Despite sagging page counts, general print-media malaise, and the fact that they're still saddled with that Diablo Cody column,
Entertainment Weekly found reason to celebrate this week: It's the magazine's 1,000th issue, and in honor of that milestone the editorial team there put together a buttload of lists of "New Classics," arbitrary best-of rundowns that supposedly quantify the best pieces of pop culture of the past 25 years. The list-craziness is apparently the latest step in
EW's plan to turn itself into a printed-and-stapled blog, which has resulted in more meandering first-person front-of-book pieces and, well, Cody's occasional game of "Spot The Reference." The centerpiece of the issue's music-related offerings is
a 100-album list that's supposedly meant to count down the best albums that came out between 1983 and now—it's bookended by the soundtrack to
Purple Rain and George Michael's
Faith—and because I needed something to do, I organized it by year.
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Idolator
Today's list that's going around some blogs that I read: List the albums you like most from each year that you've been alive. It sounds simple, right? But in making a list like this, you realize things about yourself, like how Aerosmith's peak for me came right around the year I was born, even though I didn't really hear them until many years later. And how 2004 was something of a weak year for my personal canon, while 1989 was a really huge year for it, one where I had to pick between Like A Prayer, Doolittle, Cocked & Loaded, Full Moon Fever, and the album I finally wound up selecting. Anyway, peruse my list after the jump—Anthony made one too—and feel free to pick mine apart/make your own, although I should warn you that it took me a while to do. (I'm usually loath to use Wikipedia as a source, but its lists of album releases were helpful to cross-reference with Amazon, as were the Pazz & Jop rundowns on Robert Christgau's site.) If people enjoy this exercise, maybe we'll do singles lists next week! Or, hell, runners-up lists, since some of these "best" decisions were a lot harder than others.
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Blender, the mag where you come for the reviews and leave quickly before you see how bad the features are, has a list of the "20 biggest record company screw-ups of all time." Some are obvious, like the industry's inability to deal with the internet (No. 1) and that guy who turned down the Beatles (No. 2). But should Berry Gordy selling Motown for only $60 million really be No. 3, given that he kept all the copyrights? Does signing R.E.M. to a major-label deal qualify at all? Is Chinese Democracy really the worst cash-hole ever? [
