The Five Hundred Greatest Albums Recorded Between 1980 and 2009

Because both post-war generations has always defined themselves through music, I present to you the 500 most essential albums recorded by the second, with the first generation's list to come at some poorly-defined, vaguely later date.
The Boomers have always loved to troll their kids, usually by telling them that rock n' roll somehow died after they got old.  As my brother-in-law's Kenny Rogers-looking father is fond of saying, "I don't think that there's been a good rock band that's come out since the 1970's".  There are many variations of this.  Music was somehow better "back in the day".  There's been a very strange, baffling lack of originality since their versions of popular music stopped ruling the airwaves.  This "rap crap" isn't "real" music, and it's only those damn ignorant kids with their damn laptops and cell phones that think think you can make good music with a computer.

Yawn.

As my father-in-law once tried to tell me, "If you made a list of the best 500 albums, you'd have to have the top half all albums from the 60's".  So, in that spirit, let's make one of the last thirty years, since anything before that will be only peripherally relevant to our generation.  Yeah, we all remember discovering the Beatles for the first time, but they were never ours.  We never made their songs our own.  These are albums we made, songs that we've had scratched into our souls.

So let's begin this interminably long process already.