The writer who reviewed every record on Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’ list

👋 Hola
Issue #255: laughtivism, DeepSeek, and compartmentalization
By Harris Sockel

Last weekend, I spent several hours digging into a majestic 138-minute read by Tom Morton-Collings (it’s more of a book, to be honest). He began the project last year, inspired by Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The magazine lets musicians, music critics, and journalists cast their votes on the “best” (it’s super subjective) albums of the last 70ish years. The list is ever-changing and always incomplete — it was last updated in 2023 — but it tries to be as comprehensive as possible.

He decided to listen to all 6,800 songs on all 500 albums. It took him over six months. He writes:

“I grew up as a music fan believing in the medium of the album as sacred. Somewhere along the way, I’d lost sight of that. I ditched all my physical media a long time ago. I only used streaming services and, more and more, was only listening to playlists curated… based on my listening habits. […] I wasn’t expanding my musical horizons at all. If anything, they were narrowing.”

What follows is the most detailed, exhaustive journey through the last 70 years of music that I’ve ever seen. Morton-Collings reviews every album, devoting most of his attention to the top 50. While reading, I kept pausing to revisit albums I hadn’t heard in decades (hello, Green Day’s Dookie). I made a few new discoveries, like Laura Nyro’s Eli and the 13th Confession (1968). And I learned that Rolling Stone really needs to listen to its own list, because Morton-Collings points out a few (what he perceives as) lazy choices — like including a five-hour Merle Haggard compilation as one of its “top albums of all time.” A more discerning curator would’ve picked just one of the artist’s 66 studio albums.

One takeaway from this list: Innovation tends to spur more innovation. The decade between 1965 and ’75 produced some of what Rolling Stone sees as the most culture-shifting albums, and Morton-Collings attributes this to artists’ attempts to outdo each other: The Beach Boys tried to one-up The Beatles, and “the pushing of boundaries and experimentalism seemed to cause an explosion of creativity.” Artists were simultaneously inspired by and competing with each other.

I appreciate Morton-Collings’ dedication to excaping his algorithmic bubble. If you, too, want to expand your cultural horizons, bookmark this post for your weekend.

🤖 What else we’re reading

• DeepSeek’s R1, a new chatbot owned by a Chinese hedge fund, is voicey-er than ChatGPT and Claude — but it still has no idea what it’s talking about. (Jasmine Sun & Lincoln Michel)
• A writer who was interning at the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 riots shares what it was like to be there and how she’s reflecting on it now: “In the moment, we — as staffers — were expected to compartmentalize our experience, bounce back, and get back to work like nothing happened. It seemed like everyone got to be outraged this happened but us.”
• The lesser-known key to an effective protest? Humor. “If you’re a cop, you spend a lot of time thinking about how to deal with people who are violent. But nothing in your training prepares you for dealing with people who are funny.” — Serbian activist Srdja Popovic, who devised a gag to poke fun at Slobodan Milošević in the ’90s.

🖋️ Your daily dose of practical wisdom

The trick to reading poetry: don’t treat it like it’s sacred. (Jason McBride)

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