A lot has changed in the 8+ years since I did that project, however. For starters, the pandemic changed my life completely. Working from home, I tended to listen to much more music than ever before. This led to me getting back into becoming a serious vinyl collector, and my albums ballooned from around 5 in 2021 to nearly 400 today.
Then a couple of years ago I started listening to Vinyl Junkies, a Twitch streamer who owns 10,000+ albums and streams a radio show. The guy has been collecting for 50 years and is one of the most knowledgeable music nerds I've ever seen. Let me tell you, hanging out with that guy weekly for two years gave me a baptism in discovering new music. It literally changed my tastes. And hanging out with fellow music nerds in the chat expanded my love of music in ways I couldn't imagine.
Looking back at my notes on the old challenge, it was sometimes embarrassing how little I knew. Why the hell was I making fun of Kraftwerk, a band I now absolutely adore? I went from love-hate of Bruce Springsteen to mostly love, thanks to collecting his back catalog on vinyl. Perhaps the biggest change was that when I did the challenge, I was very much a complete jazz novice. I became a complete jazz lover in the ensuing years, going WAY beyond the safe traditional jazz I enjoyed back then to getting into avant-garde and fusion stuff I never would have touched back then. Nearly 1/4 of my vinyl collection is jazz these days. Some things didn't change - I still don't like Elvis Costello or The Who.
So when I found out Rolling Stone updated their list of 500 albums this past December, I decided it was time to update my project. Now I know what you're thinking: "But YK, you didn't finish your Classic Rock Project!" Yeah, I know. I got burned out on it. It was too many of the same bands over and over (which was kind of the point, but at the time I didn't realize how tedious it would become). The Rolling Stone project at least forced variety, and I think it's why I was able to stick with it for the long haul.
Now, obviously I'm not going to go through all 500 albums again. However, I am going to listen to all the NEW albums that made the list, of which it's a quite sizeable chunk. For repeats from the previous 2012 list, I'll mention whether they moved up or down in the list in 2023. It's going to take me a little time to sift and compare the lists, but I love this kind of thing so I'm going to do it whether anyone reads it or not.
From my first glance, it seems this is quite a large update. They added a lot of more contemporary artists, which I'm sure is going to cause some consternation. In some cases they swapped the lone representative album of a certain artist with another one from their discography. And they seemed to go a little broader outside of western nations and explore more world music. I'm excited to dive into some of these, whether or not their place on the list feels warranted or not.
