Rolling Stone magazine was published first in 1967 and quickly morphed into the definitive voice of the growing counter culture.

The famous music and pop culture chronicler is, like an aged hippie who took too much brown acid at Monterey Pop Festival, functionally stuck in the summer of love. It has used its shrinking editorial space to fetishize the ’60s as the penultimate moment of music and cultural relevance.

So it should surprise no one that Rolling Stones’ newly minted list of the top 100 guitarists contains very few musicians making current and important additions to their catalogs. Instead, it is primarily a list of ’60s rock revolutionaries and roots musicians the ’60s rockers cite as influences.

Eric Clapton is the only axe man ranked in the top 10 still evolving as a musician. (Keith Richards is technically still playing but not creating anything. And Van Halen might have new material on the way, but Eddie’s career has been too dormant to warrant being labeled “relevant.”) Having reached fame in the 1980s, Van Halen is the most current act and is the only group in the top 10 that hasn’t played a variation of the blues.

Are we to construe this list as proof that guitar rock is dead and has been for the better part of 10 years? Hardly. If guitar crunch is what you seek, there are more than a few modern acts willing to oblige. Rather, the list’s take-away message is that Rolling Stone is too steeped in baby boomer thinking to look at modern music as having contributed anything remotely meaningful to rock’s historical cannon. The byproduct of this shortsightedness is that a young generation of music fanatics can easily dismiss Rolling Stone as a dinosaur publication more interested in lecturing you on the better, simpler times than adding constructively to the modern rock conversation.

I wouldn’t expect a modern guitarist like The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach to make the list at such a stage in his career (his band’s first album was released in 2002), but on such a blues-heavy list, how can Jack White not crack the top 50? (He ranked 70.) His rip-roaring, Muddy Waters-influenced take on the Delta blues has been more innovative and influential than Rory Gallagher (57) and Derek Trucks (16).

And though Jonny Greenwood did make the list at number 48, neither of Radiohead’s two other primary guitarists were included. Thom Yorke usually plays rhythm behind both Greenwood and Ed O’Brien, but listen to tracks like “There, There” or the gnarly intro to 2007’s “Bodysnatchers.” The complex melodies Yorke churns out are more impressive than any lead parts Bruce Springsteen (95) has produced.

With the baby boomer generation reaching AARP age, perhaps the music press should stop labeling Rolling Stone’s late ’60s/early ’70s fetish as tunnel-visioned thinking and start worrying that early age dementia has set in across the whole magazine’s editorial staff.

_Joe is a senior in Media._