Well, I made it through the first 100 and the most striking thing about the list is that they sure like those greatest hits albums at Rolling Stone… and the Beatles. Although, oddly, they didn’t include any Beatles Greatest Hits albums.

By including a greatest hits album, they are basically saying - well, this guy didn’t really have any good albums but we like him…so…here are his greatest hits anyway.

Get rid of all the greatest hits, about half of The Beatles’ albums and all the oddball ones (I am looking at you Captain Beefheart) that they threw in to see if we were paying attention and you’d have a good list of about 40 albums that you really should go back and listen to someday. Maybe tomorrow.

Only four hundred to go.

UPDATE

I pruned the list down for you. I nuked all the greatest hits and oddballs and got rid of some Beatles. 40 fantastic albums remain and here they are. I left them in the original order that Rolling Stone had them.

1. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
4. Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan
6. What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye
9. Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan
10. The Beatles (”The White Album”), The Beatles
11. The Sun Sessions, Elvis Presley
12. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis
15. Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience
17. Nevermind, Nirvana
18. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
22. Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon
23. Innervisions, Stevie Wonder
25. Rumours, Fleetwood Mac
26. The Joshua Tree, U2
28. Who’s Next, The Who
29. Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin
32. Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones
37. Hotel California, The Eagles
41. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, The Sex Pistols
42. The Doors, The Doors
43. The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd
51. Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel
57. Beggars Banquet, The Rolling Stones
65. Moondance, Van Morrison
66. Led Zeppelin IV, Led Zeppelin
68. Off the Wall, Michael Jackson
71. After the Gold Rush, Neil Young
72. Purple Rain, Prince
73. Back in Black, AC/DC
74. Otis Blue, Otis Redding
79. Star Time, James Brown
83. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Aretha Franklin
87. The Wall, Pink Floyd
88. At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash
91. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John
93. Sign ‘o’ the Times, Prince
97. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan
98. This Year’s Model, Elvis Costello
99. There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Sly and the Family Stone
100. In the Wee Small Hours, Frank Sinatra

[Clearing out my drafts folder while I wait for my meeting to start and discovered this. Dunno if it's any good or why I wrote it.]

Splendid wrap up of the Darwin Anniversary last year in the London Review of Books (it’s not short).

The reviewer focuses on the question  Why Darwin? After all, there are plenty of people (ok…not plenty of people…a few people) who have made as big a contribution to science as Darwin - Einstein, Newton, Gallileo - why is Darwin such a big hero?

According to Dawkins, Darwin’s idea wasn’t just a great one (‘the most powerful, revolutionary idea ever put forward by an individual’), it is essentially the only idea you need to explain life and all its phenomena: ‘Charles Darwin really solved the problem of existence, the problem of the existence of all living things – humans, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria. Everything we know about life, Darwin essentially explained.’

After a roundabout tour that disses evolutionary psychology and the New Atheists, the reviewer settles on the idea that, even without Darwin, someone would’ve come up with Natural Selection [er...they did - ed] just as someone would’ve discovered oxygen without Priestley [er.... -ed] or  figured out calculus without *Newton [now you are just messing with me - ed]. But Darwin’s great contribution was not that he was one of the greatest scientists of all times. It was that he was a great writer.

You can still say, with perfect accuracy, that the Origin is much more than its ‘essential’ theory of natural selection: it is a book, a magnificent theatre of persuasion, ‘one long argument’ (as Darwin called it), supported by masses of arduously compiled evidence, ingeniously organised and vouched for by a special individual, with known special virtues and capacities.

It so happens that I am reading The Descent of Man at the Moment, so I have recent experience of Darwin’s writing. It really is magnificent. When you think that he was writing about cutting edge science - not a popularization - and that, in fact, he was the one doing the cutting… it just takes your breath away.

If you have tried reading The Origin and got stuck at the pigeon chapter like I did, give Descent a try. You won’t regret it.

* For all the received wisdom about the inevitability of discovery, it was surprisingly hard to come up with a third example to make my joke work.

Daniel Larison is rapidly becoming my favourite conservative and today he takes on a former favourite, Davids Brooks.

Brooks’ column today is about The White Messiah

This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.

