After many hours of head-scratching and more than a few worn grooves, we present one of the most ambitious and hopefully provocative lists we've ever done: The 100 Greatest Rock Albums of all time.
A few ground rules here: We've tried to cover the entirety of rock history, while making sure that each album still sounds great a few years after its release. This list adheres to a fairly narrow definition of "rock," confining it to largely guitar-based music, and making exceptions only in a few cases where the album was too important to leave off. Which means, you won't find a lot of blues, country, or R&B on this list, even though we realize how important they were as rock influences. (A few entries do fall into the R&B realm, but with so much of a rock sound that they had to be here). We've also left off certain genres, like electronica and acoustic singer-songwriter, that are closely related to the rock world but not really part of it. We have (or will) have other lists for that.