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I’m afraid my gripes with this one go way beyond a comment/Tweet/Facebook status update. Based almost entirely on the top 2, Rolling Stones’s Top 25 Best Albums of 2009 is easily the worst ‘best of’ list the magazine has ever done (counting year end albums lists only, cause Lord knows they’ve made a metric ton of all kinds of terrible lists). I knew their “Best of the Decade” choices (which were actually pretty spot on for the most part) were way wayway way too good to be true. Let’s have a look at the list.

1 | U2: No Line on the Horizon
2 | Bruce Springsteen: Working on a Dream
3 | Phoenix: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
4 | Jay-Z: The Blueprint 3
5 | Green Day: 21st Century Breakdown
6 | Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
7 | Neko Case: Middle Cyclone
8 | The-Dream: Love vs Money
9 | The xx: The xx
10 | Sonic Youth: The Eternal
11 | Pearl Jam: Backspacer
12 | Mastodon: Crack the Skye
13 | Drake: So Far Gone Mixtape
14 | Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavillion
15 | Girls: Album
16 | Wilco: Wilco (The Album)
17 | Mos Def: The Ecstatic
18 | Bob Dylan: Together Through Life
19 | Bat For Lashes: Two Suns
20 | Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It’s Blitz!
21 | Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
22 | Franz Ferdinand: Tonight: Franz Ferdinand
23 | Levon Helm: Electric Dirt
24 | Monsters of Folk: Monsters of Folk
25 | Raekwon: Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Pt. II

K…

I genuinely love U2. I love old U2. I love new U2. I love all U2, but No Line on the Horizon is not the Album of the Year by any stretch of the imagination.

You could say, “Oh, but they’re going by record sales.” Sure, you could say that, except that’s not the case. If it were, Taylor Swift would be #1. You could even say that this was U2’s big comeback album, or their best album of the decade, or the best album since ___________, but then I’d have to smack you. With the exception of Pop and Zooropa (both of which I actually <3), NLOTH is U2’s weakest album of their career. Don’t know one fan who doesn’t think the same. I wouldn’t even feel comfortable with it appearing on a Top 100.

I wrote earlier this year that NLOTH is an over-hyped, unsatisfying let-down. So yeah, still feel that way.

In an interview in the new issue, The Edge tells RS that he believes U2 is still capable of making their best record, and “It’s not a foregone conclusion that our best work is behind us.” I dunno, Edge. Your band has 9 or 10 of the best rock albums ever recorded, and I find this statement even harder to believe after hearing NLOTR, which is mediocre by any standard. As a believer that How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is actually one of their best, I’d say that I would have believed this statement a year ago. But hey, what do I know? They just made the Album of the Year!

It’s all a matter of opinion, I know. But really, whose opinion is this other than Interscope’s checkbook? (I said it).

As for Bruce, you can copy and paste my last few paragraphs here, replacing the words “No Line on the Horizon” with “Working on a Dream.” Anyone who’s ever seen a year-end Rolling Stone list knows full well that if Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen release an album, you can look for it around the top 5. Yes, Bob Dylan’s recent albums have been incredible, but Bruce Springsteen’s Magic and Working on a Dream have not (like, really really not), and have both mysteriously placed at #2. RS gets a lot of criticism for favoring older rock acts regardless of how good the albums actually are, and here’s some more of that. They ask for it with this stuff.

Then there’s the Jay-Z thing. Well, maybe this one is based on album sales. On the strength of a handful of really strong (and great) singles, the album has sold over 1.3 million copies. But as bumpin’ as Blueprint III is in spots, it’s one, if not the only Jay-Z album that doesn’t deserve to be on this list. Also, Blueprint III is ranked 20+ spots higher than Raekwon’s Cuban Linx II, which doesn’t make much sense if you take into account that Blueprint III got the usual 3 stars and a not so favoring write-up earlier this year, while Cuban Linx received a much rarer 4 star nod. It’s hardly the first time something like that has happened, and it won’t be the last.

There’s validity in a lot of the albums the magazine picked, but absolutely no method to the order they were put in. It’s nice/weird/confusing to see The xx and Neko Case mixed in that Top 10, as if Rolling Stone’s actual Top Albums of 2009 list got mixed in with someone else’s (like someone who actually knows something). I’ll take it, but if you’re going to mix in token ‘indie’ releases, at least have the good sense to know they are better than 21st Century Breakdown. On second thought, at least have the decency not to include them on such a horrible list at all. Horrible. Oh, and there’s Veckatimest in the 20’s.

Horrible. Rolling Stone cracks me up.