Product Description

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die is a highly readable list of the best, the most important, and the most influential pop albums from 1955 through 2003. Carefully selected by a team of international critics, each album is a groundbreaking work seminal to the understanding and appreciation of music from the 1950s to the present. Included with each entry are production details and credits as well as reproductions of original album cover art. Perhaps most important of all, each album featured comes with an authoritative description of its importance and influence. Among the critics involved in selecting the list are some of the best known music reviewers and commentators, including Theunis Bates (music writer for Time and urban editor at worldpop.com), Jon Harrington (staff writer at MTV), Seth Jacobson (writer for Dazed & Confused), as well as many others.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46341 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-07
• Released on: 2006-02-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 960 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This bookshelf-busting testament to music geeks' mania for lists is about as comprehensive a "best-of" as any sane person could want. Editor Dimery and the army of 90 music critics he drafted to compile this beast begin in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra, end in 2005 with The White Stripes and cover every genre, sub-genre, fad, flash-in-the-pan and musical movement that hit in the intervening years, taking each on their own merits. So, noise-and-terror group Lightning Bolt (featuring "a 'singer' who barks through a contact microphone taped inside a gimp mask") gets lauded as a "truly challenging listening experience," Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" gets dubious props for turning "heavy metal into a pop genre that women would be able to love" and Yoko Ono gets ignored. Arranged chronologically and with an excellent index, the book's a pleasure to peruse. Hundreds of jacket art reproductions accompany original track listings, and the critic-penned album summaries are brisk, informed, devoid of snark and full of argument-ending trivia. As with any list, there are bound to be glaring omissions and contentious inclusions, though Dimery buffets the book somewhat by disqualifying from consideration compilations, greatest hits albums and most soundtracks. For music lovers, it doesn't get much better.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Robert Dimery is a writer and editor who has worked for numerous magazines, including Time Out and Vogue. Michael Lydon was a founding editor of Rolling Stone. His books include Rock Folk, Boogie Lightning, and Ray Charles: Man and Music.

Customer Reviews

You better get a move on.... there are 1001 albums you have to hear...
I'm always sceptical about these kind of books; it's either the writing is too arrogant, or all the facts are wrong. But, with this publication, I'm extremly suprised, and glad to be so, seeing as it's an Australian ABC book!
The records are in chronological order, starting from the 50s - the book begins with Frank Sinatra's "In the wee small hours" and ends in 2005, with the White Stripes latest, "Get beind me satan." The majoirity of the reviews include - the year, the label, producer, art direction, nationary and running time. Plus, a small album cover picture, and then about 350 words on why the album is so remarkable. But, for the most influential, like, for example, The Clash's first self titled album, it includes a quote from the band, a full page picture, and a list of the album tracks and their running times.
The people writing about all these albums seem to know what they are talking about - they know little facts about the people they are writing about, and seem to dig out the dirt on why this album should be in the list of 1001 you should hear before you die. --- It is also a very varied list, with mainstream artists like Norah Jones being included, and alternative artists like Elliott Smith, and DJ Shadow thrown into the mix. Actually, most of the entries aren't from the mainstream, and if they are, they have actually been influential, even if it's only on the 'scene' like The Killers have. (Their album "Hot fuss"is one of the last reviewed)
However, I was suprised with a few of the entries - such as Britney, Christina and Justin - I think inclusions by people like Suzi Quatro, and the Runaways would have been more interesting - as the mickey mouse kids seem to be a sign of the decline in female rock, whilst Quatro and the Runaways prompted girls to pick up guitars and start a' rockin'.
I don't listen to that much music from today, I'm still listening to all the old stuff, the roots of rock n' roll, but I still really love this book, and every few days, I pull it out and have a flick, and read about a band I've heard of before, but never heard.
If you want to -
Improve your CD collection,
Expand your musical knowledge,
Read good music reviews,
Then check this book out.

