There’s only one punk album, no disco, and lots of rap and electronic music.
Apple Music has produced a “100 Best Albums” list. (It’s presented more concisely on Wikipedia if you want a quick scan.) For those of us accustomed to rock-periodical lists, it’s both startling and comical. There’s a lot of space taken up by rap and hip-hop, modern (post-1990) R & B, and electronic music. While there is much fodder for mocking the list as a symptom of young people’s ignorance of musical history, it also represents something more serious: a symptom of the fracturing of a once-common musical culture into genres and silos that can’t talk with one another.
First, the quarrels. Here’s the top ten:
1. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill — Lauryn Hill
2. Thriller — Michael Jackson
3. Abbey Road — The Beatles
4. Purple Rain — Prince & The Revolution
5. Blonde — Frank Ocean
6. Songs in the Key of Life — Stevie Wonder
7. Good Kid, M.A.A.D City — Kendrick Lamar
8. Back to Black — Amy Winehouse
9. Nevermind — Nirvana
10. Lemonade — Beyoncé
Frank Ocean? Lauryn Hill at No. 1? Meanwhile, there are many egregious omissions, most notably Who’s Next, the Who’s masterpiece, with its groundbreaking mix of synthesizers into thunderous rock. (Note to readers under 40: The Who was more than just the soundtrack band for the CSI TV franchise). The band that made Quadrophenia and Tommy is completely absent. There’s no Layla and other Assorted Love Songs (or anything else featuring Eric Clapton), no Boston, no Music from Big Pink, no Graceland (with its pathbreaking use of African music), nothing at all from the Kinks, Billy Joel, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Otis Redding, Tom Petty, Simon & Garfunkel, the Doors, Van Morrison, Blondie, Van Halen, the Grateful Dead, Genesis, Janis Joplin, James Brown, Dire Straits, ABBA, Pearl Jam, Aerosmith, the Police, Bob Seger, or John Mellencamp.
With the absence of familiar titles such as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Led Zeppelin IV, there’s the question of which artists get represented more than once, and by what. Only Beyoncé, the Beatles, Prince, Radiohead, and Stevie Wonder are represented more than once, and nobody more than twice. That leaves no room for Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks (only Highway 61 Revisited makes the cut), the Rolling Stones’ classic run of Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed, or Sticky Fingers (we get only Exile on Main Street, which frankly is overrated compared with its three predecessors), or Springsteen epics like Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, Nebraska, or Born in the USA. Born to Run is ranked below Taylor Swift’s 1989. I suspect Michael Jackson fans will take similar issue with there being no room for Off the Wall.
Undoubtedly, the list’s defenders will claim that this is some sort of victory for musical and demographic diversity, and it’s hard not to suspect that a certain amount of effort was put into the race, gender, and sexual hierarchy here. For example, straight, white, and male solo artists occupy just four slots out of 100: one each for Dylan, Springsteen, Neil Young, and Eminem. Solo pop records are instead dominated by 21-century female artists, including Beyoncé, Swift, Winehouse, Adele, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Lorde, Billie Eilish, and Lana Del Rey. But the list’s own blind spots are glaring. Maybe the biggest one is the complete disregard for the vast corpus of country and Western music. Aside from Swift (an ex–country star who appears for a pop album), the only country album on the entire list is Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves. There’s no Willie Nelson, no Garth Brooks, no Dolly Parton, no Johnny Cash, no Waylon Jennings, not even Shania Twain. Southern-rock icons such as the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd get no respect, and neither do country-rock pioneers such as the Byrds or crooners like Harry Connick Jr. Prog rock doesn’t fare much better. Aretha Franklin’s 1967 I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You is the only R & B record from before 1971. There’s only one punk album, no disco, and outside the rap genre, no Latin American music of any kind.
My own nominee for the most influential album of all time, one that still gets heavy rotation on the radio 61 years after its release, is A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, which completely and permanently changed how Christmas music was made and was the pinnacle of Spector’s influence on the sound of the Sixties. Maybe Apple didn’t want to feature multi-artist or holiday albums, but that one is a milestone. Similarly, there are three jazz albums on the list — from Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Nina Simone — which seems too few if you’re trying to treat jazz as a genre equal to others and too many if you acknowledge that it can’t really be properly compared with the other forms of music on the list. It perhaps goes without saying that there’s no modern classical music.
If we are comparing apples to apples within the genre of pop rock, it’s egregious to rate something like Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster or a Billie Eilish record above Billy Joel’s The Stranger, which gave us “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “Just the Way You Are,” “Only the Good Die Young,” “She’s Always a Woman,” “The Stranger,” and “Vienna.” We’ll see how many of these people are still selling out arenas to play half a dozen songs from the same album 45 years from now.
The list-makers may be biased toward the present, but they also entirely ignore current rock. Radiohead’s Kid A, released in 2000, and the Strokes’ Is This It, released in 2001, are the only rock albums on the list from this century (and if we’re being pedantic, 2000 isn’t in the 21st century). Where are milestones like the White Stripes’ Elephant or the Killers’ Sam’s Town or Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga?
This is all critique of the choices within the list’s parameters. Such things inevitably involve a certain level of opinion. Some claim that it’s impossible to compare works of art and entertainment without being completely subjective. I don’t concede that: There are always standards. There are, also, limits. You can compare Hamlet with Death of a Salesman because both are dramatic plays; you can even compare Hamlet with Cats because both are stage productions with plot and dialogue. You can’t, however, compare Hamlet with the Mona Lisa or the Statue of Liberty.
That’s where the introduction of rap and hip-hop breaks the paradigm. I don’t even have a framework in which to discuss how a Kendrick Lamar record compares with Led Zeppelin IV, and I’m not sure who does. As a mainly rock and pop-rock guy, I hold thousands of melodies in my head, but I freely confess that my relationship with rap is much like my relationship with opera, classical music, and jazz: I can enjoy some of the best of it when it really pops, but most of the rest just blends into a formless mass. I don’t even have the mental vocabulary to tell what’s any good from what’s not or to remember what I just heard in a way that captures the melody or allows for the consideration of lyrics. That’s fundamentally different from genres such as country and big-band music, which are not my favorites but are immediately accessible. Even granting that this is how my parents’ generation felt — and how much of the rising generation feels, I suppose — about guitar rock, it really is the case that some genres (most of Sixties R & B, a lot of traditional pop, pop rock, classic rock, and country) are accessible to the uninitiated in a way that rap is not and perhaps wishes not to be. Anybody can listen to the Temptations or the Four Tops or the Beatles and instantly get them; not anybody can do the same with Eminem or 2Pac or Bad Bunny.
For my sins, I subjected myself to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill before writing this. I believe I had previously heard only her serviceable if inferior cover (with the Fugees) of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” Miseducation contains another, similar cover (“Can’t Take My Eyes off You”). It has a couple of decent R & B tracks, and a surprising number of its lyrics are explicitly biblical. Those parts of the album I could judge: I could see why some songs would appeal to some people and also why I would not place them on a par with other vocal-and-melody songs (I have, I confess, little use for post-1990 R & B in general). But more than half of the record is rap, and it’s just terra incognita; I could not even attempt to tell you whether this is good rap or bad rap. Maybe Apple Music should accept that it’s comparing apples to oranges.