Apple Music put together a “Top 100 Albums” list and didn’t follow its old advice to “think different.”
The list, which was released in bits and pieces and culminated in the top 10 announcement on Wednesday, would not be out of place in Rolling Stone, Time, Pitchfork, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, New Music Express, The Source, Spin or any of the countless other publications that have attempted to implement this idea over the years.
“Doesn’t it matter?”, number 9. “What’s going on?”, number 17. “Does it take a nation of millions to stop us?”, number 34.
For those familiar with the list-making genre, it’s more fun to look at it closely to see the tough decisions Apple inevitably faced in making the list “with the help of artists and experts.”
Did the list’s authors give extra weight to double albums? (Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life is at No. 6, The Clash’s London Calling is at No. 35, Prince’s Sign o’ the Times is at No. 51, and The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street is at No. 53.) Which Beatles album is highest? (They put Abbey Road at No. 3 and Revolver at No. 21, skipping Sgt. Pepper’s entirely.) How diverse is the list? (About a third of the artists are women, and about 40% are black.)
Apple’s decisions are as mysterious as its decision to keep changing the design of MacBook power cables.
Then there’s the bigger picture, and that’s where Apple’s decisions are as mysterious as its decision to keep changing the design of MacBook power cables.
First of all, what exactly does the list measure?
Most outlets that attempt to make a list like this narrow it down in some way — like the best rock albums, the best hip-hop albums, or the best albums of the 2010s — but Apple decided to simply call it the “100 Greatest Albums,” saying it was “the definitive list of the greatest albums ever made.” Are they supposed to be the best thematically? The best collections, song by song? The most historically important? Apple isn’t saying.
And what kind of albums are we talking about?
While hip-hop and rock are fairly well represented, the list offers only token references to other genres, with one reggae album (Bob Marley’s Exodus at No. 46), one country album (Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour at No. 85), one folk album (Joni Mitchell’s Blue at No. 16), two punk albums (London Calling at No. 35 and Patti Smith’s Horses at No. 83), and three jazz albums (Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue at No. 25, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at No. 54, and Nina Simone’s I Put a Spell on You at No. 88). There are no blues, no gospel, no world music, and no live albums.
By comparison, R&B fared well, with nearly a dozen entries, but fans were unhappy with the absence of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, among others. Legendary producer Jermaine Dupri criticized the list on Tuesday, writing on the social media site X that it was “sad” and “not worthy” and “the disrespect to R&B is INSANE!” (To be fair, his tweet came out before the final 10, which placed “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” at No. 1.)
A few years ago, music critics would have debated whether a list like this had fallen victim to “rockism” — the belief that pop music isn’t as important as four guys with guitars and black leather jackets. That bias was most vividly on display in the case of Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner, who recently managed to write an entire book about rock music in which he interviewed only white men. Wenner then defended that choice by arguing that black artists weren’t in his “zeitgeist” and that female artists weren’t “articulate enough on this intellectual level.”
But the problem here runs deeper than rockism. Like Rolling Stone itself, the very concept of an album, let alone a best-of list, is a relic of an earlier era in music.
The LP (which, for younger readers, stands for “Long Play”) was invented in 1948 and quickly became a popular format for classical music (not on Apple’s list), Broadway cast recordings (also not on the list), and especially jazz (barely on the list), where it arguably transformed the genre by allowing artists like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington to extend their arrangements on recordings to match what they were doing in concert. The album concept was pioneered by artists as diverse as Woody Guthrie (“Dust Bowl Ballads”), Frank Sinatra (“Songs for Swingin’ Lovers”) and Ray Charles (“Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music”), none of whom appeared on Apple’s list.
The album’s true heyday came in the 1960s, when rock bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys elevated it above the single.
But the album’s true heyday came in the 1960s, when rock bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys — all of whom made the Apple list — elevated it above the single. Wenner and other critics of the era took over from there, arguing over whether “Highway 61 Revisited” was better than “Blonde on Blonde,” which albums should make the annual list and who should be literally canonized with the annual inductions into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. (Though he was a co-founder, Wenner was ousted from the museum’s board after his comments about black musicians and women.)
The album remains important, with artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift using the format to make a statement, explore a different genre or mark a new era in their personal lives.
But albums themselves are no longer a juggernaut, as music is now primarily heard on services like Spotify and Apple Music, where algorithms, user-created playlists, and professionally curated “Essentials” are the most common listening experience. Ironically, Apple wrote that its list was intended to be “a modern love letter to the records that have shaped the world we live in and listen to today,” but it may be more of a eulogy to a lost era of music, delivered by one of its killers.
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