9/19/16

The Great Music Canons of the Internet

The internet is full of publications, communities, and individual people who think they know where the good shit is at.  Many of you may roll your eyes at the very sight of the words "___hundred Greatest Albums of All Time".  But, regardless of how futile the exercise of ranking the 'best music' is, it's being done and it will continue to be done, and what a website ranks as good music tends to be incredibly revealing about its tastes.  Certain websites have come to represent distinct canons in music, with clearly defined features, strengths, faults, arguments and counter arguments.  I find it interesting how these places differ, and how they are similar.  After examining these websites, I've learned a lot about how different types of music are regarded on the internet.  I hope you find it interesting as well.  Nine websites are discussed below: three publications, three communities, and three created by individuals.


The Publications

I probably trust publications the least when it comes to musical recommendations, for the simple reason that a paid musical opinion is automatically more insencere than an unpaid one.  But there are certain publications that have come to symbolize large cultural differences in music taste.  Three are discussed below.

Rolling Stone Greatest 500 Albums of All Time


Let’s start off the show with what is definitely the least respectable canon that I’m going to discuss today.  Because fuck Rolling Stone.  It would be hard to make a satirical list that more perfectly characterizes the short sightedness of what has come to be known “rockism”.  9 of the 10 albums in the top 10 were recorded between 1965 and 1972.  It’s not that these albums aren’t good, or even great.  It’s that the creators of this list seem to think that all great music ever made was in heavy rotation on rock radio in 1972.  The attitude of the list towards all other genres amounts to tokenism.  Great hip-hop, underground rock, reggae and metal albums are given a couple of mentions each, but are drowned in a sea of 60’s rock, soul, R&B, and mainstream rock hits from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.  Though the list was made around 2012, almost no music from the previous decade was included.  Any sort of experimental music is completely ignored.  Electronic music is completely ignored.  Music not made in America or Britain is ignored.  If a recording exists of Paul McCartney sneezing in 1967, it’s on here.  Widespread commercial success is clearly a prerequisite for inclusion.  Also one of the slowest, most poorly designed web pages I have ever encountered.

  1. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
  2. The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
  3. The Beatles: Revolver
  4. Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited
  5. The Beatles: Rubber Soul
  6. Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On
  7. The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main Street
  8. The Clash: London Calling
  9. Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde
  10. The Beatles: The White Album

Characteristic Pick:
37. The Eagles: Hotel California

 Descriptors:
Rockist, “The 60’s... man you just had to be there.”, Beatles worship.

 This list, in human form:
Your unhappily married burnout uncle who stores two guitars beneath a Jimmy Page poster in ‘his corner’ of the garage.  He owns a Stratocaster and another Stratocaster.  He gets offended if you even suggest touching either one of his ‘precious axes’. He speaks in hushed tones about the Guns ‘n Roses reunion show he saw in 2006.

I’m probably being too hard on this list.  It’s not really that bad.  It might be a more comprehensive list then any of the others in this article, as far as genre coverage is concerned.  It’s just that it represents a certain kind of dogma that to this day people have to encounter and overcome, before they can really start listening to that good shit you know what I mean?

NME Top 500 Albums of All Time


For those who aren’t very familiar with NME, they are, in many ways, the british Rolling Stone.  Published as a magazine since 1949.  It became the bestselling british newspaper in the 70’s, and was associated with gonzo journalism during that time.  I don’t know much more than that about their cultural reputation, but it isn’t too hard to see where they’re coming from from the list below.

  1. The Smiths: The Queen is Dead
  2. The Beatles: Revolver
  3. David Bowie: Hunky Dory
  4. The Strokes: This Is It
  5. The Velvet Underground & Nico:  The Velvet Underground & Nico
  6. Pulp: Different Class
  7. The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses
  8. Pixies: Doolittle
  9. The Beatles: The White Album
  10. Oasis: Definitely Maybe

British. Pop. Music.  Given, we’ve got two american acts on here, but both of those acts, the Velvet Underground and the Pixies, were very prominent in Britain during their time.  This list has much more current music than the Rolling Stone list, but also essentially ignores genres that Rolling Stone included.  Soul, R&B, and Jazz are largely absent here.  There’s more acknowledgement of the indie underground, experimental, and electronic music -- we’ve got Big Black, Can, and Boards of Canada on here.  And a lot of hip hop.  But the real focus are british dudes with guitars -- and not just the Beatles!  Curiously, the #500 album on this, as well as the Rolling Stone list is an Outkast album.

Descriptors:
British, Britpop, Morissey as christ incarnate.

Characteristic Pick:
19. Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, I Am Not.

This list, in human form:
Some bloke from Leeds, probably.

