It is perhaps the most sacred tradition of music journalism: the Year's Best Albums list. These lists ostensibly provide insight into the most important music of the past year, as deigned by the most critically wise and aesthetically sensitive folks among us.
These days, practically every publication puts one out, from the classical purists at Grammophone Magazine, to the goofballs at The Onion.
A Google search for the exact phrase, "Best Albums of 2004," returns 46,500 hits. Figure a minimum of 10 albums on each list, and it becomes easy to believe that every single album released during the past year probably appeared on someone's Best of 2004 list.
And actually, simple Top 10 lists are increasingly in the minority these days. Christianity Today, perhaps in keeping with the number of Jesus' disciples, picked 12 this year. Spin Magazine picked 40. Rolling Stone picked 50. The All Music Guide picked 94. Amazon.com's editors picked an even 100.
There are plenty of curiosities to be found on these lists.
According to the Washington Post, for example, the best album of 2004 was Arcade Fire's "Funeral."
Ever heard of the band, or the record? Probably not, unless you're a fan of Canadian indie rock. Released on a small label based in Chapel Hill, N.C., "Funeral" hasn't exactly been tearing up the charts or blaring from radios. Yes, the band is generating a fair share of buzz in the alternative press. But is the album truly the year's best? Amazon.com's editors put it at No. 35 on their list. Most others ignored it or missed it entirely.
Indeed, the most glaring trend in these lists is the lack of agreement as to what constituted the best music of the past year, not only among critics but also - especially - between critics and popular tastes (as judged by album sales and radio airplay).
Comparing the 10 best albums as ranked by the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Amazon.com, one finds that exactly half of the albums mentioned appear only once among the lists. Only one record - Kanye West's "The College Dropout" - appeared on all of the lists; no other album appeared more than twice.
According to the New York Times, U2's "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" was the best pop album of the year. Although that album certainly was in the spotlight for much of the holiday season, it was completely absent from the year's-best lists at those other publications. Amazon.com didn't even bother to include it in its Top 100, nor did the All Music Guide include it in its Top 94.
One thing all these critics seem to agree on: Popular tastes are wrong.
Apart from West's "The College Dropout," which was this year's 12th best-selling record, no other album among Billboard's top 20 best-sellers of the year showed up on any of the critics' best-of lists that I examined.
Out of the 100 best-selling albums of the past year, only five also appeared among Amazon.com's top 100 editorial picks.
How to explain this lack of agreement on what constitutes greatness?
It's tempting to blame the haughty pretense of music critics. We are, after all, a know-it-all lot, given to frequent outbursts of obscure historical trivia and bizarre cross-genre comparative references. Professing our love for unknown bands from distant lands helps reinforce the illusion (or delusion) that we know more than you do about music.
More generously, it could be asserted that critics hold high standards for what we like: We tend to prefer music that breaks new ground and stands up to aesthetic scrutiny. We listen closely to music, because we care deeply about it. Music that sounds fine in the background - the kind of stuff that typically ends up on commercial radio - often doesn't survive that kind of close examination.
Besides, one man's trash is another man's treasure; and thus it should be no surprise that one man's outcast is another man's OutKast ... or Youssou N'Dour, or Interpol. If we all agreed on what constitutes a great album, there'd be little need for record companies to release more than the 20 or so best albums every year.
It's also easy to point out that popular tastes will always reward the lowest common denominator - which, in the case of music, is usually the stuff that sounds the most familiar and bland. While Usher and OutKast might not sound familiar to classic-rock fans, those artists in fact fall neatly into the mix of today's popular music. Such musicians don't lead tastes; they simply capitalize on them. They're rarely the kind of artists who inspire lifelong love and respect from their fans, but they're good enough for enough people that they sell plenty of albums.
But ultimately, I suspect there's a much more mundane reason why these year-end lists never seem to concur with one another.
Even for the most music-obsessed aficionado, there's only so much time in a year to listen to music - 5,840 hours, to be exact, if you figure eight hours of sleeping time per day.
To assess the quality and staying-power of an album, I personally feel one has to listen to it at least five times, all the way through. Figure an hour of music per album, and that means that one can only consider a maximum of 1,168 different albums in a given year ... and that's assuming one has the endurance and financial independence to commit 16 hours per day, every day of the year, to closely listening to new music.
More realistically, it's probable that the most committed music critics around the country only manage to commit that effort to, at best, 40 or 50 new albums in a year. Of those, plenty will turn out to suck.
More than 25,000 albums are released every year by the major labels alone, according to data from the Recording Industry Association of America. Add in small-label and independent releases, and the total number of albums released in the past year is probably at least twice that.
Is it thus any wonder that nobody can agree on which of these albums constituted the year's best? I'd suspect that New York Times pop critic Jon Pareles - the guy who thought U2 produced this year's best record - hasn't even heard all of the albums on the Top 10 list at the Washington Post. And I certainly can't blame him.
In a world in which every kid with a microphone and a computer can release a CD, it is no doubt useful to have an entire year's worth of albums condensed into one printable, savable list. Otherwise, we'd all be stuck trying to guess the difference between Britney Spears and Burning Spear.
But to expect those lists to really tell us what we will and won't like is to miss the beauty of music altogether: the joy of discovery, the mystery, and the uniquely personal connection that great music inspires.
Joe Nickell can be reached at 523-5358 or at jnickell@missoulian.com.
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