Rolling Stone released the 200 Greatest Albums Of All Time last week. Another poll of music journalists (most likely all affiliated with Rolling Stone), musicians and hangers on who, collectively, get to tell us we haven't had any good rock and roll since the 70s. We get one of these lists to dissect every year or two.

Rolling Stone isn't the only magazine to do this because lists are great. They immediately encourage discussion, dissension and scorn. And it's not really that hard to put them together. Send out ballots to a select list of people. Most of them will send back their responses because we all want a vote about this.

No one totally agrees with the list, and there are always large holes. In the case of Rolling Stone's latest, greatest list, if the music came after 1980, it was much less important than anything that came before. This disturbs me a bit, since I didn't really start listening to popular music until 1982. While I will readily admit to listening and loving music from before the 80s, a lot of what has influenced me has come later. Most of it was ignored by the list.

Having said that, between my roommate and I, we own the top ten albums on the list. And a great majority of the top 50.

But four Beatles albums in the top 10? A little unbalanced, I'd say.

In the 80s, I'd list Duran Duran's Rio (they were my favorite band for a couple of years in the mid-80s), Bon Jovi's 7800 Fahrenheit and Van Halen's Fair Warning and 1984. None of these are on the list. Guns N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction (#61) is the only relevant album to come out of the late 80s, apparently--it would be on my list as well.

The most influential music, for me, came out in the early 90s. I spent a year riding my bike around the little town I went to high school in, listening to Mother Love Bone's Apple (unlisted). The seismic crash called Nevermind (#17) shifted my music view enough to embrace punk. In 1994, Green Day's Dookie (#193) and Beck's Mellow Gold (unlisted) both made me expand what I listened to in totally different directions.

A whole slew of 90s punk is completely discarded, even though much of this influences the new punk bands out there today. NOFX, Rancid, Snuff, Less Than Jake and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones are nowhere to be seen. And what about Sublime's eponymous masterpiece, possibly the biggest punk/pop album of the mid-90s? Inexplicably missing.

At the same time, I am extremely happy there were no Limp Bizkit albums listed. Thank music critics for some miracles.

The exclusion of a lot of my favorites would be fine if there wasn't so much damn filler in the list of 500. For one thing, about 50 of them are best of compilations. This is so wrong. Albums are put together to represent a certain time and place. All of the songs, for the most part, come from a collective group to form a cohesive whole--if they're good, that is. Best of collections are about stacking the deck. If an artist doesn't have one good album, they shouldn't be rewarded for putting all of their singles onto one disc. Of course, every single top album list invariably contains these "albums." So I guess I'm in the minority about this.

Mott The Hoople has two albums on the list. Two albums? I think they might have had two hit songs--total--in their career. A Peter Wolf solo album? Are you kidding? Four Roxy Music CDs? Four albums by The Smiths? Four Grateful Dead? I'd give them American Beauty just as a token, but their music isn't the reason they are remembered. It's about the experience of seeing them live, on lots of hallucinogens and orange juice, that makes people think fondly of the Dead. The music is really a side show at best.

I guess my point on those, and some of the other artists who were over represented is this: there should be a limit. The albums of 13 artists take up 88 positions (44% of the list)--rock and roll is way more diverse than this. Every album the Beatles made should not appear on the list. Bruce Springsteen is great, but eight slots go to him. The Rolling Stones did not make 10 great albums--there are about five, and they don't all deserve to be on the list. After the deck is stacked in the favor of established artists, it's hard for the new kids to break in. Nostalgia got a little deep and derivative when they put this together. And it seems like they forgot to ask a lot of people under the age of 30--except Britney Spears, who, apparently, really is the voice of her generation.

In a few years, we'll go through this dance again. Rolling Stone and other magazines make tons of cash off of these lists. We'll see if, by the mid-00s, the music establishment has gotten a little more varied in their top picks.

I expect, however, there will still be five Beatles albums in the top 20. Some things never change.

Matt Worley likes making lists just as much as the next guy.