Since finishing the RYM list, I've been working on a few more lists. I'm doing them chronologically and at the same time, so I do it a year at a time and do all the albums across all the lists. I'm not re-listening to any albums because that would be too painful.
I finished all the 50s/60s albums last night and I'm gonna do a little update every time I finish a decade.
Current stats:
1001 Albums You Must See Before You Die (2013 edition): 481/1001
Rolling Stones' Top 500 Albums of All Time (2012): 303/500
Pitchfork 1960s: 200/200
Pitchfork 1970s: 86/100
Pitchfork 1980s: 50/100
Pitchfork 1990s: 58/100
Pitchfork 2000s: 56/200
Pitchfork 2010s: 30/200
So far I've been enjoying this bunch way more than RYM. I was already at about 40% of the 1001 and Pitchfork 60s list when I started, so maybe RYM has helped me cut most of the crap, but generally it's been more varied and interesting and enjoyable. There's a lot more popular stuff that was really missing from RYM (eg, Elvis; I'm not a huge fan but he's kind of an essential one), but there are also some weird album choices from otherwise decent/popular bands. The lists have a few albums in common but there are also a lot of different ones, sometimes for the same year they will choose a different album for the same artist. They seem to like country, psychedelia and 'world' music a lot more than RYM, and I'm not particularly happy about the country music, and I'm super bored of psychedelic rock now, but it's nice to hear more non-English stuff.
I have also decided to finally start listening to albums of songs that I like (when I hear a song that sounds ok, I add it to a playlist and if I want to keep listening to it it goes in my playlist for the year); I've been wanting to do this for a while but every time I go to play one of them I get bored instantly and have to do something else instead. Idk why it's easier to listen to a 3 hour album that I hate than 3 minutes of something I might like
I've listened to a few now, though they haven't been very fruitful. But my goal going into 2020 is to do this whenever I find a song I like.
Best finds so far:
Louis Prima - The Wildest! (1956)
The Crickets - The "Chirping" Crickets (1957)
Ella Fitzgerald - Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book (1959)
The Everly Brothers - A Date With The Everly Brothers (1960)
The Mama's and The Papa's - If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (1966)
Walter Carlos - Switched on Bach (1968)
The Drifters - The Drifters' Golden Hits (1968)
No new 'favourites', but these are all 7/10. I didn't get into Ella Fitzgerald before but I fell in love with her voice after that album and have 'Let's Call the Whole Thing Off' stuck in my head all the time. Already liked most of the songs on The Crickets, Everly Brothers and Drifters albums, and while I didn't really like any songs in particular off the Prima, Mamas and Papas and Carlos albums (aside from a few I already liked), they were just really enjoyable albums. Mama Cass has a beautiful voice as well, and actually I've been listening to her cover of Dream a Little Dream of Me after hearing it in Sunday's Illness, so maybe that warmed me up to Fitzgerald.
I don't really hear about any kind of pop culture unless it gets mentioned on this forum. Sometimes I click on some stuff on Spotify I see the names and titles of popular stuff but it's all gobbledegook to me.
