The Illusion of Greatest Rock Albums: A Personal Insight
I'm very flattered to have been asked this question. Thanks, Anonymous! But anyone who's read a few of my answers will probably know that I don't really like talking about music in terms of lists of the greatest and the best. In this case, there are so many great rock albums - and great soul albums, great funk albums, and great pop albums - that I'd never finish this answer because I'd constantly want to add to it. Even when I've written answers that consist of lists of my personal favorites, I read them a year later and go, 'What was I thinking?'
Why Great Rock Albums Lists Couldn't Be Comprehensive
My tastes change all the time, and only a very small handful of things are always in the top three or four. The main reason I don't want to answer this question is that I'm not interested in telling people these are the greatest rock albums ever made. For a start, I don't know most of the rock albums ever made. There are thousands and thousands of rock albums, and I've come across far too many good ones that I'd never heard of before to be confident that I could give a comprehensive account of what the 'greatest' ones are. It would take a much more arrogant man than I to compile such a list, and as regular readers know, I can already be pretty frickin' arrogant when I want to be.
The Evolution of My Musical Taste
Secondly, I don't really like rock music as much as I used to. My tastes have changed as I've gotten older, and I've come to prefer music that is less 'rock-ish.' I used to think that rock music was one of the most flexible and eclectic kinds of music out there, but I no longer think so. It's partly because of rock fans who I find are less open-minded and more cliqueish than I thought they would be. For example, the 'classic rock' phenomenon is a phenomenon that I find incredibly boring and restrictive. My concept of classic rock is rock music made a certain way in a certain time period by musicians with a certain approach to making music. But I got at least one comment from a rock fan of my age or older telling me in no uncertain terms that the Mothers of Invention (MoI) were not classic rock because, according to them, classic rock doesn't sound like that.
Why Comprehensive Lists of Great Rock Albums Aren't Helpful
I find that kind of narrowing of the canon really annoying, and that's one reason why I'm not as interested in rock as I used to be. But the third and biggest reason why I won't make a list of the greatest rock albums ever made is that that's not the kind of conversation I want to have. Who wants to sit and read the bloviations of some opinionated twit about 'the greatest rock albums ever made' - someone rambling on and on about the hypnotic baroque complexities of Jon Lord's organ and Ritchie Blackmore's aggressive guitar stylings and pentatonic riffage plus Ian Paice's contrapuntal drum complexities with their bluesy edge undoubtedly making Machine Head a superior album by 33.78 to Tim Buckley's Starsailor? That's my idea of really shitty music writing. I don't want to talk about why this is 'better than' that; I want to talk about why we like this if we like it, and if we don't, why don't we. What's going on in this musically, not just on an impressionistic level but in the nuts and bolts?
My Approach to Music Criticism and the Anti-Scaruffi Perspective
What I want to talk about is musical meaning. But we don't get an enormous amount of questions about that. Instead, we get questions like this one. Basically, what I want is to be the anti-Scaruffi. The music blogger Piero Scaruffi - who is far more famous on the internet than I will ever be - represents everything about the kind of music writing that I can't stand. He's incredibly opinionated, which is not in itself a bad thing. But he represents his opinions as if they were objectively true, which they aren't. He knows very little about the actual structure and nature of music and how music is made and played, but he confidently bloviates about it like he's some sort of authority and constantly comes out with meaningless impressionistic drivel, which some people find mysteriously wonderful. He's self-published many books of his own bloviate-bloviate-blovia, which I feel is sort of icky. I feel like very little of my own writing about music is worth charging money for. But I certainly wouldn't pay for any of his.
Scaruffi's entire schtick is long lists of the greatest albums ever made in a variety of genres. I've read some of his stuff, and I've seldom if ever read such bollocks presented as if it were meaningful music writing. So, thanks for the question, Anonymous, but I hope you now know why I'll never answer it.