A Flawed 500

I find myself conflicted each and every year when it comes to the annual year's end compilations by various periodicals of the "best of" for music, movies, books, etc. However, even before this listing was compiled and released, I was confronted with the decision by Rolling Stone to release their listing of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Now, I enjoy this type of listing because one it's inherently interesting to me to see the best albums, many of which I enjoy and many I've never heard or even desire to listen to, listed together and two because I can use it as a guide to acquire albums by artists I've never been exposed to.
What really irks me, though, is the lack of creativity by the writers of these types of lists and the inevitable backlash that others, including myself, have in regards to this list. It seems to me that there's a marked interest in portraying and sustaining the myth that Rolling Stone came out at a time, the 60s and 70s, when a tremendous amount of influential music was being recorded and released and was on the cutting edge of culture, criticism, and, most of all, hip music. But this type of cause seems to me to lead to a conflict of interests when it comes to assembling a listing of the greatest albums of all time. For example, there are no records recorded in the last twenty years in the top ten. Most, understandably, are from the giants of rock (i.e. the Beatles, Dylan, Rolling Stones) and that's an understandable, maybe necessary conceit. What I don't like about this type of conceit is the fact that it's inevitable and without any real sort of thought and imagination. Perhaps, and I realize this borders on heresy, the Beatles haven't released the most important album, in this case Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, of all time, let alone four of the top ten albums. Granted, without the Beatles there wouldn't be what we traditionally call rock n' roll music to listen to, or at the very least it would be radically different in sound, but maybe not. Also, it's important to concede the fact that without the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, etc. there wouldn't be nearly a fraction of the bands that I feel are not represented accurately on this listing.
I don't expect the writers to go out on a limb and produce a list that's so radical that it includes such recent albums as the White Stripes' Elephant in the top ten, regardless of how good the record it, and it is good. What I would like to see, though, is a list that truly reflects what records someone should have in their collection that they can listen to repeatedly and provide the listener with a broad array of styles, genres, etc. that don't border on the repetitive. In other words, I don't want four of the only ten albums that I should own be from one group, especially when one of the albums, the White Album, isn't all that spectacular. Sure, the Beatles are necessary to include in the list, but I don't think it's necessary to include four of their albums in the top ten. They're a good band, perhaps the greatest ever, but I don't want five, which includes the double-disc White Album, of their discs occupying my top ten.
This leads me to my overall critique of the magazine. What I believe is occurring is that the staff of writers and those who voted on the list itself are living in a delusional state that forces them to assume that there can't possibly be a better group of records than those released in the aforementioned time period. In other words, they're slaves to a system that consecrates things as sacred and beyond reproach. If I can only keep ten albums, four of them aren't going to be Beatles discs because, well, they're the Beatles and they're the greatest band of all time and they deserve to be the main components of any record collection. This is ridiculous. I want and need other types of music in my list. I love rap, techno, punk, alternative, metal, trip-hop, alt-country, country..., and a list with four albums by a pop-rock, because that's what the Beatles were first and foremost, doesn't give me the ability to have that broad representation of genres.