(Video)Īnd yet, despite its unconventional format and overall length, Hypnotize/Mesmerize isn't meant to give the finger to the music biz or test the limits of fan endurance with an arrogant display of musical self-indulgence. With that kind of commercial and artistic track record, SOAD have pretty much earned the right to do as they please when it comes to releasing new music. Together for a decade, the intense creative partnership of Malakian, vocalist Serj Tankian, bassist Shavo Odadjian and drummer John Dolmayan has sold millions of records and established a rabid worldwide audience for the band's genre-smashing, sociopolitically conscious brand of hard rock. Why are System of a Down releasing a double album? And why are they splitting the album into two halves, the rest of which will be released this May, and the second around Christmas? Well, to paraphrase the old adage about the dog that licks his balls, they're doing it because they can. "It's driving me up the wall," he admits. But it's managed to elude him thus far, and the fact that Hypnotize/Mesmerize happens to be a double album makes his task all the more frustrating. ![]() As he did with all of SOAD's previous LPs, Malakian has spent countless hours trying to compile the perfect song sequence. Each piece of paper lists a different track order for Hypnotize/Mesmerize, the first System of a Down record since 2002's Steal This Album. The classics are still the classics, but the canon keeps getting bigger and better.Over on Malakian's coffee table, a stack of notebook pages covered in the guitarist's scrawl offers proof that he has been extremely busy, indeed. But that was part of what made rebooting the RS 500 fascinating and fun 86 of the albums on the list are from this century, and 154 are new additions that weren’t on the 2003 or 2012 versions. Of course, it could still be argued that embarking on a project like this is increasingly difficult in an era of streaming and fragmented taste. (As in 2003, we allowed votes for compilations and greatest-hits albums, mainly because a well-made compilation can be just as coherent and significant as an LP, because compilations helped shaped music history, and because many hugely important artists recorded their best work before the album had arrived as a prominent format.) When we first did the RS 500 in 2003, people were talking about the “death of the album.” The album -and especially the album release - is more relevant than ever. The electorate includes Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish rising artists like H.E.R., Tierra Whack, and Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail as well as veteran musicians, such as Adam Clayton and the Edge of U2, Raekwon of the Wu-Tang Clan, Gene Simmons, and Stevie Nicks. ![]() To do so, we received and tabulated Top 50 Albums lists from more than 300 artists, producers, critics, and music-industry figures (from radio programmers to label heads, like Atlantic Records CEO Craig Kallman). So we decided to remake our greatest albums list from scratch. But no list is definitive - tastes change, new genres emerge, the history of music keeps being rewritten. Over the years, it’s been the most widely read - and argued over - feature in the history of the magazine (last year, the RS 500 got over 63 million views on the site). ![]() Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time was originally published in 2003, with a slight update in 2012.
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