Larison, as always, goes ever so gently for the throat:

Brooks is right when he says the story teaches that, “Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.” What he fails to do is connect this to the urges of our own liberal imperialists and humanitarian interventionists, who are constantly warning against leaving other nations to their own devices and who are frequently complaining about our boundless benevolence that is repaid with contempt or indifference. He might consult his colleague Thomas Friedman on this point, since Friedman seems to think that most Muslims worldwide are “holding our coats” while we do all the heavy lifting on their behalf and that Afghanistan can be likened to a “special needs baby” that we as a country have just adopted. Muslims do tend to be reduced to supporting actors in Friedman’s own journey of self-importance.

One of the commenters at Eunomia used the delightful phrase

the neocons’ inexplicable War Against Avatar

Excellent!

The third post in which I blog my reactions as I plough through Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

This was the first section where I was listening to most of the albums for the first time and I had an intense reaction to every one of them.

OK. Except Robert Johnson. I mean, I love the blues. The blues wouldn’t have been possible without Robert Johnson. And then we wouldn’t have had Clapton or Page or The Rolling Stones. But it’s like looking at a Daguerreotype. OK. It’s really cool to see what Paris looked like in 1838, but people take much better pictures these days. Just take a look at one of Roongko’s.

I always liked Chuck Berry - even after My Ding a-Ling - and I am happy to concede that he - not Elvis or Bill Haley - invented Rock ‘n’ Roll. But he never really grabbed me the way some of the other pioneers did. He did write some good music though. Why a greatest hits album? Did he not release any decent albums? *shrug*

Rolling Stone says

In the latter half of the fifties, guitarist, singer and songwriter extraordinaire Berry released a string of singles that defined the sound and spirit of rock & roll. “Maybellene,” a fast, countryish rocker about a race between a Ford and a Cadillac, kicked it all off in 1955, and one classic hit followed another…

How did this one escape me? I guess I had my John Lennon’s Greatest Hits and I thought I was done. Didn’t need to hear any more.

But this one is greater.

I remember coming across Working Class Hero in the soundtrack of the monumental The Leaving of Liverpool and rushing to the internet to find out who it was by. But then I remembered that the internet had not been *invented yet so I rushed back in time to catch the credits and saw that Holy Crap! It’s John Lennon. It has been my favourite John Lennon song ever since. Imagine.

My much younger step-sister was really into U2 when they first made their appearance and she used to play them all the time but this was the first time I sat down and listened to The Joshua Tree. I have other U2 albums but not this one. Odd. Because this is certainly the best.

Rolling Stone says

On U2’s fifth full album, the band immerses itself in the mythology of the United States, particularly the wide-open spaces and possibilities of the Western frontier, while guitarist the Edge exploits the poetic echo of digital delay, drowning his trademark arpeggios in rippling tremolo.

I am ashamed to say that I had never heard Led Zeppelin I either. I know all the songs of course but the actual album managed to avoid me for all these years. I’m wondering now whether this album should actually be up there at the top instead of Sgt Pepper. It’s crazy good - and I’m not even a Led Zep fan.

Rolling Stone says

On their first album, Led Zeppelin were still in the process of inventing their own sound, moving on from the heavy rave-up blueprint of guitarist Jimmy Page’s previous band, the Yardbirds. But from the very beginning, Zeppelin had the astonishing fusion of Page’s lyrical guitar playing and Robert Plant’s paint-peeling love-hound yowl.

Wait! Blue?… Not Clouds?

I have Clouds. It’s quite marvellous but Blue? Isn’t that the one she made when she was already a has-been?

OK. OK. I’ll listen…

…OMG! That is the most incredible album I have heard in years and years. It won’t be to everyone’s taste - maybe not even to mine (and certainly not to my wife’s). But at least give it a listen and marvel at what Joni has created.

Rolling Stone says

With song after song of regrets and sorrow and a smoky-blue cover shot of Mitchell on the edge of tears, this may be the ultimate breakup album. Its whispery minimalism is also Mitchell’s greatest musical achievement.

Expeditions like this are what music subscriptions are for and what you people who still buy their music don’t seem to get. You probably wouldn’t want to run out and buy Blue and, if you did, you’d probably only listen to it once. But with Rhapsody or Napster - for five bucks a month - you can listen to any crazy album that takes your fancy [as long as it is not by the Beatles or Led Zep or the Eagles or AC/DC -ed].

All in all, this has been the most exciting section of the journey so far. Who knew that Stevie Wonder was this good? Or James Brown? Amazing stuff. I am looking forward to the next section.

