Welcome to Pop Thruster!
The kernel of the idea for Pop Thruster came from my obsession with Rolling Stone’s revised top 500 albums of all time list.
I poured over the list for months, often listening to albums while doing other chores or work. I started to think: Why is this album ranked so low? Why isn’t this band on the list at all?
And of course that started getting me to thinking about how I would rank my own top albums of all time list. Without much of a plan, I went through the entire Rolling Stone list – all 500 albums – again and ranked them according to how I personally feel about them as the benevolent dictator of my own little pop culture universe. I also began jotting notes about each album as I went: what songs I liked the most and why, and many albums would conjure memories (as music so often does) about times and places in my life, and I’d become compelled about to write about that as well.
Some albums I could appreciate intellectually, respect fully, and understand that they are revered by many but for me they just didn’t excite me all that much. These albums, I began to understand, wouldn’t be on my personal top albums list of all time at all.
Something was clearly going on here that had the makings of a full-blown project. Over time, my placeholder or little code name for it became The Rankings Project.
And soon enough, things fell into place for Pop Thruster!
I realized that I wanted a platform to explore rankings for all kinds of things – including a massive Top 1,000 albums of all time list! There will be a hard lean into pop culture, particularly music and television, but we might see other interesting things pop in from time to time as well.
I’ll be updating these rankings from time to time, and I look forward to being forced to challenge my own assumptions by all of you in the meantime!
important disclaimer!
These rankings are my own particular and highly subjective take on the universe. In no way am I saying that they are definitive. They’re just one passionate writer’s opinion, meant to spur conversations and, selfishly, for me to get exposed to even more great stuff.
On that note, I wildly encourage you to fire up your opinions, thoughts, and questions in the comments or by contacting popthruster@gmail.com.
About the Publisher
I’m Eric Berlin, digital product guy and pop culture and politics nerd. I got involved in blogging in the early 2000s and helped run blogging community Blogcritics (acquired by Technorati), and have always enjoyed figuring out how to develop great content, features, user experience on the webs.
Once again, drop me a line at popthruster@gmail.com if you’d like to get in touch.