The five hundred

Rolling Stone has published its latest list of the five hundred best albums of all times, this time mostly refreshed by what the western world has repeatedly made to understand as diversity, all the way to raising Marvin Gaye to the top spot, and almost immediately the list is met with criticism not only of its too-little-too-late manoeuvrings but also of the very need for a list in our time. This reaction, unanticipated in its ingredients but not in essence, proves that there is an uncontrollable mass of music listeners by whom it simply cannot be done right, not even after the inclusion of colour and gender. Perhaps more than ever before, people are showing their anger (or, in a vaguer sense, reaction) at any authority telling them how things are, and popular music is at the top of debilitating experiences for modern consumers: accessible enough to allow an everyman’s expertise, but simultaneously on the verge of being valued for reasons ultimately unrelated to music. Of course it shouldn’t be assumed that the editors at Rolling Stone are not aware of this.

To begin with, it might be easiest to state some of the most obvious conclusions and be rid of them. Here in no particular order:

There is no competition in music. The need for a list is brought about ultimately by two things: a continuing attempt to limit music to a mathematical and calculable entity and a frustration with the now unlimited amount of popular music, much of which can only be lost. Certainly there is no-one who has actually listened through the entire list of the five hundred albums, and I doubt if anyone has done so even with the top twenty, let alone done so with actively assessing the contents of each album. Even if someone decided to set out on such a quest, by the time they got to, let’s say, the hundredth album the musical landscape – as the fleeting amalgamation is repeatedly referred to – would once again have changed.

Cultural impact overrides musical importance. Music journalism is a strange enterprise, since there is only a questionable value in writing about music, and invariably when journalists take it upon themselves to list the qualities of some musical output or another they end up writing about a great many things that have little to do with music. The situation is perhaps worst in music because such a primitive emotional response is often awakened that any listener would be swept away so strongly that sooner or later something would have to be said or talked about. Here is one of the more obvious reasons why it is difficult to talk about why a piece of music is better than another, and also why it is easier to recognize the merits of an album such as they are, first and foremost as a mental construct and an approximation of an already existing state. But it is not only the cultural impact of a music album we are talking about here, but the musical importance of music journalism itself, and Rolling Stone without question is at the very heart of such a conundrum. What it is therefore constantly promoting, even when renewing its list, is an acceptable terrain of American music. There are some foreign albums on the latest list, of course, but never to such an extent that would challenge the culturally unified whole. Looking at the list of the five hundred one gets the feeling of looking at the American society, neatly listed, with all its agents in their places.

Music is for men. Since there is no competition in music, and while concessions have been made to follow with at least some of the trends and developments of the times, the paradigm for celebratory, life-affirming music can stretch or reduce, but not change in its essence. This is most dominant in the presence of the male musician, for while women are beginning to populate lists of the most acceptable cultural items, there is no proof to suggest an actual shift in the central thought. Looking at the evidence, out of the fifty greatest albums ever produced seven are made by women, and in the top ten there are barely two, both of which are without doubt largely unknown to a male audience. Joni Mitchell is finally elevated to third place with the common album choice Blue, but the top of three – a black man, a group of white men and a woman – is indicative of very little change, culturally speaking, since the shift from a leading white man to a leading black man comes over a decade after it has been witnessed in the country’s highest position. As it stands, Joni Mitchell is held back by at least six men of music, and to get to Lauryn Hill one would have to wriggle through an entire platoon of male musicians.

Greatness equals commemorating. The biggest difficulty and source of contempt for the magazine is in the use of the word great. In its vagueness a concept of greatness can involve ’acceptable merit’, ’sufficient noticeability’, ’up-to-the-minute resonance’, and many more things. As a later development we see a call for the celebration of those that have been systematically left out, predominately minorities, and a rising tide from not only a crisis in journalism but from a hitherto never-changing culture has begun to threaten Rolling Stone in a detectable way. Ours is a time when many, if not all, of the greatest establishments are forced to tip-toe around a suddenly foreign ground, an inconsiderably overlooked minefield of hurt and misunderstanding, continuously filled with the fear of causing further harm. A list for our age can only aim at appeasement of the public as well as salvation of the journalist, but even after the humane refreshment the end result may not be any better for it, as we have already witnessed. To run to the aid of a suffering public, as it were, is to neglect the amount of hurt and the unwillingness of many to be appeased.

