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Apple has decided 2024 is the year it annoys everyone. Is its top 100 albums list really that bad?

Apple Music’s best albums list is a fair reflection of where music is at nowadays. But many fans should prepare to be vexed - it turns out to be a bonfire of the musos

Last week, Apple’s music streaming service counted down the best 100 albums of all time. The results were, on the whole, a fair reflection of where music is at nowadays. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

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Ed Power
Tue May 28 2024 - 06:00

Apple has decided 2024 is the year it annoys everyone. In early May, the tech behemoth provoked the wrath of the artisanal classes with an ad for the new iPad in which a hydraulic press crushes creative tools such as musical instruments, an artist’s palette, and so forth. With the debate about the potentially apocalyptic impact of AI upon the arts raging, this was a clumsy misstep that painted Apple as on the side of the bad guys – squishing creativity and backing the machine uprising.

That was just for starters. Last week, Apple’s music streaming service counted down the best 100 albums of all time. The results were, on the whole, a fair reflection of where music is at nowadays. In particular, the list addressed the historical exclusion of hip hop and R’n’B from these sorts of rundowns by placing the 1998 classic The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill at number one.

It was an entirely reasonable pick. Miseducation is an effervescent masterpiece that still sparkles 26 years on. At the same time, Apple was regarded as giving short shrift to other genres – it included just one country record, Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, and a sprinkling of heavy metal: Metallica’s Master of Puppets and AC/DC’s Back In Black. Irish music receives a similar cold shoulder. U2′s Joshua Tree makes 49th place, but there is no space for, say, My Bloody Valentine, Van Morrison, Thin Lizzy, Sinéad O’Connor, etc. They’re just not that into us.

“Best Ofs” are a strange institution insofar as they seem to exist largely to get on everyone’s nerves. If you enjoy being ticked off, there’s certainly lots to love about the Apple countdown. It ranks Taylor Swift’s 1989 (or, more accurately, last year’s revamped Taylor’s Version) above the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Adele’s 21 places higher than Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen. It is a bonfire of the musos.

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Apple compiled the list by polling an in-house “team of experts” along with artists such as Charli XCX, Nile Rodgers of Chic (taking time out from playing Ireland every 10 minutes) and Pharrell Williams. They’ve taken a number of big swings. Notable absentees include Johnny Cash and The Who, while the Eagles’ Hotel California scrapes in at 99 – behind Usher’s Confessions and Pure Heroine by Lorde.

For some, a top 100 that rates Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Ago? above the Velvet Underground and Nico deserves to be cast into the pit of hell

But is that a bad thing? Surely, it is time we moved on from what might be described as the Mojo magazine view of music: the idea that certain hallowed LPs should be regarded as canonical because they’ve been around a long time and/or hew to the unspoken agreement that great music must be guitar-based and made by English or American white guys.

There was a similar reaction when The Irish Times published a revised list of the best 50 Irish albums, in 2020, and people were aghast that, to take one example, Róisín Murphy ranked above the Pogues. The degree to which individuals took this as a personal slight was quite the sight – who knew so many were invested in Microdisney’s The Clock Comes Down The Stairs having a lock on the title of Best Irish Album Ever (it isn’t even the best Microdisney album)?

[ The music of 2023: Our critics’ verdicts on the best albums and acts of the year ]

Another complaint is that Apple is guilty of recency bias – just 10 albums from the 1960s feature, while 17 are from the 2010s. Again, it depends on whether you feel music should be set in stone or whether a countdown should engage with it as a living art form. For some, a top 100 that rates Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Ago? above the Velvet Underground and Nico deserves to be cast into the pit of hell. Others might feel that that is just as it should be – that music is such a distinctive art form because it is ever-changing. Surely, a top 100 should reflect that.

That the Apple list has provoked so much discourse suggests it is on the right track.

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