The Best Greatest Albums of All Time Ever

I wrote a book about them.

This ebook is one of my favorite things I’ve written—and also (maybe not coincidentally?) a thing that I don’t know that very many people read? So I thought I’d highlight it and maybe encourage some of you folks to check it out.

Here’s the blurb/description:

The best album ever is a recording of frog calls. Or maybe it's some tired guy moaning a cappella about Satan. Or, again, it could be a 10 CD collection of Western swing, or that one perfect video of Ukrainian art folk. Most best of books define best of as the most influential Beatles album or the greatest 60s rock recording. This book has some of those hoary favorites (Velvet Underground 4eva), but it also tries to find less well-chronicled recordings—and to think about how our aesthetic passions are limited by genre, by geography, by what's available, what isn't, and what is or is not considered important or central. The book includes more than 180 albums from the 1920s through the 2020s, from Thailand to Colombia, from death metal to Shangaan electro to jazz to rockabilly to hyperpop. Each selection is illustrated with an album cover. Plus! an appendix of alternate best of lists by gospel scholar Anthony Heilbut, Dana Schechter of Insect Ark, Angel Marcloid of Fire-Toolz, Bernardo Oliviera of the Brazilian experimental label QTV, and many more. With an introduction by indie-rock musician Mobley.

And while there’s not a whole lot of Amazon reviews, there are a couple that I adore, so I will share those too.

Taras Tymonshenko, 5 stars

This might seem like a book of album reviews, but it's really a book of alternate worlds. There's no rankings here, no lists, and few conventional list-topping album picks, [Editor: there is a ranking! it’s not intrusive though] but as you read the reviews you can't help imagining the phantom Greatest Album of All Time lists on which each of these albums are placed proudly at Number 1.

What if the greatest album of all time were a bandcamp release that is no longer available for purchase anywhere? What if it were a massive compilation of 60's girl group singles? What about a nature sounds record called Sounds of North American Frogs? A "black metal" album which consists of just the phrase "Masturbate in Praise of Black Satan" repeated over and over for the duration?

Of course there are more conventional selections in the book as well from Fleetwood Mac to Public Enemy to, of course, The Velvet Underground. It doesn't matter though, every single album whether critically acclaimed, an obscure treasure or something so odd that its presence feels like it must be a joke is treated with the same respect and afforded equal claim to being the Greatest Of All Time.
Noah doesn't just throw this eclectic selection of albums together and leave it at that. Every review in the book is a delight to read and personally makes me want to listen to just about every album featured (I've already found some new favorites!), but they're not just about the albums themselves, they're also about what it means for an album to be the greatest of all time and why it might not make much sense to rank anything at all. It's also about why we feel compelled to keep doing it anyway, in the process defining the North Star of our shared aesthetic universe by which certain paths are easier to chart than others. This book will make you excited to live in alternate worlds in which finding and appreciating albums like the ones in this book is possible, and it will make you mourn for the countless Greatest Albums of All Time that you will never hear and never even stood a chance of finding in the first place.

And here’s one more!

Jonathan DiCarlo, 5 stars

Don't let the bananas on the cover fool you. You might note the similarity to the cover of "The Velvet Underground and Nico" and think this is yet-another book arguing about exactly what rank "Dark Side of the Moon" is relative to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (yawwwwwwn) and otherwise tediously quantifying the well-trod ground of the baby-boomer rock canon, as if white male rockers from the 60s made the only music worth listening to.

This is not one of those books. This is the *exact opposite* of those books. This is a book about the absurdity of pretending you can objectively rank the world's best albums. After all, nobody in the world has actually listened to every album in the world. Best-of lists are just one person's taste masquerading as objectivity. Noah drops the pretense. He embraces the weird, the obscure, the personal, and explodes the very idea that there could ever be a musical "canon". Because he has uniquely weird taste, this is a uniquely weird book.

You won't find the Beatles on here. You ALREADY KNOW about the Beatles! You don't need another book telling you how great they are!

Instead you'll find rockabilly, Bollywood, death metal, shoegaze, "harsh noise wall", gospel, jazz both standard and obscure, Japanese punk, Columbian funk, African electronica, Thai country music, 1920s Ottoman folk, and things much too weird to even be categorized. I pride myself on being a pretty knowledgeable music listener, and still more than half of this book is about albums I'd literally never heard of.

Music is "good" if you find meaning in it, and finding meaning is ultimately an extremely personal and subjective thing; your favorite song doesn't mean the same thing to anybody else as it does to you.

Noah does his best to explain why you might find meaning in listening to an album of frog mating calls, or Peruvian industrial noise, or minimalist tape loop experiments. He juxtaposes albums you'd never expect to find together, like putting a recording of Beethoven's Ninth next to Norwegian black metal created by a real-life murderer, and finds meaning in their surprising similarities.

This book will take you on a musical adventure, if you let it. You won't agree with the list. There's albums on here that will make you say "That's not music, that's just noise!" But there's a good chance your new favorite album is on here too, an album by a band you've never heard of, in a genre you never considered listening to before. It might even change the way you think about music.

So, like I said this book is near and dear to my heart. Hope it finds a new reader or two.