I think one answer is that it's difficult to tell what kind of historical impact an album will have if it's still within a few years of its release. Like, the Strokes' first album paved the way for a lot of neo-garage bands to have popular breakthroughs, but I still have my doubts about exactly how well it will hold up over time, divorced from that original context -- they don't have quite the versatility of the White Stripes. Plus, music that's ahead of its time can take a while to filter out and find an audience that's ready for its innovation.

I think another factor is that some of the most creatively vital music of the last decade has been hip-hop, a format whose albums are notoriously uneven and filled with padding in between the moments of brilliance. As if it's better to fill up 74 minutes of a CD -- even if half of it is irrelevant -- than to cut out the filler and give the audience 37 minutes of unadulterated greatness, but leaving half the CD blank and risking the audience feeling ripped off.

I don't think music criticism is entirely sure yet how to evaluate important albums that were made specifically for the more expansive running times of the CD era, and consequently have a few weak moments (unlike a lot of the great LPs of yesteryear that were necessarily limited to around 45 minutes).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2SFBLOI2aQ

Well, it is their sandbox.

That said, I thought this year has seen some promising releases.

Then again, circumstance is aligned against today's music. No real substitute for a frontier at your feet, where the slightest tap of the toe breaks new ground.

Probably one of the best entries in this journal ever.


I'm glad P.E.'s Nation of Millions made it. I'm surprised that the Beastie Boy's Paul's beat out License.

Anyway, what about the math. I don't know enough about his data. Don't older albums have more TIME to be well credited? This isn't about new music being unappreciated. It's about whether these lists that are polled for data are all current. If every critic in the past 40 years has had the option of suggesting a beatles album, then that's a skew isn't it?

The noticeable flaw is the decade before being so weak. But I suspect that the 60s and 70s were a higher point for volume of music than the decade before.

I must say one of the things I like about being older, I have so much more music than I used to. Yet, I still don't listen to half the crap on this list. I'm not sure what this all means. And while it's an interesting source for considering music I have never considered before, it also smacks of homogenizing music even further.

It would be interesting if there were a nice fat pirate torrent to get it all in one go. There-you-are. Everyone gets the same music library, and no one can complain, after all it's the "best" possible library isn't it?

Thanks. This is the best and clearest summation I've read explaining where we're at with music right now. Amazing what you can do with some simple math and a simple graph.

If this had been done in '96, would the '87-'96 decade been as large? It sometimes takes time for critics to realize the significance of these works and how they ended up shaping the direction of music tomorrow. Don't you think?

Yes, if this study were being conducted in 1976, Zeppelin, Floyd, the Stones wouldn't be nearly as high as the "golden age" of Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, et al. -- and, someone like Led Zeppelin might be seen as merely a retrospective of blues. Note the surge in albums coincides with the height of the baby boomers. The chart looks more like a comparison of the relative ages of music critics than it is of the impending death of music.

I personally would rank twice as many albums from the past 15 years as I would from the '70s. That only shows you how old I am.

That rock critics are ageing?

Yes, and they're male.

I think the main issue is that most people are nostalgic, and the music of their childhood/teenage years affects them the most. Those who listened to the music made between '97-'06 just aren't old enough to be nostalgic yet, or "industry" enough to get reviews printed in newspapers.

yay a person with a brane!

I don't think the trend for praising older albums in the music industry is because of the fact that the older music have had more time to gain recognition. There are almost no albums on the list that were'nt super popular when they came out. I think this study on the most critically acclaimed albums reflects the popularity and commercial success of the albums, moreso than the innovation and artistic merit. I think time will change what's on this list, but there hasn't been enough time yet, today it's still just a reflection of popularity and commercial success. "As Valasquez and Picasso will happily explain, history remembers the names of those who creep out of the shadows and reposition the frames."

Where is Daniel Johnston? Where are the High Llamas? Where is Liliput? Where is Renaldo and the loaf? Wjere is Yximalloo? Where are the Shaggs? Wheres is Momus????

I typed this really quickly and managed to misspell 'where' twice. I'm not really that horrible at spelling I promise, I'm just not very good at typing!

Accessibility to technology has definitely changed the playing field
in pop culture. I wonder if literature or other art forms correspond in a similar fashion.

I wonder what kind of obscene technology we need to invent before we can quantify the most ignored music of all time?

