General Editor Robert Dimery and a big bunch of music critics from around the world compiled this bible-size guide: 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and, as the name reads, these are albums you must listen, not a guideline of “the best of the best ever!”. People tend to take too serious a book of these proportions and they always start telling things like: why Pop and not Metal? …and so on, obviously not everybody is going to agree on every selection, and that is precisely the point in this kind of guides, for instance, I hate (really, I do!) Jeff Buckley’s singing (and I don’t usually hate something when it comes to music, I just ignore what I don’t like) but that doesn’t mean the album Grace doesn’t deserve a position in the book, since a lot of people may like, or even love, the late Buckley.
The book is worth reading and if you are an avid collector, like ourselves here at LaSuite303, it makes an attractive item in your bookshelf.
As many reviewers of the book, I won’t dissapoint you by not complaining about the terrible ommissions such as: Amon Tobin, Bran Van 3000, Dave Brubeck, Cornelius, Esquivel, Mano Negra (since they did consider Manu Chao’s Clandestino over Casa Babylon, one of the greatest works of music I’ve ever heard), Sergio Mendes (who, along with Esquivel, I consider the biggest misses), Morphine and Weezer… among others, and there’s not a conceivable way in which these artists didn’t make it, while Britney’s …Baby One More Time did.
The other bad thing about this compendium is that an irrational percentage of the list is embodied by albums from the USA and the UK, I agree that these two nationalities are always going to sweep the percentage, but not in such a drastic manner.