The other day, I came across the Apple Music 100 Best Albums. Intrigued, I took a look …
… and, well, it’s precisely as bad as you’d think it would be, as long as you think it would be really bad. I mean, the LP (basically, the album) began to be prominent in the 1950s, so we’re looking at 70 years of albums, so no way 100 picks is going to distill music broadly.
But still, if I was picking the 100 best albums, I’d probably include more than zero classical records. Probably more than zero blues records (I mean, there’s one Jimi Hendrix album, but no straight blues, electric or acoustic). Two jazz records? One country record? No Elvis? And the closest it gets to international musicians is, as best I can tell, British recording artists?
I could go on, but I’ll stop there.[fn] See, the choices are abysmal, but also, Apple Music doesn’t describe its process of choosing its best albums. Yes, it says the choices were assembled with the help of “artists and experts,” but which artists and experts? How many? What were their criteria?
Here at BCC, we can do better. I’ve talked to my co-bloggers, and several of us are going to provide our lists of best albums. I doubt any of us will do 100, because we have jobs and families and other things to do, and Apple Music isn’t paying us to do this.
And we’ll either lay out our criteria or expressly tell you there are no criteria, or that our criteria are random or something like that.
See, we’re not going to pretend we’re creating an objective list of best albums. We’re just going to tell us what albums scratch the best itch in our subjective opinions. I suspect our lists will differ a lot! And maybe some of us will have a couple of the same records on our lists! And maybe we’ll wake up the next day and regret the list that we posted and make emendations in the comments! I don’t really know! I just know it’s going to be fun.
When will these BCC Best Albums Project posts appear? No idea. But when they do, I’ll link to them here so that we can have easy access to all of the BCC bloggers’ picks for best album.
[fn] Okay, one more thing: with 100 picks, they’re going to to choose two Radiohead albums? Really? Like, if any musician in the 20th century was diverse enough to include multiple times on a top 100 albums, it would have to be Miles Davis, who played (and often invented/popularized) basically every style of jazz that existed during his lifetime. Also, as great an album as Kind of Blue is, that shouldn’t be the Miles pick, even though it’s one of the two jazz albums Apple Music chose.
Photo by me. This is my record collection!