Radiohead’s OK Computer has been overtaken by Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly after years at the top of Rate Your Music‘s fan-voted “Best Albums of all time” list.
It’s been a big week for online music discussion: the internet’s new favourite album of all time has been crowned on Rate Your Music; Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 jazz rap masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly is the new ruler of the roost, overtaking Radiohead‘s 1997 alt-rock magnum opus OK Computer after years spent at the top.
The list is run and maintained by the popular community-based music review site Rate Your Music, which uses a complex algorithm that considers the total number of reviews for an album, how active each reviewer is on-site (to combat spam accounts and cynical review-bombing), and more to calculate an album’s review score and ranking. With every major album receiving tens of thousands of reviews, the site is genuinely a pretty great indicator of an album’s overall quality and legacy over time — at least among chronically online music nerds.
If ever there was an album to earn the title of “greatest of all time”, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly is certainly a fair choice. Praised for its innovative and thought-provoking lyrics, its genre-defying musical style that blends elements of jazz, funk, soul, and hip-hop, and its themes that address important social and political issues such as race, poverty, and the Black Lives Matter movement. The album is a sonic and lyrical masterpiece that showcases Lamar’s creative and artistic abilities at their best, and I’d easily consider it a worthy opponent for the venerable Ok Computer.
Check out Rate Your Music’s top 10 albums of all time below, and their full list here. While everyone will have their own answers of what the greatest albums of all time are, Rate Your Music‘s list is pretty damn good, albeit very light on any representation from female artists (I mean, surely we can and should get Kate Bush, Fiona Apple, Björk in there at the very least, come on). regardless, here’s the top 10:
- Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly
- Radiohead – OK Computer
- Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
- King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King
- Radiohead – Kid A
- Madvillain – Madvillainy
- My Bloody Valentine – Loveless
- Radiohead – In Rainbows
- Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon
- The Beatles – Abbey Road
