After sitting through like ten /mu/core albums designed to be as far from pop as possible, turning on Discovery felt like coming home - if home were a futuristic space odyssey with a distinctly European feel. Like OK Computer, Discovery doesn’t have a single bad song. Unlike OK Computer, almost all of Discovery’s songs are so good that they can fully stand by themselves - Romanthony’s dance anthems of “One More Time” and “Too Long” on both ends of the album, the overdrive-heavy “Aerodynamic”, the orgasmic guitar solo at the end of “Digital Love”, the bouncy, funky “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”, the groovy buildup and vocals of “Crescendolls”, the beautiful, contemplative “Something About Us”, the incredible beat drop of “Voyager”, and the sad electronic woodwinds on “Veridis Quo”. The best song on the album is the penultimate “Face to Face”, where Daft Punk show their total mastery over the art of sampling. I mean, just watch this video. Absolutely incredible.
The 2010s
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West (2010)
The Money Store - Death Grips (2012)
good kid, m.A.A.d city - Kendrick Lamar (2012)
To Pimp A Butterfly - Kendrick Lamar (2015)
Carrie & Lowell - Sufjan Stevens (2015)
★ [Blackstar] - David Bowie (2016)6
Blonde - Frank Ocean (2016)
Atrocity Exhibition - Danny Brown (2016)
Igor - Tyler, the Creator (2019)
Ants From Up There - Black Country, New Road (2022)
The defining characteristic of this decade was rap that transcended the genre. It opened with Kanye’s magnum opus, MBDTF, which perfectly blends post-2007 Kanye’s braggadocio and energy with an over-the-top, almost orchestral production style. Try “All of the Lights”, “Devil in a New Dress”, or “Runaway”, which isn’t very orchestral, but some consider it Kanye’s best song. It was immediately followed up by Death Grips’ The Money Store, another cult classic, although more of the underground rap cult than the /mu/ cult. “I’ve Seen Footage” is the best song on the album; the rest aren’t as good.
The 2010s also had Kendrick Lamar’s two best albums, good kid, m.A.A.d city and To Pimp A Butterfly, the latter of which is ranked #1 out of nearly 6.2 million releases on Rate Your Music. GKMC tells the story of Kendrick’s upbringing among poverty, drugs, and violence in Compton, California; while TPAB speaks more broadly of black culture, racism, and discrimination. GKMC has more individual bangers (“Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe”, “Backseat Freestyle”, “Money Trees”, “Swimming Pools (Drank)”, and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” come to mind), but TPAB is overall a better album.
Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Tyler, the Creator’s Igor complement each other very well. Both are concept albums that tell a story with innovative production that blends rap with R&B, soul, and electronica. Blonde has a more soft, upbeat mood and minimalist production, exemplified by the 10/10 track “Pink + White”, though “Nights” and “Futura Free” are excellent too. Igor goes much harder, with a heavy electronic sound. The first two tracks, “IGOR’S THEME” and “EARFQUAKE”, make up one of the best two-song lineups I’ve heard.
A RYM Retrospective
So, what did I learn from my foray into the world of high taste? What even is high taste? We can try to answer this by examining what all 100 of these albums had in common, which wasn’t much - most of them are very different from each other. The main thing that springs to mind is that they’re all unique. This may be obvious, but consider how much of the music you listen to has very little that distinguishes it - especially rap (can you even tell the difference between 21 Savage, Kodak Black, and NLE Choppa?)
Second, most songs aren’t structured. A lot of popular music has a definite form with ordered repetition, such that you can almost predict what’s going to come next. Weirdly, almost no songs on any of the 100 albums have this trait - most songs are relatively unstructured, and it’s hard to tell what comes next. This naturally requires you to actually pay attention to the music, rather than mindlessly taking it in like you would with pop music. Paying attention to music is a costly signal, one that can provide solid evidence of good taste for those who do it.
Third, almost all albums were the first to either create a new genre or fuse two or more genres in a specific way. Like financial alpha, being the first comes with its rewards. Watch Citizen Kane today and you might be bored by how trite and overplayed everything feels. Watch it when it came out in 1941 and you’d be shocked at how much it advanced the medium of film. If you go back and listen to RYM’s list with the same mindset, you’ll see that Bob Dylan was the first to pioneer folk rock, The Velvet Underground & Nico invented alt rock, A Tribe Called Quest fused rap with jazz, and Radiohead melded… everything.
In the end, though, taste is a nebulous concept. There are no formulas or algorithms for developing it - just subjective feel and “I know it when I see it”. Listening to someone else’s list, even an aggregate of many such lists like RYM, can only get you so far. If you truly want to evolve your taste, you have to venture out yourself, finding what’s interesting to you and literally playing it by ear. Nonetheless, if you feel like your music taste is too narrow or too normie, listening to the top 100 RYM albums is a great first step.
My #1 artist every year for the last 2-3 years, by a wide margin. I don’t care that people think he’s corny or whatever - I think he’s great, and listening to 100 of the “best albums of all time” didn’t change that.
Interestingly, my top three artists - Logic, Kanye, and Daft Punk - are also some of the favorite artists of popular tech YouTuber (and, clearly, man of high taste) Marques Brownlee.
You also won’t find pretty much any non-English music, or music from before 1959. RIP to Beethoven and Liszt - I guess they weren’t good enough.
I was surprised to see no Rolling Stones or Elvis Presley.
So many of the artists on this list died early. Nico of The Velvet Underground and Nico fell off her bike, hit her head, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 49. Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his own father over a stupid fight about insurance documents at 44. Jimi Hendrix choked on his own vomit after overdosing on barbiturates at 27. Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head with a shotgun, also at 27. Cliff Burton, the bassist of Metallica, was killed when a tour bus hit a patch of ice. He was ejected through the window, and then the bus fell on him, crushing him to death. He was 24.
Even stranger, the album directly above it is one of my favorite of all time, Buena Vista Social Club by Buena Vista Social Club, and the one right above that is Norman Fucking Rockwell! by Lana Del Rey.
David Bowie’s Blackstar was released 39 years after his second-most recent album on the list, Low (1977), and 44 years later than his first album on the list, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972).