Good Lord, Apple Music's 100 Best Albums List
It is an OUTRAGE.
ICYMI, I was on a podcast a few weeks ago.
Otters,
How have y’all been? Sure has been a minute. Excited to be back. No idea why I was ever “gone” to begin with for the last two weeks but let’s pretend it never happened.
I’ll be prepping lots of upcoming posts for the Substack this week, most of which will likely be silly and pointless thousand-word rants about music. But what else did you expect. You’re subscribed for that very thing. And so we begin with this absolute travesty of an Apple Music 100 Best Albums list.
No one asked for this!! Every 100, 200, 500, 1,000 best albums list is ripe for scrutiny. It’s an impossible task. It’s like asking me to pick my favourite child, and I don’t even have kids.
You may remember that Rolling Stone updated their list recently. It stinks. Besides! Nimrods on Reddit will always be sure to tell you that you forgot to include the earth shattering third Flock of Seagulls greatest hits collection.
I’d expect Spotify to make a list like this. They’re very prone to pointless, gimmicky PR stunts. Spotify itself is a pointless, gimmicky PR stunt. Why Apple? This only hurts their brand. I don’t care what Tim Cook listens to. We all know it’s Kraftwerk.
Of course, if you really want to understand why this list sucks, you have to… look at the list. And so we shall.
We’re off to a great start here. Dude held a whole festival that resulted in eight needless deaths. Makes total sense to include his trashy album here.
STOP IT. Come on.
He is massively popular. But come on. Try humming a Bad Bunny song.
See? You can’t.
Try something off Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Or Back in Black. Easy, right?
BAD BUNNY IS ABOVE BOTH OF THOSE ALBUMS. Good LORD. Truly the only bunny in the land that deserves a timeout.
This trio I find really fascinating. No idea what that Sade album is doing here, it’s a killer album, it makes me wanna make out with a boy, but it’s not top 100 worthy. Velvet Underground should be at MINIMUM top 20. It’s in every other list’s top 20, so to not only place it so low but also have an ARCTIC MONKEYS album right above it is…a choice. And I love Arctic Monkeys! But if you’re going to include one of their albums it 1) has to be their debut, because that was lightning in a bottle, and 2) it should sit near the very bottom of the list. Very weird choices overall.
Not a lot of issues with the albums between ~60-35, but a lot of recency bias in this slot. I’ve said this before, but Lorde walked so Billie Eilish could run. (The new album might be her best yet, by the way.) Why, then, is this album—though undoubtedly a 2010s classic—so high, and Pure Heroine near the bottom, and Melodrama completely absent? WHERE IS MELODRAMA??????? Sorry for being so dramatic, pun absolutely intended, but this is just SOH unFAIHRE.
Not gonna take too many issues with Zeppelin because you could include any of the first 4 Zeppelins in that slot and I wouldn’t be mad. Dark Side is too low. Hell, I have a friend who says it should’ve been #1! And get Kanye out of here. Maybe this is too hot a take, but we need to stop giving that POS recognition, even retrospectively.
?????????? WHAT PLANET AM I ON. Please god tell me they forgot to do math and the list actually ends here.
Stop.
Oh my god get out of town.
EIGHTEEN? This list is turning corporate FAST. The worst part is that the stolen version is objectively better. But if they really loved Taylor, they’d put her at #13, no? They’d make her take up the whole top 10 if they could.
It was always going to be either 1989 or Red making this list (and, for my money, Fearless floating around in the 300s somewhere), but this is just too much.
Well then.
21 doesn’t exist without Blue creating the blueprint for breakup albums. You’d think Blue would be higher considering its massive swath of influence on pretty much every songwriter of the last 50 years, but oh well. 21 is a little too one-note for it to go so high but its front half is full of beautiful, borderline-timeless ballads, so it definitely merits an inclusion. I literally remember Adele being on the news because she made a rare public appearance during her lengthy hiatus that fell in between 21 and 25. That’s how big she was. Y’all should’ve been there.
You know what, switch the two. Have Blue at #15 and 21 at #16. That makes a little more sense to me.
The top 10!
Wasn’t expecting Lauryn Hill at #1 but she’s obviously still around and kicking—and still yet to drop a second album—so I can see why Apple Music wanted to give her flowers (like, quite literally give her flowers).
Kendrick is in the top 10 but it’s not for the album you’d expect. Justice for To Pimp a Butterfly!
Back to Black…that’s not a top 10 album for me. But we all adore Amy Winehouse and we miss her terribly. So I’ll be chill about that.
The obvious inclusions in here, like Nevermind, Songs in the Key of Life, Abbey Road, Thriller, they could be reordered a bit, but then people would complain that this list looked too much like every other list, and goddamnit you can’t please everybody, especially not me.
Thriller is Thriller, but then why not include Bad or Off the Wall or even Dangerous near the bottom.
Maybe switch Stevie and Prince around? Not that I hate Prince or anything, but Songs in the Key of Life is an objective miracle.
I actually quite like having Blonde (or is it without the E?) in the top 5. Sure, I complained about this list being obsessed with recency bias, but Blonde was a game-changer. I remember the day it came out. People were taken aback. It was an artistic statement of the highest order. Frank may very well be the Lauryn Hill of our generation. Dude might never put out an album again and we won’t even mind.
Any albums you thought should’ve made the list? I can think of a few just off the top of my head.
Chat soon.