I was here first. One explanation for postmodern art that I have come across goes as follows: whereas in the old days an artist was a skilled craftsman who was capable for producing works that the general public could not, what we have now are people who are producing works that many others could themselves produce, and when they are faced with this predicament, that is, when someone says, ’I could do that as well’, the correct response is to now say, ’Yes, but you didn’t and I did’. This, to me, is as close a description of a popular magazine as can be. With Rolling Stone, for example, one of the greatest sources of anger seems to be in the sheer audacity of their dealings, and while this reaction can be traced all the way back to the guilt of a magazine reader, at least a part of the success of this kind of publication is in the tension between its public and its editors. A list for everybody is not a list at all, and journalists at Rolling Stone know this, as they know that the universality of a story is no story worth telling. There is something interesting at play with the magazine, a kind of exhibition of popular modern art, with much of the publication’s success and enjoyment coming from the mere privilege of being allowed to exhibit, to give a somewhat violent view of contemporary life and times, and then to fall silent. There is an unapologetic streak in publishing lists such as this, but it is no less present than that of the reader’s or the critic’s.

So here we have a seemingly updated scene of popular modern music, undoubtedly already on its way to oblivion. What is most striking about this moment and inarguably a great source of pain for many is that criticism and lists have persisted well into the twenty-first century. The revisions to the list come at a late hour, and there could be an overall correction at work, were it not for the concurrence which has already taken place at the beginning of the very first list and the need to compartmentalize the products of popular music. What has once begun cannot completely ever change. After a piece of work has been called great it cannot be un-called great, not entirely, as an advertisement cannot not speak to a consumer after the fact. A reported change by Rolling Stone has been that of an expansion of ’the canon’, but this is only following closely with an era of everything expanding rapidly. Simply put, there doesn’t seem to be any popular modern life at all without an all-encompassing expansion. The case with many of the albums chosen for the list is that they mainly serve as a gateway into the actual discovery of the artist and ultimately better works than those mentioned. This library of music is now so vast that there is no-one who can keep track of it all, and even if someone set out to find the bigger picture, by the time they had got through merely a dozen artists, the amount of information would already be too great to grasp satisfyingly. I suppose one could scroll through them all, or have a playlist in the background for a few weeks, but what would that bring other than an even worse cacophony of musical outings or indeed a deterioration of the importance of music?

There is no doubt examining the past fifty years that things have been neglected and deliberately forgotten, but the real question is whether there is a modern album that can demonstrate the same kind of greatness that The Beatles or The Rolling Stones did in their day. How could there be? The frustration felt in many responses to the latest list is one caused by the disintegration of the very thing such a list is there to uphold. Now is not the time for lists, and even if it were, their impact would not come near the excitement or longevity of present politics or an ongoing overturning of public figures and institutions. What has come as an unpleasant surprise to many people in an era of constant streaming and digital libraries is how much music there really is and has been for much longer than its canonisation in magazines. The outright horror of the amount of music that cannot be talked away in an afternoon program is calling for responses similar to those that occur after a large amount of people realize that they have been outrageously swindled, namely indifference, obsession, fear and anger. I quote one especially wounded writer:

“The term ‘greatness’ is very useful for one reason — because of its vagueness. An album’s greatness doesn’t depend on the number of lives that the music touched, or innovative techniques incorporated into the music, or the circumstances under which it was written. In Rolling Stone magazine, what makes an album ‘great’ is that music industry insiders happened to like it. All 500 albums on the list are monumental accomplishments independently of each other, as are albums that didn’t either make the list or get nominated. Pitting the albums against each other only cheapens each work’s individual artistic merit.”

To attack a concept such as greatness doesn’t ultimately take much away from the everyday feeling of greatness. In fact, there is more to be said about the attitude toward the idea of greatness in the text above than there is about whatever it is that makes an album great. It is quite possible that instead of any vagueness of greatness constituting as an absence of meaning, seeing something as great might on the contrary include many kinds of cumulative notions of such a state. The quotation marks the writer has placed around the word great seem no accident or rhetorical choice, but rather an emotional posture. Interestingly enough, this turns out to be an attack on authority, not an analysis of musical merit or anything of the sort. Rolling Stone and its elite contributors, the writer looks to be saying, who do they think they are. The selected group (over three hundred according to the article) are needlessly isolated as a privileged bunch first of all because there is no reason to believe that they would possess any special knowledge in such a boundless entity as music, but moreover because of the alternative. Had the choice been left up to the entire population, the end results might not have been any more satisfying for it. They might very well have been worse. And so it appears that ’greatness’ is absolutely open to the lives music touches as well as innovative techniques and many more things, and no music journalist or contributor is above this. The reactions similar to the quoted article add to the list of the five hundred, of course, and the final picture is far more fascinating as a result. We are discussing, in a phrase, a popularised take on music. What is not discussed, however, is how a great piece of music, much as it is generated by talent, is similarly prompted by happenstance and sheer luck. There is no musical success, as there is none in theatre or film, without an acceptance of forces greater than that of the individual artist. Rolling Stone may have successfully updated its list of the five hundred greatest albums of all time and thereby subjected itself to innumerable opinions on music journalism’s hold on a concept of greatness, but the most powerful act of them all appears to be the publishing of the list in the first place.