Honestly, in recent years the only reason I’ve continued to post year-end lists by Rolling Stone magazine as part of our Listmania series is to give people a chance to renew the Gorguts joke. Sadly, Rolling Stone magazine has deprived me of the opportunity this year.
Mournfully, I must report that for the first time in a long number of years (I don’t really care enough to count them), Rolling Stone has failed to post a year-end list of best metal albums. I’ve waited patiently, but it’s now January 4th and no such list has appeared.
Rolling Stone did post a list of “The 50 Best Albums of 2020“, which you can peruse here, but it doesn’t include even one metal album.
I did learn from their Top 50 list that the late Toots Hibbert put out a new album in 2020, which I didn’t know and am now going to track down, and I was reminded that I haven’t yet listened to the latest albums by Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell, and I might actually now be induced to listen to Waxahatchee and Fiona Apple, because they’ve finished high on yet another big-platform list. So it’s not a complete wasteland for me personally. But it’s close, because I have little time and even less interest in expanding my musical horizons.
I’m not going to write a separate post about it, but I’ll mention here that Pitchfork, whose metal lists I’ve also included in previous years’ Listmania series, also failed to post a list of best metal albums this year. Like Rolling Stone they did publish (here) a cross-genre list of “The 50 Best Albums of 2020“, but it also includes a grand total of zero metal albums. (As it happens, that list puts Waxahatchee at No. 2 and Fiona Apple at No. 1.)
Oh hell, forget what I said earlier, I guess I can still strain and make room for the joke: Rolling Stone named Taylor Swift’s Folklore the album of the year.
P.S. I think we’ve now reached the end of 2020 LISTMANIA (other than my list of Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs, which I will begin to roll out later today). Tomorrow I’ll post a recap of the 2020 series with links to all the lists we’ve posted this year.
13 Responses to “LISTMANIA 2020: THE ROLLING STONE JOKE IS DEAD”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
No list from Austin Lunn this year?
🙁
Not this year, but we will have something from Austin very soon that will be a balm for that.
“Rolling Stone? That’s laughable! DGR put out the best METAL list this year – don’t deny it. Stop trying to be different – you’re only appealing to hipsters. Have fun with that. I thought i’d found a credible metal music site to frequent. Apparently not – laters!”
Cough… that which is already dead may never die.
🙂 🙂 🙂
truly, 2020 took so much from us.
🙂
I gotta say, I love Fiona Apple, a lot. But that album that came out this year was awful. A real shame.
Thanks for all the lists guys !
I found a couple of great albums there (especially Hexer).
Chris Stapleton’s album is pretty strong – as a huge Isbell fan I was disappointed with Reunions I only gave it a couple of spins. It definitely sounds different than the last 400 unit album too not that growth is bad but its missed its mark with me.
That’s sad news regarding Isbell’s new album. I still haven’t gotten to it, but surely will.
Who the F cares what Rolling Stone thinks?
I’m not disagreeing with you. 🙂