'Rolling Stone' magazine published their updated '500 Greatest Albums of All Time' this week. Their previous lists, from 2003 and 2012, have received fair criticism for being old-mannish and lacking diversity, and this is a decent attempt to redress that.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-albums-of-all-time-1062063/
I generally was going through it and going "good album, good album, yup, fine" so can't complain too much.
But there are still some fascinating currents when you look closely.
One area where it leaves itself open to criticism is by not closing the criteria off - by including "some" jazz albums, a few non-English albums, a few instrumental albums, a few Greatest Hits, it basically says "Everything else we have here in the standard Anglo-American rock and hip-hop genres are better than everything else in every other genre and language", thus basically dismissing jazz and world music as only having a few worthwhile relics.
Next, as a music journalist I follow on twitter called Matthew Perpetua points out, the 50s, 60s and 70s classics are still there, and they've been added to by the modern era, in particular by hip-hop and R'n'B (the likes of Frank Ocean, Kanye West, Beyonce, Kendrick Lamar placing right near the top) but what's been squeezed out is the middle, the music of my generation and the one just before. Not squeezed out entirely, of course, but just under-represented. Also squeezed is classic "singer-songwriter" stuff and indie/Americana stuff.
Also ... something I have noticed for a long time is that American music criticism just doesn't properly engage with British music anymore - you've still got the Beatles/Stones/Clash/Floyd etc holding high positions, and the usual other suspects (Winehouse, Radiohead etc) but, in the whole 500 albums, there is very little Britpop and British indie, and almost nothing by non-white British artists (just MIA, Massive Attack, Sade).
If you look at the Mercury Prize winners and nominees, which is purportedly representing the most acclaimed of British for the last 3 decades, and where the winners have, lately, been mainly black artists, almost none of them are represented - 'Screamadelica', 'Dummy', 'Different Class', 'Stories from the City ... '(PJ Harvey), 'Whatever People Say I Am ...' (Arctic Monkeys) are the only Mercury winners included, none particularly high up. No Dave, Stormzy, Roots Manuva, Dizzee Rascal etc to be seen.
I notice this when I look at (the more alternative to 'Rolling Stone') 'Pitchfork''s reviews too - you can pretty much guess the album scores in advance for British albums. Even if the reviewer likes the album and gives it a very positive review, the score is usually in the 7s (out of 10), like British music is marked to a lower scale than the most acclaimed American stuff.
It's funny that, since the 60s and 70s, when British music was both commercially and critically dominant (or at least equal), America has, counterintuitively (or not) become more closed off to it. Or maybe (I've thought this myself at times, but don't at the moment) British music is just worse these day.
Like I say, it's far from a terrible list, you can see that a lot of effort and thought has gone into collating it and getting a representative set of voters, it's just interesting what the new orthodoxy is.
It's the realisation, for me, that my "sweet spot", the stuff that, as I grew up, felt like the new modern classic stuff, is not going to be seen that way by history - no Nick Cave, no Joanna Newsom, no National, no Dexys (bollocks to that), no SFA (double bollocks to that), no Spiritualized, no Roots Manuva, no Midlake, no Fleet Foxes, no Lambchop or Rilo Kiley, no Animal Collective, no Suede, no Weller, Flaming Lips or Mercury Rev, no Bright Eyes or Manics ... you get the idea. (there's even only one Leonard Cohen, one Tom Waits, one Wilco).
Anyway, it's inspired me to make another playlist, called 'Unappreciated Songs'. It's a dig back into the stuff I was listening to in the early 2000s.
None if it is on the 'Rolling Stone' list, none of it is the "Landfill Indie" of that recent list, none of it was all that successful, and it's not to be much of the stuff I always go on about, my usual suspects (Wilco, National, Marling, Jenny Lewis etc) ... just bits of indie and Americana I loved at the time but had pretty much forgotten about. When I started looking, it was so fun, I've found 100s. Time has passed quickly enough to be nostalgic about this stuff.
I've boiled it down to 60 (to start with) - here it is - there's actually so much great music, I might well make another one in the same vein:
https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/unappreciated-songs/pl.u-aZMm9tvWEd8
- Go Fuck Yourself/Choochtown - Hamell on Trial
- Charlie Darwin - The Low Anthem
- Zorbing - Stornoway
- Winterlight - Clearlake
- Good Dancers - The Sleepy Jackson
- You Broke My Heart - Lavender Diamond
- New American Language - Dan Bern
- The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ - Jackie Leven
- Chosen One - The Concretes
- The Glare - David McAlmont and Michael Nyman
- Round Eye Blues - Marah
- Everyone I Know is Listening to Crunk - Lightspeed Champion
- Rill Rill - Sleigh Bells
- I Was Made for Sunny Days - The Weepies
- Penny and Jack - The Essex Green
- Let Your Shoulder Fall - Matthew Jay
- When I See Your Eyes I Swear to God That Worlds Collided - Young Republic
- My Secret is My Silence - Roddy Woomble
- Frankie's Gun - The Felice Brothers
- Steady Rollin' - Two Gallants
- The Wound that Never Heals - Jim White
- The Deal - Stephen Duffy
- Lose Yr Frown - Electric Soft Parade
- No Names - Kate Rusby
- My Brittle Heart - Lucky Soul
- What I Meant to Say - Ben and Jason
- Mysteries - Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man
- Language of Fools - Tom McRae
- Now Til 69 - The Shortwave Set
- The Freest Man - Tilly and the Wall
- Place for Us - The Mummers
- We Dug a Hole - Kathryn Williams
- I'm a Broken Heart - The Bird and the Bee
- Anyone Who's Yet to Come - Paddy Casey
- Look Left - Salako
- Sweet Surrender - Bellatrix
- Medication - Damien Jurado
- Ash Wednesday - Elvis Perkins
- Heliopolis by Night - Aberfeldy
- Julie Christie - Spearmint
- Galileo - Declan O'Rourke
- A Matter of Time - The Leisure Society
- Play the Hits - Hal
- The First Big Weekend - Arab Strap
- Put a Penny in the Slot - Fionn Regan
- Easter Parade - Emmy the Parade
- Black Winged Bird - The Cake Sale ft Nina Persson
- Not the Tremblin' Kind - Laura Cantrell
- Peculiar - Mull Historical Society
- Patience - Micah P Hinson
- Gold Day - Sparklehorse
- We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River - Richmond Fontaine
- All I Ever Really Wanted Was a Good Time - My Computer
- Inside of Love - Nada Surf
- Even Tho - Joseph Arthur
- Not About to Lose - Ron Sexsmith
- Long Time Coming - Delays
- start/stop/synchro - Rose Elinor Dougall
- The Last Good Day of the Year - Cousteau
- You are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve - Johnny Boy
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