✎Subscriber thread: Apple Music 100
What if we stopped ranking music?
Hello,
We spent our Bank Holiday lunchtime poring over the Apple Music 100 list. For those who are blissfully unaware, this is Apple’s list of the 100 greatest albums ever made, for once chosen by a panel of musicians instead of journalists.
The result is strangely engrossing, if only because it’s impossible not to rise up in horror at whatever omission grinds against your own particular taste. H, who lives to buy records, was kind of amusing to watch as he read the list: ‘No James Brown! No Elvis! No Bobbie Gentry! No Toots and the Maytalls! Where’s the Country? Where’s the Blues? Wait… is anything not in English?* What about Africa? What about Asia? What about BRAZIL?’ (You have to imagine these words shouted in increased distress across a crowded restaurant to get the full effect.)
For what it’s worth, I quite liked the list. I think it’s better at acknowledging the influence of Black music than previous lists of this kind have been, and better at including women, too. There’s a freshness to it. Lauryn Hill at the top: why not? But there are also some pretty terrible omissions, and it’s hard to understand the logic of some of the rankings.
To me, that says less about the taste of the panel of judges, and more about the ridiculousness of ever ranking music in the first place. There is no such thing as the best album in history. That’s just not how it works. Our love of certain records is intensely personal, intensely contextual. It’s a fuction of time and place, of the life that was flowing around those songs, of the connections made. The list is an enjoyable debating point, but it will never speak to the soul.
So, tell me: what three albums do you love and listen to often, that did not make the list? No need to rank them, or assert that they’re better than anything else. Just share three that you love, and we’ll understand that you love many others too.
I’ll start:
Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi by Jacques Dutronc
I’m looking forward to reading your choices.
Take care,
Katherine
*The answer, by the way, is yes, but only one single record. Which I think we have to agree is not good.
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‘Tracy Chapman’ by Tracy Chapman; ‘Graceland’ by Paul Simon (*how* did neither of these make the list…??!) and something folky - ‘Little Lights’ by Kate Rusby…💜
I decided not to look at the Apple list. As an aging boomer, I remember when Albums were the dominant music format, they were a coherent creation. Then came MTV and videos, now it's streaming songs. All have their place. But when I was in college, we didn't have playlists, someone in the dorm with good speakers would put Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" or Grateful Dead's "American Beauty" on the turntable, and play from one end to the other.
This is my favorite album list, the NPR 150 greatest women's albums, curated by the wise Ann Powers and her colleagues:
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/24/538387823/turning-the-tables-150-greatest-albums-made-by-women