987 Album Listens: Ranking 29 Classic Rock Artists From Led Zeppelin to Pink Floyd
What happens when a lifelong rock fan puts his musical opinions to the test? Aaron Belansky created The Review Board, an ambitious experiment that has him working through the complete catalogs of 29 personally selected classic rock artists through 1989, listening to every album three times and scoring each one. That adds up to 329 albums, 987 listens, roughly 740 hours of music and an estimated 2,000 miles of walking. In this episode of Booked On Rock, Aaron explains how his classic rock album rankings are challenging opinions he’s held since his teenage years—and why listening chronologically and repeatedly can completely change the way an artist or album sounds.
Some of the results have surprised even Aaron. Led Zeppelin has climbed to No. 2 despite his never considering himself a major Zeppelin fan, while Pink Floyd’s early catalog has kept them much lower than he expected. Eric Clapton’s Slowhand doesn’t connect with him the way it did when he was younger, while The Rolling Stones have won him over after decades of resistance. He also explains how revisiting The Who’s Live at Leeds transformed his opinion of Pete Townshend as a guitarist and tackles a question at the heart of the experiment: do we love classic rock because the music is truly great—or because we’ve heard it thousands of times? These rankings offer a fascinating look at how age, repetition, memory and deeper listening can reshape a lifetime of musical opinions. Watch the entire video episode above or listen to the audio version below:
