Quit arguing about the Apple albums list

This is the same global megacorp that pissed us all off with that ad about crushing instruments and other artistic tools a couple of weeks back. And now we care about its musical 'opinions'?

Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

I’m trying to understand why Apple Music’s Best 100 Albums list has been making me angry all week. More accurately, people’s reactions to Apple’s list. I’m furious that they are responding at all. So Taylor Swift got ranked higher than the Beach Boys or Aretha Franklin? By the company that makes your phone? Who cares? As the pressure built, I started tweeting things like, Don’t be chumps!

But did everyone listen, and head off to music-list rehab? No, no, no. By Thursday morning, some of my smartest Facebook friends were getting worked up that a “Best Albums” list would consist almost entirely of records from the U.K. and North America (Bob Marley is the only exception, plus Bad Bunny if you don’t count Puerto Rico as part of the U.S., a question that’s above my paygrade); nearly no music made before the 1960s (Kind of Blue, 1959, that’s it); two token jazz LPs (Miles and one Coltrane); no country music (the sole candidate, Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, is primarily pop, as Musgraves would acknowledge); etc.

All true. But also frequently true of other music lists. Why on earth expect better from Apple, and why donate free branding labor to this exploitative global tech behemoth by shouting about it? But too late now I guess, so here is my shout. Aka my intemperate rant.

Not all lists are dumb. But most “best albums/songs ever” lists are, unless they’re explicitly personal ones. Institutionally curated cross-genre lists inevitably contain many of the lacunae listed above, reflecting the prejudices of their makers and their markets. There are too many albums of too many different kinds and there is no meaningful set of criteria by which to compare them. A hundred is a ridiculously small number. Leaving them unranked would at least be truer to their irreducibility, but it would fail the main Internet list test, which is trolling: Competitive rankings provoke people to fight online and repeat your brand name a lot. Leveraging that dynamic has become a huge part of the business plan of Rolling Stone in the 21st c., and for Pitchfork and other sites too.

But at least on RS or P4k, these lists are usually chosen by panels of critics identified by name, and accompanied by blurbs about each album with bylines. They are gimmicky and promotional, but they are gimmicky and promotional versions of the main thing those publications do, which is to publish music criticism (and news and features, etc). To the degree the lists promote thoughtful discussion, that’s part of the publications’ mission, and to the degree they generate tendentious nonsense, well, it subsidizes the meatier stuff.

The Apple list, by contrast, is made by the same company that pissed everybody off a couple of weeks ago with that piano-and-sculpture-crushing commercial. It was about how great it is to destroy violently all artistic tools that aren’t blank metal boxes.

The procedures by which publications make lists are often too unclear—how much is staff/juror voting, how much is editor/publisher fiat? (Ex-RS publisher Jan Wenner was notorious for his top-down interventions, among all the other things he was notorious for.) I always want to know. The Apple list is even more opaque.

Apparently there was an in-house nomination process among its “editorial” team, meaning people who mostly make playlists but also write some texts and so on, headed by veteran music journo and editor Alex Gale (with whom I’ve worked happily in the past). Radio personalities and Apple Music hosts Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden act as the lead faces, and there was a voting panel of artists, industry people, and misc “experts,” a couple of them featured for cred in the promo—Maggie Rogers, Nile Rogers, presumably some people not named Rogers. I know of at least one critic who voted. If I called Apple, maybe I could find out all the names. But Apple doesn’t hint that users should wonder. Apple wants us to think, “Apple did this for us.” As if Apple were our compadre and fellow music lover, one with aesthetic opinions or any p.o.v. that’s not a shareholder yield graph.

Granted, I was glad to observe that the final expanded version of the list (I’m not linking; Apple will make it plenty easy for you to find) does include brief contextual write-ups of the albums. They’re unbylined and boilerplate, but some kind of start. It even has a couple of podcast-style features about the list if you dig around. Overall, the list is, you know, fine, with all the caveats above. They claim that it was made without regard to streaming popularity, which is bull; of course it’s not a hundred Drake and Taylor albums, but there’s also nothing remotely obscure on it. It could have been compiled by AI, given a few basic guidelines. It’s status quo, except for the thing that provokes so much knee-jerk annoyance online, which is that it includes slightly more pop albums of the past 15 years than some people expect, middle-aged white people especially. Apple Music needs to care about diverse, younger pop fans more than most entities that usually make such lists do. That’s the one good thing. One cheer for this minor crumb of instability in the canon-making machinery.

