o3:
Dire Straits are definitely in “borderline-top-20” territory for rock. The sticking point is simply that I forced myself to stop at 20 titles: once you’ve locked in the eight or nine acts who utterly rewired the genre (Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd, Hendrix, Nirvana, etc.), the final quarter of the list gets brutally competitive.
Their credentials at a glance
Metric | Detail |
---|
Signature LP | Brothers in Arms (1985) |
Commercial clout | 30 - 34 million copies worldwide and the first album to sell a million CDs, tipping the industry toward the format. Wikipedia |
Critical standing | Ranked #418 on Rolling Stone’s revised 500-greatest list and #224 on the crowdsourced BestEverAlbums all-time chart. WikipediaBest Ever Albums |
Catalogue depth | Fans also champion Making Movies (1980) and Love Over Gold (1982), but consensus points to Brothers in Arms as their canonical peak. |
Legacy | Mark Knopfler’s finger-style electric tone has influenced everyone from John Mayer to prog-metal players; the album’s digital production became a reference point for ’80s AOR. |
How they could slot in
If you (or the ASR crowd) insist on a Steely Dan
and Dire Straits presence without expanding past 20, here’s a tidy swap:
Old #19 | New #19 |
---|
Guns N’ Roses — Appetite for Destruction (1987) | Dire Straits — Brothers in Arms (1985) |
Appetite is a genre pillar, but hard-rock already has
Back in Black and
Master of Puppets on the list, so losing one swagger-guitar entry keeps diversity intact. Everything else would shift down one, with Arcade Fire’s
Funeral staying in the honourable-mention pile set up after the Steely Dan adjustment.
Why they just missed the cut originally
- Cultural “shock” factor: Brothers in Arms rewrote sales records yet didn’t move the creative goalposts the way Nevermind or OK Computer did.
- Stylistic overlap: The lush, adult-oriented blues-rock Knopfler perfected overlaps with Springsteen’s big-canvas songwriting and Pink Floyd’s audiophile polish—already covered in the 20.
- One unanimous classic: Critics almost universally pick Brothers in Arms; most other artists on the list have at least two or three albums that turn up in top-100 debates.
That said, if your forum’s ethos leans toward studio-craft and hi-fi listening, Sneaking Dire Straits in is an easy call. I’m happy to treat the swap above as the “forum edition” of the rock list.