Are the Decade's Best Albums Necessarily the Most Important?
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Though they usually don't pop up until December, various music outlets are flooding the marketplace with their "best-of" lists a little early this year. The occasion? A chance to gauge the most "important" albums of this century's first decade. But just because a record is important, does that make it the best? This year's lists provide a test subject on the matter. Check out just a few albums that are getting bumped up on lists, just because they're that important.
Is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Fever to Tell really one of the top 25 albums of the decade? In terms of quality -- despite the sheer greatness of "Maps" -- the answer is easily "hell no." Like it or not, though, the album will be remembered and placed on decade lists for many years to come. Music, like any other medium, is a cultural force, and so it becomes easy to rank music in terms of influence.
The real trouble with this is that lists -- even at magazines -- are meant to be sujective. The words "best of" are part of the title because they're meant to be just that: albums that the fan or critic or magazine personally think are the best, which is not the same as being the most important. Think about it this way: I think that an album like the Arcade Fire's Funeral is one of the most important albums of the decade. It encapsulates a decade where indie rock not only became mainstream but oftentimes formulaic. If I were to list my favorite albums, I'd put Neon Bible on my list instead... if I put any Arcade Fire albums on it at all.
Of course, the conversation about all of this inevitably brings Pitchfork into the picture. In a season where these lists pop up every few hours, theirs stands out as both the most visible and the most divisive. With a network of fans that nitpick the site's every move, their Haagen-Dazs sponsored end-of-decade lists are under intense scrutiny. How, someone might wonder, can an album that they straight up panned end up in its list due to sheer importance? Apparently, Basement Jaxx's Rooty was considered terrible, but it's just so damn important that it's one of the decade's best. It's easy to peg the Cool Police at Pitchfork in this case, but you'll find this same exact problem across the board. Just about every single one of us has been guilty of this at some point, even if we don't want to admit it.
The music geek's conundrum is whether to take the route Pitchfork has, or instead risk humiliation and shamelessly plug the records they truly enjoyed the most. They may not be the most important on an objective level, but they're certainly the subjective best. Can albums by Radiohead and Spank Rock really live together in a top 10 list? In terms of importance, no. As a personal list? You'd better believe it.
Comments (6)
As with any list, if it's to be anything but a conversation starter, you have to be upfront with some definitions and criteria. I think, if you are judging importance, it is too early to tell, except in a few cases. Of course very few of these lists even make a stab at objectivity. Even so, if you are gonna start an argument, you should give the framework of the criteria first.
If you mean imporatant, as in "cultural force" important, I'm sad to say that for immediate importance the most popular records are driving the cultural bus. Their ubiquity,unfortunately, trumps just about everything else.
I mean it is easy to see the influence of a band like Iggy & the Stooges in retrospect, but in their time Stooges labelmates, The Doors, were "more important."
Finally, as a whole I feel like music has drifted way down the ladder as an avatar for the culture as a whole..splintering off into micro genre after micro genre and with huge swaths of the population totally unengaged. Those who are engaged are buried in their little cultural wormhole of the moment, with almost no one able to galvanize large sections of the youth..it seems like it has been this way since Nirvana.
If you are talking about importance on a purely musical level by pointing out artists who are "changing" the way music is made or heard,and influencing other artists, or defining a new "school", you can make some headway there.
Cody--cool thoughts about the splintering effect.
i know these lists occur regularly, but do we really need to name an album that's most important by the decade? they come up when they come up. sometimes, maybe years later, you can notice one in a decade that had more effect on things than you realized at the time but sometimes maybe they just don't happen. faves are much easier and i don't think there's any humiliation in acknowledging things you love. if you're worried about that, then you should just bail on the conversation!
if we're talking about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and influence, I think that any credit attributed to Karen O should be handed over to Siouxie Sioux.
Finally brought myself to view the list and I haven't seen a list that questionable and bias since Rolling Stone's top guitarists list.
Just based on the fact that Bright Flight (Silver Jews) and Go Plastic (Squarepusher) didn't even make it onto the top 200, I think that it's a load of bullshit
Cody: While ubiquity is a cultural force, it's only a cultural force in terms of popularizing things that have been innovated by others. Think about electro music and its tendency toward "bangers" several years ago slowly seeping into mainstream hip-hop until it's the norm, or even bands like Coldplay eventually feeling the need to "step up their game" by watering down current trends in indie rock. For the most part, an influential album is rarely the one that the masses credit, even though the currently so-called important albums are, as Dead C points out, rehashes of old.
Robin: Preaching to the choir, but I love the way you're thinking!
Dead C: Good call on the Silver Jews... I somehow hadn't even noticed they weren't on the list. What a crime!
Another oddity, although they go overboard and liberally include Animal Collective on the list, they didn't put Strawberry Jam on there anywhere