A-Ha

 

The media obsession with rating the best records ever made is a crushingly boring -- and predictable -- pastime, says Darragh McManus

 

Another day, another list of the greatest albums ever recorded. If a music-loving Martian should ever land on Earth, wondering what are the hottest sounds produced by the funny-looking inhabitants of this planet, all they'd need to do is wait about a week for one of the music magazines, newspapers or websites to publish their latest guide to the records everyone should own.

 

These are generally hailed as the ultimate, definitive, end-all-arguments catalogue of great albums ... until the next one comes along, of course.

 

You can hardly open the music pages these days without being accosted by lists of the best, the brightest, the truly seminal, the must-have. Q magazine, probably the bible of rock journalism, seems to churn them out on a weekly basis.

 

A major date in music history -- say, the 50th anniversary of Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock, or the death of some old acid casualty you never heard of who played bass for a famous band you have heard of -- will precipitate another bout of nerdish chin-stroking.

 

The newspapers have also joined in, and recently The Guardian completed probably the most ambitious such project thus far undertaken: no less than a thousand albums that you must, apparently, hear before you die.

 

Wow -- a thousand complete records. At an average album length of about 45 minutes, this makes for roughly 750 hours, or more than 31 days, of continuous listening.

 

We'd better hope that the cause of death is something slow and lingering -- perhaps TB or malnutrition, and not something abrupt like a car crash or an embolism -- so as to give enough time to aurally wade through this conclusive list. You'd barely have made it past the records beginning with 'A' before shuffling off this mortal coil.

 

On a theological tangent, what actually happens if you fail to listen to all these records before the point of death? Is there a sort of musical purgatory into which are sent those unfortunate souls who didn't last long enough to hear that Frank Zappa LP?

 

There they must spend a tortured eternity with the Greatest Hits of Yazoo on repeat play ... or it would seem a tortured eternity, anyway, with Yazoo playing in the background.

 

Furthermore, what is the official Vatican position on this list? Is it true that Benedict will ex-communicate anyone who hasn't heard at least as far as the records beginning with 'M' before they expire, or will they accept 'K' as a compromise?

 

The Guardian list, as well as being of comparable length to Ulysses, was also different from the norm in that its creators specify that these are not the greatest albums of all time; rather, they are 1,000 albums that are worth your while hearing. This seems a remarkably slack, vague sort of approach to something as important as which indistinguishable Coldplay record is better than another indistinguishable Coldplay record.

 

In fairness, though, they also stressed -- and here I quote -- "where there was a good alternative to the blindingly obvious album, we went for the alternative. After all, who needs to be told, yet again, to buy Revolver?"

 

Who, indeed? Nobody needs to be told to buy a revolver. They will realise the necessity of owning a powerful handgun themselves, and make their purchase accordingly.

 

Of course, the criteria for these lists has also expanded, in tandem with their frequency. We've had them all by this stage: the 100 greatest records, the 100 greatest singles, the 100 greatest singers, the 100 greatest opening riffs, the 100 greatest guitar solos, the 100 greatest cover versions, the 100 greatest live albums, the 100 greatest live albums by dead artistes...

 

Really, what's left? The 100 greatest songs wherein the singer expresses love for a woman called Marie? The 100 greatest albums with a picture of a curly-haired girl on the cover? The 100 greatest 'one-two-three-four!' intros to a rock song? The 100 greatest jazz-influenced death metal instrumentals? The 100 greatest uses of cymbals to add dramatic effect before the middle-eight?

 

As we approach Christmas, one notices also that the publishing industry has jumped on the bandwagon, with a slew of titles eagerly waiting to be purchases as gifts for that special obsessive-compulsive someone in your life: 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die; The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; 100 Albums That Changed Music (And 500 Songs You Need to Hear). There's something for everyone.

 

Even proper writers, like novelist Nick Hornby, are getting involved, with his 31 Songs, which looked at (correct) 31 songs he likes. Perhaps Ian McEwan might now be called on to write 47 Afternoon TV Show Theme Songs I'm Quite Fond Of, or Zadie Smith might catalogue her favourite swearwords in the Busta Rhymes canon.

 

Sadly, for all their ubiquity, greatest-album lists suffer from one crippling deficiency: their awful predictability.

 

It's always the same stuff that makes the cut -- Radiohead, The Beatles, U2, The Smiths, Nirvana, The Sex Pistols, that Velvet Underground one with the banana on the cover and, for some obscure reason, a couple of albums by Oasis, who are only marginally better than the average pub covers band. You could, at this stage, predict about 97 of the 100 beforehand.

 

So what's the point of publishing and reading these lists? Well, there's the fact that many men are totally neurotic when it comes to music, displaying an almost Asperger's level of obsession in collecting, cataloguing, arranging and debating, instead of just listening to music like normal people. For such weirdoes, best-album lists are printed manna from heaven, against which they can measure their own rating system.

 

But for everyone else, the main reason is so we have something to give out about. If there's one thing everyone loves more than music, it's finding fault with other people's taste in music.

 

 

20 albums they always tend to forget

 

 

1. The Primitives -- Lovely

 

2. A-Ha -- Scoundrel Days

 

3. Soundgarden -- Superunknown

 

4. Terence Trent D'Arby -- Introducing the Hardline According to ...

 

5. Quireboys -- A Bit of What You Fancy

 

6. Screaming Trees -- Dust

 

7. Rage Against the Machine -- Rage Against the Machine

 

8. Stina Nordenstam -- Memories of a Colour

 

9. Frankie Goes to Hollywood -- Welcome to the Pleasuredome

 

10. Cypress Hill -- Black Sunday

 

11. Nouvelle Vague -- Nouvelle Vague

 

12. Hole -- Live Through This

 

13. Suede -- Dog Man Star

 

14. Metallica -- Ride the Lightning

 

15. Pearl Jam -- Vitalogy

 

16. Massive Attack -- Mezzanine

 

17. Stone Temple Pilots -- Purple

 

18. Kila -- Mind the Gap

 

19. Foo Fighters -- Colour and the Shape

 

20. St Etienne -- Fox Base Alpha

 

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/lets-face-the-music-and-ditch-all-those-greatest-album-lists-1242082.html

I agree. Those lists are all a waste of time.

Far more worthwhile are the "hate" lists!:P

It must be that time of year when Virgin Radio do their bi-annual best 500 tracks in the world ever...

I enjoy the best-of lists posted on here. THey're a good way for us to introduce one another to new music, but there are a lot of them out there in the music papers. People will always love their lists.

I prefer the best off lists from less main-stream artists, so you can discover new and better music.

Yay I'm glad to see Massive Attack on that list. :D

i think any "best of list..." is a sham.

highly subjective stuff.