Maybe I'll Finish In My Next Incarnation
Of all the various 1001...BEFORE YOU DIE books, this one at least made me feel like I had begun to scratch the surface--not that you should be deliberately scratching an album's surface, of course. But you know what I mean. The 1001 BOOKS volume had me feeling like I was not so well-read after all. And the MOVIES version gave me a definite sense of not being all that, uh, "well-screened."

But I can lay claim to being--shall we say?--"well-turntabled," (and that may not be such a misnomer since my halcyon listening days were before the CD era). So at least I have a good percentage of the middle section of this volume's recommendations under my belt.

And I find that I don't really dispute that many of the selections. I see a lot of reviewers have, true to form, protested the inclusion of this artist and the omission of that. I could gripe too. I mean including THREE Madonna albums and only one Laura Nyro?? Come on now, really. One of those ladies is the penultimate pop star, to be sure, but the other was a genius.

And yeah, I could complain that the albums included are often among the "safest" a given artist or group ever produced (SURREALISTIC PILLOW for the Airplane, not AFTER BATHING AT BAXTER'S, say, or CHELSEA GIRL for Nico and not THE MARBLE INDEX or DESERTSHORE). But still it's nice to see so many of my favorite artists included at all.

And it's also kinda nice to see these works still referred to as ALBUMS. "CD" (like "tape") is a FORMAT, but even in the age of downloads (especially in the age of downloads), we need to remind ourselves that there is something special about a COLLECTION of songs by a given artist or band. A record ALBUM (whatever the format)is a compilation that gives you insight into the full range of that artist's capabilities. Books like this can never truly be the last word on the matter, but they do remind us that the "album" has served us well over the past 50 years as a means of giving recording artists of all stripes a serious listen.

Yeah, but what about important artists?
I just got this book, and have gone though and ticked off the albums they list in my collection. I have a grand total of 115 of the 1001; mostly clustered between 1966 and 1972. Typical, I suppose of a lot of people my age. The book provides me an interesting touch stone that will help me expand outside of the 'golden era' I think.

Several points trouble me about the book however:

1) It has reminded me that I still haven't replaced a bunch of records that an ex-roommate stole from me - including my entire first release Beatles collection. (My total might have topped 150 I think).

2) While no list like this, however large, is going to satisfy everyone, how anyone could include Britney Spears in this list is beyond my imagination. If they just had to have an obvious example of late nineties bubblegum, they could have picked someone with just a little bit of talent, like maybe Kylie Minogue. I expect 99.44% of all readers could think of several omitted albums that would be more appropriate. I myself can't see how they could leave out the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed, or John Coltrane's Blue Train but find room for Spears.

3) While not actually gathered onto an album until decades after the 78's were recorded, I think a 'special case' should have been made for Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens. It is not an overstatement to say that without these recordings, very little of the music on the 1001 albums chosen could have ever existed. And even though the 'LP album' as such wasn't invented until much later, taken together they are very much in the general mode of an album, capturing a special time in the artists development and a turning point in popular music.

4) Although this is "1001 Albums..." not "1001 Artists..." several artists are clearly over-represented (Led Zeppelin is great, but do they really deserve 5 albums here) and other very important artists are completely missing (the above mentioned Louis Armstrong; Robert Johnson; Bessie Smith [actually most Blues artists in general], Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Sam the Sham and the Pharohs).

5) I found a bunch of indexing errors - page numbers and inconsistent group names ("Led Zeppelin" and "Zeppelin, Led").

Items 2, 3, and 4 point to a possibly more fundamental problem. I expect that the contributors felt is important to try to balance the weights of the decades and dropped older stuff to make way for the newer. The problem is that much of the newer stuff is too new to be properly considered a 'must hear' important album. Pop music is in a deep cycle of bubblegum, and very little of todays 'pop' is destined to become important historical records. These days, ground breaking takes place by indies and is distributed via the internet. Not a very easy environment for an album to grab the imagination.

Overall I think it is an interesting - if weighty - tome. Ready made to inspire arguements and the widening of horizons. And much more realistic than its 1001 Books or 1001 Movies siblings.