Pitchfork’s Top Rated Albums


Ah, you knew it was coming.  Though Pitchfork has never created any sort of “best all time” list, their canon can be outlined well by looking at their highest scored reviews.  This creates a list that is in no way an attempt at a comprehensive evaluation of all of popular music, but just a summary of Pitchfork’s own top dogs.  The website started in 1996, but really became the ubiquitous force it is today sometime in the first half of the 2000s.  For consistency, only reviews that were written at the time of the album’s release are included below.

  • Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy -- 10/10
  • Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot -- 10/10
  • Radiohead: Kid A -- 10/10
  • D’Angelo: Voodoo -- 10/10
  • The Dismemberment Plan: Emergency & I -- 10/10
  • The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin -- 10/10
  • Bonnie “Prince” Billy : I See A Darkness -- 10/10
  • Boards of Canada: Music Has A Right to Children -- 10/10
  • Silver Jews: American Water -- 9.9/10
  • Björk: Homogenic -- 9.9/10
  • Modest Mouse: The Moon & Antarctica -- 9.9/10
  • Arcade Fire: Funeral -- 9.7/10
  • Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion -- 9.6/10


A lot (like a lot) of albums are omitted from the list above, so don’t come whining to me.  The thing is, it’s hard to parse Pitchfork’s high scores.  They’re rated a ton of classic albums upon their re-issue, and they’ve even gone back to late 90’s albums that eluded their scope at the time (see their In the Aeroplane review).  Also, they’ve shied away from giving very high scores since they became popular (many say their 2004 Arcade Fire review is the signpost for this shift).  It’s not even worth stating what Pitchfork’s negative reputation is at this point.  Everyone knows that they’re pretentious, ‘only obscure music is good’, dick wagging hipsters.  Whatever.  As pointed out on this list I recently found on RYM, at this point it’s as much of a pose to hate on Pitchfork as it is to like them.  I mean, I do hate the way they write about music, but I hate they way pretty much anyone who’s paid to write about music writes about music.  And one fact I cannot deny is that as a young, impressionable lad, I looked up the exact list you see above.  I listened to some of it, and now some of my favorite music is on that list.  I’d list The Dismemberment Plan as one of my favorite bands of all time.  Listening to Emergency & I introduced me to the concept of music with dissonance, with chaos, with desperation and anger.  For that, I will always have the Pitchfork canon to thank.

 Descriptors:
Indie, hipster

Characteristic Pick:
Arcade Fire: Funeral -- 9.7/10

 This List, in human form:
A random college kid, probably from suburban Indianapolis, who doesn’t really want to put in the effort to listen to music but still wants to look cool.  Has been killing the Birkenstocks, button down shirt and Ray-Bans look since ‘14.

The Communities

Here are three online communities that have, in one way or another, developed their own musical canon.  As these lists are a synthesis of thousands, if not millions of people's opinions, they can consider much more music than can be covered by on person, or even one publication.  But they can also be heavily influenced by the popularity of a small amount of music, or the community's taste can become insular.


/mu/ Top 100 Albums


You thought we were going to get through this article without a mention of these fucking guys? Ha!  I think this list was made through user polling, and it is formatted into tiers, instead of a straight list.  Here is the top ten tier.

  • Neutral Milk Hotel: In The Aeroplane Over the Sea
  • Radiohead: Kid A
  • Madvillain: Madvillainy
  • Radiohead: OK Computer
  • Death Grips: The Money Store
  • Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
  • My Bloody Valentine: Loveless
  • The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
  • Sufjan Stevens: Illinois
  • Slint: Spiderland  
At least to my knowledge, /mu/ is one of the most unique musical communities on the internet.   This list is by no stretch of the imagination a comprehensive list of all of album-based popular music.  /mu/ tends to fixate on certain albums, especially ones with obvious, memeable characteristics, and then shitpost the fuck out of them.  They’ve created they’re own culture around of handful of albums, so much so that these albums are referred to as “/mu/core”.  Also, /mu/ seems to really like albums that are deep in a very obvious way.  This list is heavily populated with deep as fuck post-rock, huge, epic prog, and long winded, repetitive experimental rock.  Even the three jazz albums on here, A Love Supreme, Bitches Brew, and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, are albums with lots of backstory and conceptual underpinnings.  I’ve never really heard anyone articulate this before, but to me it seems very obvious that /mu/ is all about the huge, long, conceptual, grandiose album.