21. The Great Twenty-Eight, Chuck Berry

22. Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon

23. Innervisions, Stevie Wonder

24. Live at the Apollo (1963), James Brown

25. Rumours, Fleetwood Mac

26. The Joshua Tree, U2

27. King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 1, Robert Johnson

28. Who’s Next, The Who

29. Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin

30. Blue, Joni Mitchell

* Yeah, yeah. I know the difference between the internet and the world wide web but that wouldn’t have been so funny, would it?

The next ten albums in my quest to listen to 500 Greatest - according to Rolling Stone - Albums of All Time. It’s handy, on a quest like this, to have access to all the music in the world. Imagine if you had to buy them all on iTunes at 99c a track. It’d be even handier if The Beatles albums were available on Rhapsody which is kind of important when THERE ARE 5 BEATLES ALBUMS in the top 14!

OMG Elvis at #11.

Elvis is kind of unfashionable right now - especially in America. People still have this image of a fat greaser in a sequined jumpsuit but that is totally unfair. It’s like remembering Frank Sinatra as an old man or Marlon Brando as an obnoxious tub of lard.

Frank Sinatra will always be a super-cool young crooner with a voice from heaven. Marlon Brando will always be Fletcher Christian casting Captain Bligh into the long boat and Elvis will always be the nineteen year old trucker who walked into Sam Phillips’s studio and changed music forever.

I got my first Elvis album for Christmas in 1972 and hearing his voice still gives me chills.

Rolling Stone says:

Many believe Rock & Roll was born on July 5th, 1954, at Sun Studios in Memphis. Elvis Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black were horsing around with “That’s All Right,” a tune by bluesman Arthur Crudup, when producer Sam Phillips stopped them and asked, “What are you doing?” “We don’t know,” they said. Phillips told them to “back up and do it again.”

I came to Miles Davis late in life. I always liked jazz but Miles Davis never grabbed me - until I sat down and listened to A Kind of Blue. I could put this on a loop and never get bored with it.

I used to think that Hendrix was the greatest guitar player ever, But, now that I am learning to play the guitar, I am starting to doubt that he was a guitar player at all because there is no way that those sounds could come out of the same instrument that I strum away at every night. I think he was some kind of magician.

Rolling Stone says

This is what Britain sounded like in late 1966 and early 1967: ablaze with rainbow blues, orchestral guitar feedback and the highly personal cosmic vision of black American emigre Jimi Hendrix.

I bought Nevermind a long time ago but, after one listen, decided it was too heavy for my taste and didn’t play it for another ten years. Now I can’t get enough of it. I blame Guitar Hero.

Rolling Stone says

his slashing riffs, corrosive singing and deviously oblique writing, rammed home by the Pixies-via-Zeppelin might of bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, put the warrior purity back in rock & roll. Lyrically, Cobain raged in code — shorthand grenades of inner tumult and self-loathing. His genius, though, in songs such as “Lithium,” “Breed” and “Teen Spirit” was the soft-loud tension he created between verse and chorus, restraint and assault.

I hated Michael Jackson in 1983 but my girlfriend of the time couldn’t get enough of him. She played Thriller back to back, hour after hour, over and over, every night of every weekend for nearly three years. When I listen to it now, the only song that strikes me as really great is Billie Jean but, like it or not, it’s a part of my life.

Rolling Stone says

It is hard now to separate the wonder of Thriller from its commercial stature (Number One for thirty-seven weeks, seven Top Ten singles, eight Grammys) and Jackson’s current nightmare of tabloid celebrity and self-destructive egomania. But there was a time when he was truly the King of Pop. This is it.

Except for The Velvet Underground (did they throw these outliers in to see if we are paying attention?), the rest of the top 20 is kind of obvious although I might’ve picked a different Van Morrison album.

11. The Sun Sessions, Elvis Presley

12. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis

13. Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground

14. Abbey Road, The Beatles

15. Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience

16. Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan

17. Nevermind, Nirvana

18. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen

19. Astral Weeks, Van Morrison

20. Thriller, Michael Jackson

I am on a quest to listen to the 500 Greatest - according to Rolling Stone - Albums of All Time. I am 30 albums in and have an interim report to file. I’ll cover the highlights.

OK, Sergeant Pepper really is awesome and I can’t quibble about it being  #1. It wouldn’t be my number 1 but I accept that it is a fantastic album. Well done Beatles.

Rolling Stone says

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time.

Your White Album was incredible too but I will not accept that five Beatles albums belong in the top 14. That’s madness.

But what is even more crazy is that Pet Sounds is #2.

