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What the world needs now is lists, sweet lists! Or so Apple thinks. It released its Top 10 Albums of All Time on May 22 (along with its Top 100), joining a perpetual parade of greatest songs/singers/guitarists lists from Rolling Stone, Spin and every music site imaginable. And who could be more appropriate to generate a top albums list than the company that did more than practically anyone to make people stop buying albums for all time, and switch to hearing individual songs and curated playlists as downloads or streams?
The whole point is to rile up fans and round up readers for rankings that spark transitory outrage. One typical response May 23: “Screw Apple Music for not including country in their top 100 albums!” growled Saving Country Music. “Get pissed. Get mad. Be personally offended.”
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AARP members, too, have particular reason to be at least annoyed about Apple’s list. We respect history and vividly remember albums, first made in 1948 by Columbia Records and called Vinylites — for the first time, up to 45 minutes of music on one disk!
Apple honors one measly album from the 1950s and just 10 from the 1960s on its Top 100. The most-represented decade is the 1990s, with 23 albums.
The 21st century? Thirty-one albums. This tallying might politely be called “recency bias,” reflecting the tastes of what we’d have to guess are mainly millennials. For them, Sly & the Family Stone, Simon & Garfunkel, Willie Nelson, both Elvises (Presley and Costello), Creedence Clearwater Revival, Al Green, Tina Turner, Janis Joplin, Television, Parliament-Funkadelic, R.E.M. and the Ramones are all kinda old and meh.
Apple’s best album of all time? That would be the one and only solo album by Lauryn Hill, the former Fugees singer, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It was a genre-bender of an album — highly regarded in 1998 (though Hill’s star has fallen amidst personal crises over the years), and certainly a precursor to Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Cowboy Carter. But is this the one album that deserves to be saluted as the best the galaxy of musicians could come up with over 75 years?
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