It must be based on THE GAME!!!"

Glad to see so much Kraftwerk. Nobody I know had heard of them before they met me!

I would have liked to see more Kate Bush, but I'll settle for getting Hounds of Love in the 1980s.

I can't believe this has music I like. I assumed it would all be "OH WHITE MEN IN JEANS PLAYING GUITARS AND DRINKING BEERS" and then me going into a coma.

the ipods will stop spinning (i know people who only carry audio-books on their pods already), a decade of silence, then something. a tone ?

I think this deification of the 67-77 decade coincides a bit too neatly with the adolescence and early adulthood of the mid-to-late Boomers (and overlapping just a bit with early Gen X).

I think it's also pretty self-evidently reflective of white North American tastes. Only 9 black artists in the top 100, and most of them were more known as 1950s soul types (and therefore more nostalgic and safe)...and of those, only one relatively recent artist (Public Enemy).

I wonder if this doesn't reflect a sort of racial divide in the ranks of music critics. At least going by my own city's English newspapers, most of the 'senior' critics are white; white critics seem to have (pardon the expression) carte blanche to indulge their wide-ranging tastes, but black critics tend to cover black music or club music exclusively. It's not a hard and fast rule, but I wonder, is this self-segregation? Everyone cleaving to what they know?

Just ramblings - not trying to state a theory here. I leave that to the capable readers...

Cleaving to what they know and then defining that as "blackness," possibly? Apparently there were and probably still are a number of people who look askance at the interest of anyone black in anime and manga - because such things were "not Black," (we were told by one such unfortunate on a mailing list.)

Pet Sounds is ranked #1 best album of all time on this list and it might be #1 on my list of most overrated albums of all time(not that I don't like it, it's very cute pop, but I don't even think it belongs in the top 20 best pop albums). But, for me, the biggest crime was ABBA only being listed once in the top 3000, and clear down at the 656th spot. Van Halen, on the other hand, is listed four times on the top 3000, their self titled album ranking at 272. ACDC is listed 5 times, 'Back In Black' barely missing the top 100. How long does it take for bands as awful as Van Halen and AC/DC to be forgotten? Did anyone else watch the Spinal Tap movie? I think ABBA, despite their immense popularity, is paying the price for their shiny one piece outfits and disco beats. That shit just ain't tuff man.

Interesting post.

Is it partly about the importance of the album? At some point (1967?) the album became for pop music what the symphony was for classical music - the defining large-scale form. But it's no longer at the centre of how people listen to music.

Are you saying that Pet Sounds really might be knocked off the most-acclaimed spot by the next Panda Bear album? A few years from now?

Critical opinion changes over time. J.S. Bach's music was not popular with the critics of his day, and he's now considered one of maybe the three greatest composers of all time. So Panda Bear certainly has a chance of future greatness.

The most critically admired album right now is the Arcade Fire. It sounds as fresh and exciting as a Tom Petty album.

Thank God for that. I thought it was just me.

It's interesting that 1967-76 turns out to be the miracle decade, when one considers that, by one popular consensus, it is also the decade where music got so bloated/self-indulgent/tedious/pretentious that everything stagnated until punk rock came along, poured petrol on the whole thing and threw a lighted match. Could this be a statistical refutation of the rockist/primitivist worldview?

I'm just reading the new ArtForum, and it's remarkable how much rock music is referenced. There's a review of Cory Arcangel's show, which loops and overlaps the opening guitar riff from Guns N' Roses 1987 track "Sweet Child O' Mine" and makes a minimalist glockspeil version of Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" album. There's a description of how Steven Parrino made images of Vito Acconci as "Vito Ramone", a member of the Ramones.

Artists have been aware of rock music as some kind of exemplary creative activity for the last forty years, and have joked around with it, paid tribute to it, been inspired by it. Now, though, I get a weird sense they're dancing on its grave. Think of Matt Stokes making painstaking archeological recreations of the mixing desks and speaker systems of early 90s rave, for instance. Like Cory Arcangel, he's fascinated by the history of music, and he sees rave as a metaphor for all kinds of autonomous self-organisation.

