Apple Music's 100 Best Albums

Squeezing Out Albums From The Canon: No Elvis (Costello), The Who or the Band in 2024 (and no Graham Parker, either).

A few weeks before Apple Music unveiled its 100 Best Albums, there was a minor Twitter kerfuffle concerning Graham Parker's Squeezing Out Sparks topping Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll all the way back in 1979. The gist of it was: how could Graham Parker's record best all the other albums released that year, a year that included such unimpeachable classics as Michael Jackson's Off the Wall, Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps, the Clash's London Calling, Talking Heads' Fear of Music, and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' Damn the Torpedoes, all albums more venerated in 2024 than Parker's peak.

Forty five years after its release, Squeezing Out Sparks hasn't exactly been forgotten—the Paranoid Style's Elizabeth Nelson gave it a Sunday Review from Pitchfork a couple years ago —but it's no longer an acknowledged classic. The last time it showed up on a Best Albums list was on Rolling Stone's 2003 poll and even that was a bit of a step down for Parker who placed twice on Rolling Stone's 1987 Best Albums of the Last Twenty years list (his other chosen record was Howlin' Wind, another excellent album). 

Unsurprisingly, Squeezing Out Sparks didn't make the cut on Apple Music's 100 Best Albums, nor did a lot of albums that were once considered unassailable staples of these kinds of lists. Many of those albums are by Parker's peers: Van Morrison, one of his key inspirations, is absent, as are Graham's fellow angry young men Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson. Not only is the only punk album on the list London Calling—famously praised as the one where the Clash learned how to play their instruments--but the records where punk's reverberations can be felt are limited. Remain in Light, Nevermind, the Strokes' Is This It,The Downward Spiral, The Queen is Dead, Disintegration, that Rage Against The Machine debut if you're being charitable.

All those records, London Calling included, are united by an emphasis on cohesive sound over uncontained chaos: they're creations of the studio, not a document of a band playing live in the studio. The same sentiment applies to the hard rock and metal albums on the list, too: Mutt Lang gave AC/DC mammoth muscle on Back in Black, Mike Clink cleaned up the essential greasiness of Guns N Roses on Appetite for Destruction, Master of Puppets places an spotlight on Metallica's technical acumen. This choice is deliberate. Ebro Dardne, a broadcaster who was involved in assembling the Apple Music list, tweeted that the voters were encouraged to select "Albums that were complete thoughts, not just collections of hit songs."

The idea that albums are "complete thoughts" is a central tenet of rockism which might initially seem fairly ironic for a list that takes pains to highlight artists who have emerged since the turn of the millennium. Such an effort is welcome. A real pitfall of Best Albums Ever list is how the canon hasn't budged much since 1978, when Paul Gambaccini published Critic's Choice: Top 200 Albums, a book that featured a Top Ten comprised entirely of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen. Gambaccini updated the book nearly a decade later, resulting in a Top Ten where the Stones fell out of favor but the Beatles, Dylan, Springsteen and Morrison all held strong, supplemented by Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley, the Velvet Underground and the Beach Boys. As great as these artists and albums are, decades of canonization can calcify even the liveliest music, plus it fosters the misleading impression that all the great music was made in the past. 

Equally deceptive is the notion that albums made as deliberate works of art are inherently greater than albums that were cobbled together with no greater aspiration than selling a few records. This concept took hold after the Beatles revolutionized the idea of what a long-playing album could be with the release of Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. Notably, Sgt. Pepper isn't on the Apple Music 100 Albums list even though it inarguably "represented a cultural moment for the artist of genre," another guideline Ebro Dardne articulated on Twitter. 

My best guess for Sgt. Pepper's absence is that it can seem old, a document of another time and place. It may still seem imaginative and exciting but its innovations have long been absorbed into the modern musical vernacular; a full appreciation of its achievement may rest upon historical context. Apple Music's list doesn't skimp on old records but their emphasis was on "Albums that are timeless and reached far beyond the genre categorization." 

Timelessness is an elusive, subjective trait that isn't much tied to the messy particulars of history. Instead, it relies on records that have "stood the test of time"—a slippery designation that favors classics everybody loves or at least knows. This quality is accentuated by the fact that the list features albums released over the course of 65 years, a long timeline that winds up suggesting the representative records of individual decades or genres are essentially sui generis: they're so clearly the peaks of their category that nobody need bother with anything else. It encourages exploration within the list, not without.

This interior nature is a reflection of another publicized dictum from Ebro Dardne: voters were "challenged to not vote for our favorites," a directive that suggests there's an objective standard of excellence. Maybe that's true. After spending many, many years assembling lists under a variety of guises, I would agree there are certain truths in popular music that are self-evident, or at least records that are obvious inclusions on Best Albums Ever lists. I am less certain that it's the best practice of critics to not advocate for favorite albums--the records that continue to harbor mysteries or bring pleasure no matter how many times they're spun. What makes lists of albums (or songs) interesting and useful is not how it shuffles the canon but where it departs. That's as true for new lists attempting to take stock of the past as it is for vintage polls like 1979's Pazz & Jop.

Village Voice's now defunct annual poll served as a barometer for critical opinion in a given year, an essential first step in forming a canon. Over the years, that canon can be strengthened and corrected through the creation of other, newer lists yet the passage of time erodes the idiosyncrasies of the yearly lists, leaving us with nothing but the usual suspects. Digging up old critics polls shouldn't be an act of judgment, one where we laugh at what critics got "wrong" but rather an attempt to discover what's been left behind. Occasionally, records are deservedly forgotten but often that initial birth of enthusiasm does suggest an album is worth hearing. Such is the case with Squeezing Out Sparks. Maybe it doesn't speak to a broader cultural movement but it's a terrific record from an artist with a distinct point of view. These days, that's enough of a complete thought for me.