Canon formation is the heading under which critics and academics usually talk about this subject, analyzing the social politics and the aesthetics of such lists, how they’re made, where they circulate. That’s part of what my book Let’s Talk About Love was all about.

I’m not sure where and when the first best-ever lists in modern music journalism got made. Jazz magazines, probably? I know Downbeat held some of the earliest annual polls of top recordings and musicians. But in my consciousness of it, the practice got dug in when the first edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide was published in 1979. I know some older music heads for whom that volume, and its subsequent editions, were the maps to their whole early music listening and collecting. For people a little younger than me, the key text was the Spin Alternative Record Guide in 1995—many of my friends and colleagues today made their initial critical bones writing and editing that book. Other people swore by the Trouser Press guide, or Robert Christgau’s compendiums of his graded capsule reviews. I never really had a “bible” like that. I surfed more from issue to issue of magazines and alt-weeklies and DIY zines, listened to Brave New Waves and other radio shows, and treated record stores kind of like archival research sites. I maintained my own little lists. I probably would have found useful shortcuts in the books, but I didn’t stumble on them at the right time.

All of those published guides had huge blind spots, which provided fodder for dozens of revisionist articles and counter-lists in later decades. But at least they were whole books. They could cover a lot of ground and include a lot of words. They really fostered practices of kids marking them up, checking off boxes, scribbling their own ratings in the margins, carrying them to record stores, dog-earing and wearing them out over the course of years. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I doubt most Internet-era lists have anywhere near that durability. They’re something to fight about for a week or two and then forget. With some exceptions.

In principle, I love and encourage people to argue about music. But “best-ever” arguments are the dullest kind: That should be number 6, not number 35! Or, You left out my favourite! Like most art forms, a list is more productive the more specific it is. Lists can be potently canon-challenging, as in NPR’s Turning the Tables project, spearheaded by my friend Ann Powers and her team, which discussed the greatest albums by women (and non-binary people) as a blow against the male domination on so many such lists. NPR deepened the project with a series of related essays and other work extending across several years.

But even annual year-end lists help people get caught up on what they might have missed, while critics might mount a case about what’s just happened culturally. Decade-best lists similarly offer a “first draft of history” for a musical era. Pitchfork’s retrospective best-of-X-decade lists can seem like a bit of a content mill, but they have often implied, say, “Here’s a different way to think about 1980s music beyond Eighties Night clichés.” Genre-based lists can be particularly educational, and the fights they spark often have higher stakes. Lists of great producers, say, or guitarists or drummers or other instrumentalists, can shift attention to parts of music-making often overlooked in the focus on soloists and lead singers. And again, lists attract readers to sites where they’ll find a range of more substantial articles, essays, reviews, etc. They feed the ecosystem.

But all this Apple Music list really says is, Come listen to these albums on Apple Music. If anything therein turns out to be a gateway for a young person, I’m glad, but I’d argue most previous forms of gateway, even a weekly radio Top 40 countdown, did more to inculcate long-term habits of lively thinking about music. (Even if some kinds also cultivated attitudes like rockism that people like me had to unlearn later.) My onetime Spin Guide-editing friend Eric Weisbard tried to persuade me that the Apple list is more like a Memorial Day-weekend, radio-station, all-time-albums countdown. I don’t think it has that listenership-interactive, real-time energy. The lesson is mainly, Click here. And here. And here.

And it pisses me off that it comes wearing a shoddily made critical mask, while shunting actual critics and critical process to backstage. It’s akin to the way AI is trawling the world for people’s hard-built knowledge and creativity, even our physical individual voices, then mixmastering it into generic, recycled, “original” content without payment or credit. It pisses me off out of professional pride and worker solidarity. Let’s not sell our souls so cheaply to the company store. They only pay in scrip.

However. As one reliably contrarian friend put it to me, this list drawing so much more attention than any other work of criticism lately might mean that this is just what music criticism is now. What canon (re)formation is. At least a significant part of it. Maybe my personal agitation is a symptom of a painfully inevitable stage of evolution. Maybe I should be submitting my résumé to the company store and deleting this post this instant.

I hope not, but honestly, maybe.