A website to check out

I'm a sucker for anything with a ranking, and today I stumbled upon a pretty spectacular website listing the greatest 5000 albums of all-time. The rankings are done by thousands of registered users judging the albums on a 1 to 5 scale.

And by greatest albums they mean simply that. There is little in genre limitation, and everything from pop to rock to jazz to classical music to soundtracks to hip-hip to live recordings to electric music to comedy albums to heavy metal (perhaps too much heavy metal) is represented. The list doesn't seem to consider greatest hits albums and, at least among the top 1000, there is no straight country or bluegrass.

The rankings start off typically enough -- the top 20 is dominated by the Beatles, Dylan and Miles Davis -- but after that you will quickly find results you would never see on a traditional critic driven magazine list. For example, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea clocks in at 36th -- right before the Rolling Stone's Sticky Fingers. 36th is about where I would put the low-fi classic, and it pleased and surprised me that about 5000 music fans agree.

There were many other pleasant discoveries of this sort, as well as some head scratchers. (A Megadeath album at #83?) While I like to think I am pretty knowledgeable about music, I hadn't heard of a few pretty highly ranked albums on the list, and can't wait to check them out.

If you care at all about music, you should check out this list. Although the serious music fan could lose a good chunk of the day doing so.

Here it is.