But while art may feel marginal compared to music, and may seem to be making meta statements about it, it's by no means a secondary form these days. The art world is booming while the music world is dying. How can art buck the demographic trend? Well, it's more elitist -- you don't need huge generations to keep art fresh; it just requires some collectors, gallerists, critics, gatekeepers, mandarins (oh yes, and artists). It can buck the demographic thing because it was never dependent on mass market sales. Also, art has done globalization much, much better than pop music did. WOMAD and the 80s World Music boom never really got out of the margins of pop, and that's fatal in a populist medium. Art, on the other hand, has its biennials all over the world, has Chinese artists exciting the West (what Chinese music artists are currently doing that?). Above all, I think in art -- and this isn't the case in pop music, alas -- new ideas have continued to be prime and key. The art world never took its eye off the importance of originality, even eccentricity. And again, this is a lot easier when you don't have to carry the average consumer with you. Ironically, its the art world's very elitism which is allowing it to thrive, and pop music's wide appeal which is killing it off.

To be more specific: I watched Guns N' Roses "Sweet Child O' Mine" video because I read that Cory Arcangel had done something with it. I'd never seen it before, but I found the video excruciating -- the way it encoded male sexuality, the way Slash looked like an idiotic bloated parody of the cool Marc Bolan on the cover of "The Slider" 15 years earlier.

And yet, for me anyway, Cory Arcangel is as cool, right now, as Marc Bolan was in 1972. He goes in and takes the best bit of the G&R track and makes something fresh with it, against all odds. The art medium is still in its prime. It has its canon, sure, but somehow that canon isn't crushing artists working now the way it is in rock.

"Might Pet Sounds get displaced by the next Panda Bear album?"
- let's hope so...(although I've never heard of Panda Bear!)

Speaking personally, I keep buying really good albums. Every couple of months I find something I like. But I keep meeting people who say "There's no good music out there anymore". I think what they really mean is " I can't be bothered to look for it anymore" or "I've got enough music already". I reckon that's what these stats mean; a state of saturation.

There's probably something to that, at least in how it applies to my experiences. I feel it's getting harder and harder to find new and interesting music, and I tend to blame that on restrictions on technology, since I formed my taste & music buying habits in the heyday of Napster, but perhaps that is unfair. I still hear some new stuff, at a much lower volume, but out of that, proportionally less rock & poppish music is interesting to me. And that may have a lot to do with saturation.

Hey, we can get another rock n' roll or another jazz, let's just enslave some other race for a couple hundred years, have em live in relative poverty, divorced from mainstream culture, then start going around and recording them.

There's one constant in human history: the sun never sets on the Blues.

"That rock critics are ageing?"

GOSH I WONDER WHY I THINK IT MIGHT BE THAT ONE.

You have no faith in any of us, do you?

This question occurred to me: If I'm a man in middle age, say, am I still likely to meet someone tomorrow who could become my all-time best friend? Is it less likely that that would happen to me aged 50 than aged 20? And, if so, is the reason for that precisely the great friendships I've found and honed over the decades? Are my standards higher, my habits more ingrained, my criteria actually defined by people I already know?

There's a parallel with Clay Shirky's idea that it gets progressively harder to get a new blog into the "power law spike" of superstar blogs -- the Top 50 blogs hog such a vastly disproportionate share of the attention that all that's left for the others (the "long tail") is to be "famous for fifteen people".

1) retro is quite fashionable now in general. no wonder people turn to old music too

2) albums produced in 70ties haven't disappeared. it's not like modern music lacks creativity, it's just that artists not only have to compete with each other, but also with those who were big in past - and still are.what I mean is that it is much harder to surpass The Beatles than it was to become The Beatles.

3) can we really judge how influential an album is, within a year or two since it was released? music industry grows bigger both in number of artists and genres, so more albums gets recommended by less critics. in case of last decade I think we should wait a little longer before officially letting it die. we may still discover how much we appreciate someone's music after the person goes away.

> harder to surpass The Beatles than it was to become The Beatles.

i'm trying to think how that might make sense.

say hayden got inspiration and motivation from handel and beethoven from mozart, wagner from all of them but it wasn't a question of surpassing them as of killing them off and heading off to new fronteers. a similar (even more oedipal) thing happened in rock/pop. the sex pistols didn't surpass led zeppelin and the hippies but wanted to kill them off completely.

so nowadays by the exaltation of the beatles (and yes there is evidence that this might have happened) have we become in this respect somewhat like certain non-western cultures where it's not about innovation and new fronteers but cycles, repetition, and ritual ?