Descriptors:
sadness, deepness, memeness

Characteristic Pick:
Top 10: Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

 This List in Human Form:
Someone who is sad and listens to Loveless every night

RateYourMusic.com Chart


Well, this is pretty self explanatory, isn’t it?  RYM is a place where you can rate on a 0.5-5 star scale any album in their database.  They have a chart which is an aggregation of the millions of ratings users have given albums over the years, and creates an ordered list based on some algorithm (I’m not sure what it is, but it obviously takes into account both average rating and total number of ratings) of the greatest albums of all time.  The top ten is below:

  1. Radiohead: OK Computer
  2. Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon
  3. The Velvet Underground & Nico: The Velvet Underground & Nico
  4. Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here
  5. Radiohead: Kid A
  6. King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King
  7. The Beatles: Abbey Road
  8. My Bloody Valentine: Loveless
  9. The Beatles: Revolver
  10. Led Zeppelin: IV
RYM is interesting.  Looking at this list, it’s like some weird synthesis of the Rolling Stone Top 500 and the /mu/ top 100 albums.  That, I think, speaks to RYM’s diverse user base.  Of all the canons I’m discussing in this article, this, I think, is the most comprehensive.  Jazz, shoegaze, soul, hip-hop, post-rock, thrash metal, punk, krautrock, psych pop, trip hop, folk rock and prog can all be found in the top 100.  RYM is not without its faults.  Once again, albums have to be visible within the community to amass enough votes to reach high on the charts.  There’s only two or three albums in the top 100 that were made since 2000.  Controversial albums that reach high on the charts tend to get reactively downvoted by disapproving sections of the user base.  And, (you can decide for yourself if this is a criticism or not), 19 of the top 100 albums were made by four artists: Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. But if you want a place to get real people’s -- not journalists, tastemakers, or hyper-ironic memers -- honest opinions about music, RYM’s about as good as you can get.

Descriptors:
Music nerd, eclectic, rockist + a lot of other shit

Characteristic Pick:
6. King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King

 This List in Human Form:
That 16 year old who is secretly kinda cool, and who has voraciously listened to each album in the top 100 in a myopic effort to listen to all of the best music.

Discogs


Discogs isn’t really a place where people go to rate music, but rather catalogue it.  If you really need to know all the pressing dates for your extensive german deep house vinyl collection, this is the place for you.  But, apparently, you can also rate albums on discogs.  Here is someone’s list of the top rated albums.

  1. Sterociti: Kawasaki
  2. Cv313: Live
  3. Various: The House of Hits - The History of House Music
  4. Cv313: Subtraktive
  5. Voices From the Lake Feat. Donato Dozzy & Neel
  6. Evan Marc + Steve Hillage: Dreamtime Submersible
  7. Various: Ninja Tune XX: 20 Years of Beats & Pieces
  8. Desolate (4): The Invisible Insurrection
  9. Deadbeat: Radio Rothko
  10. Shackelton: Music For the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs
So this is completely different, obviously.  I don’t know what the criteria for inclusion on this list is, but all of these albums have 50+ votes, so this isn’t just some random person’s faves.  What we see on this list is, well, what’s been missing from all the other lists.  Electronic music.  Dance music.  Experimental music.  Music from countries other than the UK and US.  House, ambient, drone, techno, dub, modern classical.  I, for one, have never heard of any of it.  The first album I’ve listened to is Slowdive’s Souvlaki at #50.  It’s a obscure vinyl junkie’s wet dream.

Descriptors:
Electronic, obscure, international, experimental, centered around vinyl collection

Characteristic Pick:
15. Desolate (4): Celestial Light Beings

 This List in Human Form:
A grimy slavic twenty-something named Klaus who lives a life of celibacy, solitude, and soul-crushing late period modernism amongst his piles of early 90’s dub-techno records.

The Lone Critics

Finally, we have three people who have singlehandedly created their own musical canon, and developed a following in the process.  Their 'best' albums are strongly affected by their personal tastes and biases, and constrained by the fact that no one person can feasibly listen to enough music to compile any sort of comprehensive list of all the greatest music.  And, in my opinion, they're the most worth wile to pay attention to, because that's how listening to music actually works.

Mark Prindle


Mark Prindle is a man among men.  From 1996 to 2011 he maintained a stand-alone website that housed his album reviews and interviews, and built up a substantial following with a never-take-yourself-seriously attitude towards record reviews and a middle-fingers-raised sense of humor.  For those who’ve never read a Mark Prindle review, here’s the introductory paragraph to his Gram Parsons page.
“Gram Parsons was a spoiled arrogant trust fund asshole who singlehandedly ruined The Byrds before forming a pioneering country-rock band called The Flying Burrito Brothers. Then he got kicked out of that band for being an alcoholic drug addict dumbfuck, at which point he became a Rolling Stones starfucker. Eventually he recorded two albums of his own country music and/or cover tunes before passing away from drug-related injuries at the ludicrously young age of 27 while Keith Richards lived to the ripe old age of 402.”
Mark Prindle knew what he liked and he liked it a lot.  Classic rock, punk and noise rock, hip hop and thrash metal, and whatever the hell else he thought was good.  He also knew what he didn’t like, and disliked it a lot. It’s refreshing to read someone who doesn’t feel the need to draw ideological lines in the sand when it comes to taste.  Prindle rated records on a 1-10 scale. Here are a representative selection of 10 of his 10/10s.

  • Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers: Greatest HIts
  • “Weird Al” Yankovic: “Weird Al” Yankovic
  • Motorhead: Stone Deaf Forever!
  • Minor Threat: Complete Discography
  • Metallica: Ride the Lightning
  • Sigur Ros: Agaesis byrjun
  • Bruce Springsteen: Born in the U.S.A
  • U2: The Joshua Tree
  • Beastie Boys: Paul’s Boutique
  • Cows: Cunning Stunts
Descriptors:
Noise rock, classic rock, hardcore punk, indie rock, thrash metal, old school hip hop

Characteristic Pick:
ZZ Top: Eliminator

This List in Human Form:
Mark Prindle

Piero Sacruffi


I’m sure there’s a lot of people who know a whole lot more about this guy than I do, but here’s what I know.  Piero Scaruffi is this really old guy who maintains a hideously designed website called Piero Scaruffi’s knowledge base that houses an impossibly large amount of record reviews and other content about science, philosophy, travel, history, politics, and much more.  The website existed as an online database in the 80’s before the world wide web was even invented, as Scaruffi seems to be some sort of software engineer.  It is implied that he has created all of the content on the website himself, but utilizes contributors to translate his pages into different languages.  He claims that scaruffi.com it was one of the first websites on the world wide web.  Regardless, scaruffi.com is a strange but interesting resource for finding information about...anything, I guess, but for our purposes, music.  A huge “general index of music biographies” contains more biographical information on obscure bands than you will ever find on wikipedia.  Included on these pages are his reviews of their records.  Scaruffi’s taste seems to be diverse, but art-rock centric.  Recently, he posted a list of what he deems to be the top 25 rock records of all time.  Here are the top 10:

  1. Captain Beefheart: Trout Mask Replica
  2. Robert Wyatt: Rock Bottom
  3. Faust: Faust 1
  4. The Velvet Underground & Nico: The Velvet Underground & Nico
  5. The Doors: The Doors
  6. Popol Vuh: Hosianna Mantra
  7. Pere Ubu: Modern Dance
  8. Royal Trux: Twin Infinities
  9. John Fahey: Fare Forward Voyagers
  10. Nico: Desert Shore
So, yeah.  Scaruffi likes wierd shit.  Anybody who thinks Trout Mask Replica is the greatest album of all time can be said to have weird taste in music.  What I think can be said about his taste is that Scaruffi likes music that sounded like nothing else at the time it came out.  I think that can be said for most of the albums on the above list.

Descriptors:
Art-rock, unique

Characteristic Pick:
18: Neu!: Neu!

This List In Human Form:
Piero Scaruffi

Anthony Fantano


Everyone knows who Anthony Fantano is, and I’m really tired of writing this article, so I’m not going to waste the ink explaining.  He seems to have been anointed as the Mark Prindle or the Scaruffi for the youtube generation.  I dunno how I feel about that. Is he really funny? Yes. Are his reviews mostly boring and uninformative? Also yes. Regardless, people really pay attention to what this melon-head has to say.  Parsing his ratings is difficult, since he, similar to Pitchfork, occasionally does “classic” reviews where he gives out really high scores to old albums.  But who the hell cares what Anthony Fantano thinks about At Folsom Prison?  Anthony Fantano is the critic of now goddamnit!  So I tried to omit all of those ratings.  Here are all the 10’s that he’s given to albums that came out at the time of the review, and a selection of the nines.


  • Death Grips: The Money Store - 10
  • Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly - 10
  • Swans: To Be Kind - 10
  • Swans: The Glowing Man - 9
  • Death Grips: Bottomless Pit - 9
  • Xiu Xiu: Plays the Music of Twin Peaks - 9
  • David Bowie: Blackstar - 9
  • Melt-Banana - Fetch - 9
  • Queens of the Stone Age - 9
  • Sun Kil Moon - Benji - 9
  • Ariel Pink - Pom Pom - 9
  • Iceage - Plowing Into the Field of Love - 9
  • FKA twigs - M3LL155X - 9
  • Freddie Gibbs & Madlib - Piñata - 9
Remember me complaining about how none of the other canons considered new music?  Well, here it is, I guess. Still, it’s important to note that Fantano reviews things that are significant upon release.  The fact of the matter is that it takes a long time to find the music that no one saw coming.  But if you want a look at the best music of the last couple of years, Fantanto’s top ratings aren’t a bad place to start.

Descriptors:
Current, hip hop, indie rock

Characteristic Pick:
Death Grips: The Money Store - 10

This List In Human Form:
A youtuber with a really bad haircut and stupid glasses... oh yeah that's Anthony Fantano!

SO THAT'S THE END OF THIS LONG ASS ARTICLE

I swear, if I didn't have anything to do today this would have never have happened.  Someone send me cookies or something. I deserve a reward.

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