When I was eighteen years old, Rolling Stone magazine and myself began a relationship that continues today. Though I gave up the extreme left-wing articles several years ago, I continue to hit their website to get the only truly unbiased opinions of what music is good or otherwise.
Now Rolling Stone album reviews aren't perfect. I remember they trashed ABBA pretty hard during the late 70's, and I've come to appreciate the tight harmonies and flawless engineering of their stuff in my more mellow years. And so has, for that matter, Rolling Stone, being kinder to them in retrospective reviews than they were at the time.
But the fact is that when RS gives out an infrequent five-star review, it's because the artist has earned it, producing a great work that transcends musical genre. Thus, a rock and roll fan can listen to Bill Monroe's Bean Blossom and know that he was hearing the best bluegrass music that is out there. And that's how my own musical appreciation eventually spread out to include music other than that produced by loudly amplified electric guitar.
However, five stars is the highest honor that can be bequeathed upon an album by the Powers that Be over at RS. So, the question arises: what can you do when a master has accumulated a lifetime of musical accomplishments that all rate five stars? How do you discern the greatest of the great?
The example I'm using today is Bruce Springsteen. Though he has his detractors, most rock and roll fans agree that he is one of the greats to have ever cut an album or performed on stage. Thus, his resume includes albums such as The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, Born in the USA, Tunnel of Love, The Rising, Devils and Dust, Magic, and Working on a Dream.
All of these albums have gotten perfect five-star reviews from RS. But how does one pick the best of the best?
One way might be how many times each particular album has been listened to by an individual. If that's the case, then Born to Run edges out E Street Shuffle in my book, followed by Tunnel of Love, Darkness, and The River. But is that accurate? Are the Boss's trilogy of recent albums any less great, or is it just that my musical collection is so huge that I just can't give individual attention to albums like I once did?
I have every word of Born to Run memorized, as well as Darkness (except for parts of Streets of Fire that simply can't be decoded). That will simply never be the case with anything he puts out again. That's because such musical familiarity comes from wearing out two or three cassettes with an album on each side while tooling around in my 1973 Celica right out of high school. Nowadays, I put nine hours of tunes on a memory stick and very rarely hear the same album twice in six months.
So what's the answer? How do you rate the very best of a great artist?
I guess it's up to the individual.
