Chapter 1: Do Best Albums Lists Still Matter?
Top 50 Album Roundups, digital media’s desperate attempt to remain competitive with Spotify Wrapped have been filling my social feed and I’m once again faced with the same dilemma. In reading any given list of 50 titles, I have not heard of 45 or so of the artists. Not once. Reading the names, I feel like I’m either a million years old, or I’m being Punk’d – a pop cultural reference that instantly dates me.
I know we no longer live in a monoculture, but given that more than a MILLION new tracks are posted to streamers each year, even the microculture seems as scattered as microplastics on the ocean floor.
My selections (see photo above) are no better or worse than NPR’s, Pitchfork’s, Rolling Stone’s, or NME’s (my closest kindred spirit), but while many of those platforms feel compelled to cover as many genres as possible, mine lean closer to the type of music that was popular in the 1970’s through early 2000’s – when Gen-X’ers formed their tastes. The one title we all seem to agree upon is Charli XCX’s Brat (I’ll discuss Brat Summer in several posts in this series).
2024: Rise of the Machines
I was mapping out my Top 50 (for what would have been my 12th annual list for Popdose), when I queued up a new song by Fat Dog, a new band I fell in love with this year. Spotify then played me 20 excellent songs by acts I’ve never heard of before – and the songs were really good – and I was beginning to doubt my Top 50 considering I had missed all these amazing new bands. Then it hit me, many of these “acts” just might be AI interpolations of bands I already liked, including MGMT, Blur, and Vampire Weekend.
Musician Rick Beato’s interview with music historian Ted Gioia to discuss AI’s Threat To Music was the most interesting conversation I heard all year. It confirmed my suspicion, as it tackles in-depth the role AI is playing to goose streaming royalty system to keep revenues in house at the likes of Spotify.
Suddenly, my Top 50 albums had a lot more value. My picks are real artists. Many have been in the game for 20-40 years, while others are Gen Z superstars. Can anyone with a pulse escape the allure of Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’? To that end, I feel like an early adopter, as I owned all of Sabrina’s CDs (5 albums and an EP) prior to 2024.
Out of curiosity, I compared my Top 50 Albums of 2014 with Pitchfork’s top albums of 2014, and most of my picks are are even bigger acts today than they were then (Taylor, Charli, etc.). Were their choices too hip? Were mine too safe? Perhaps. My theory is that music that critics view as “important” don’t always translate to albums that are entertaining and build to stand the test of time.
In one fun twist, two of my top album picks from 2014 — Kate Voegele and Wakey!Wakey! (Michael Grubbs) — combined forces to form a new band, Your Future Ghost. In 2024, these One Tree Hill alums have delivered four mind-blowing non-album singles; had they dropped a full album, it would have likely been among the year’s best.
The Futility of Winners and Losers
When Trump won the election by a hairline margin, the media immediately positioned Harris (and in turn the Democratic party) as complete and total losers, ignoring the fact they earned 74,946,837 votes to Trump’s 77,237,942 and won plenty of down ballot races. And now, with Grammy noms in the air and all these Best Album lists floating about, the media is hellbent on turning art into “winners and losers”. For the past 11 years, I’ve played that game. But no longer.
I’m done with judging art, I just want to turn kindred spirits onto albums they may have missed. If all these albums brought me pleasure, happiness, comfort, catharsis, and escape during one of the most volatile years of my life, why not celebrate them all? To spare you from a 30-minute doom scroll of 50 ranked albums, I’m clustering my top pics in thematic categories and debuting these mini lists one day at a time.
Buckle up, it’s gonna be a funky ride… – a cluster funk if you will.
But First, some Bronze Medals
While 50 of my 2024 purchases make this list, another 50+ did not. Dua Lipa, Redd Kross, Laura Jane Grace, Jack White, Taylor Swift, Crowded House, Kaiser Chiefs, The Smile (Radiohead), David Gilmour, and Mark Knopfler are among my all-time favorite artists. I bought their latest CDs on opening day and well, they just got kinda buried in the deluge. Unlike albums you stream, bail on, and never visit again, having the physical artifact invites further exploration down the line. Quite often these titles bubble up to become some of my favorite albums, so watch this space. Case in point – Chappell Roan, RAYE, and Rick Astley – albums I bought in 2023 but didn’t really get into until much later this year.
OK – you ready to discover the year’s best albums as seen through Gen-X spex?
Coming tomorrow… Introducing Tomorrow’s Superstars (2024’s best debuts)
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