I love the Beach Boys and I would definitely have a Beach Boys album in my top 500. But not this one. And not at #2.

Rolling Stone says

“Who’s gonna hear this shit?” Beach Boys singer Mike Love asked the band’s resident genius, Brian Wilson, in 1966, as Wilson played him the new songs he was working on. “The ears of a dog?”

It’s not that bad. But still not #2.

At last! Some sense!This is the album that gave Rolling Stone magazine it’s name and I love it. It’s better than all three of the albums above it.

Like a Rolling Stone is the certainly the best song ever but Ballad of a Thin Man is a contender.

Rolling Stone says:

Bruce Springsteen has described the beginning of “Like a Rolling Stone,” the opening song on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, as the “snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind.” The response of folk singer Phil Ochs to the entire album was even more rhapsodic. “It’s impossibly good. . . .” he said. “How can a human mind do this?”

The rest of the top 10 is fairly obvious (apart from all those Beatles albums) but wtf is The Clash doing in there?

1. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles

2. Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys

3. Revolver, The Beatles

4. Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan

5. Rubber Soul, The Beatles

6. What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye

7. Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones

8. London Calling, The Clash

9. Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan

10. The Beatles (”The White Album”), The Beatles

Way to miss the point! (Don’t play with that or you’ll go blind)

But Avatar claims that there is something wrong with technology, and that the Na’vi of Pandora somehow represent opposition to it.

The right-of-center blogosphere that I loiter around has chosen to focus on the anti-corporate message in Avatar and, indeed, your attitude to corporatism is probably a good predictor of whether you enjoyed the movie (exception: Julio).

But it wasn’t the human’s technology that the Na’vi objected to.

Spoiler (highlight to read it):
It was the gunships the humans used to destroy their home.

Douthat:

The much-discussed irony of James Cameron’s “Avatar” (which has already grossed upwards of a billion dollars worldwide) is that it’s a celebration of primitivism, pantheism, and pre-modernity created with the most cutting-edge technological tools a modern capitalist society can muster.

If there is irony in the air, it is that the freedom-loving conservatives are terrified of the government telling them how to live their lives but are perfectly happy to let corporations do the same.

FWIW I thought the movie was alright.

It’s customary, whenever someone publishes a list of the 100 best anythings, to go down the list and

1. Complain about the missing entries.
2. Complain about the entries that don’t belong.
3. Take perverse credit for the entries that are there.

Without further ado, here goes on the 100 best novels since 1923:

• I have only read 14.
• But have seen the movie of another 9.
• Hated one.
• Failed to finish another.
• Why isn’t there more Graham Greene?

I have been meaning to read Cuckoo’s Nest for ages. I think it’s finally time.

I recently finished Michael Shermer’s Science of Good and Evil and reviewed it on Facebook.

I have been enjoying Michael Shermer’s blog and writings in Skeptic magazine for a while now. His interviews with creationists are particularly spectactular. This book? Not so much. The title of the book should’ve been “meanderings thoughts about ethics from a libertarian agnostic.”

The Libertarian side of Shermer came to the fore in a couple of blog postings over the last few days when someone asked him how he squared his libertarianism with his self-professed status as a skeptic.

In a nutshell, I am a libertarian because conservatives are a bunch of gun-totting, Hummer-driving, hard-drinking, Bible-thumping, black-and-white-thinking, fist-pounding, shoe-stomping, morally-hypocritical blowhards, and liberals are a bunch of tree-hugging, whale-saving, hybrid-driving, sandle-wearing, bottled-water-drinking, ACLU-supporting, flip-flopping, wishy-washy, Namby Pamby bedwetters. There’s a better way. Libertarianism.

In one post he rattled off the Libertarian Manifesto and the comments were jammed with all the usual criticism of libertarian ideas but this one captured the problems just so.

“If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.”

This quote comes from an essay in American Conservative. The quality of the essay is mixed but it has a couple of real gems - freedom as a downpayment on future freedoms.

In each of these cases, less freedom today is the price of more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be a way of running down accumulated social capital and storing up problems for the future. So even if libertarianism is true in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the libertarian policy choice is the right one today on any particular question.

and

Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.

Finished. What a delight!

This one is a lot less prescriptive than The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and what one learns, one learns by osmosis.

The book skips around a lot of different ideas and it reaches deep into the toolbox of the design artist. Sometimes too deep, I thought - but perhaps I am not the target reader.

The pictures are nice though.