Not a “people’s” list, really!

Today, “hip” music webzine Pitchfork is releasing a list of the “best albums of the past 15 years”, as voted by “the people”. To be consistent with other lists I will only list their Top 100:

1. Radiohead: OK Computer
2. Radiohead: Kid A
3. Arcade Fire: Funeral
4. Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane over the Sea
5. The Strokes: Is This It
6. Radiohead: In Rainbows
7. Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
8. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
9. Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
10. Sufjan Stevens: Illinois
11. LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver
12. Interpol: Turn On the Bright Lights
13. Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago
14. The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin
15. The xx: The xx
16. Arcade Fire: The Suburbs
17. Modest Mouse: The Moon and Antarctica
18. Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes
19. The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
20. Radiohead: Amnesiac
21. The White Stripes: Elephant
22. The White Stripes: White Blood Cells
23. Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
24. The National: Boxer
25. Broken Social Scene: You Forgot It in People
26. Daft Punk: Discovery
27. Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend
28. Bon Iver: Bon Iver
29. DJ Shadow: …Endtroducing
30. Beck: Odelay
31. Belle and Sebastian: If You’re Feeling Sinister
32. Beach House: Teen Dream
33. Modest Mouse: The Lonesome Crowded West
34. LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening
35. OutKast: Stankonia
36. Phoenix Wolfgang: Amadeus Phoenix
37. Elliott Smith: Either/Or
38. Arcade Fire: The Neon Bible
39. Kanye West: The College Dropout
40. Radiohead: Hail to the Thief
41. Panda Bear: Person Pitch
42. Madvillain: Madvillainy
43. The Postal Service: Give Up
44. Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam
45. Sigur Rós Ágætis Byrjun
46. The Avalanches: Since I Left You
47. The Shins: Chutes Too Narrow
48. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
49. Spiritualized: Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space
50. Beck: Sea Change
51. Björk: Homogenic
52. The Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs
53. Modest Mouse: Good News for People Who Love Bad News
54. The National: High Violet
55. The Shins Oh, Inverted World
56. Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I’m Not
57. Yo La Tengo: I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One
58. Kanye West: Late Registration
59. Massive Attack: Mezzanine 
60. Burial: Untrue
61. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Fever to Tell
62. Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children
63. Deerhunter: Halcyon Digest
64. Bloc Party: Silent Alarm
65. M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
66. Jay-Z: The Blueprint
67. Animal Collective: Feels
68. Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf
69. Sigur Rós: ( ) 
70. Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand 
71. James Blake: James Blake 
72. Daft Punk: Homework 
73. Portishead: Third 
74. The National: Alligator 
75. Animal Collective: Sung Tongs 
76. The Strokes: Room on Fire 
77. Wilco: Summerteeth 
78. Elliott Smith: XO 
79. Justice: † 
80. Deerhunter: Microcastle/Weird Era Continued 
81. TV on the Radio: Dear Science 
82. Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues
83. The Knife: Silent Shout
84. Outkast: Aquemini
85. TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain
86. Built to Spill: Keep it Like a Secret
87. Air: Moon Safari
88. Vampire Weekend: Contra
89. OutKast: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
90. Kanye West: Graduation
91. Wolf Parade: Apologies to the Queen Mary
92. LCD Soundsystem: LCD Soundsystem
93. The Antlers: Hospice
94. Jay-Z: The Black Album
95. Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
96. Spoon: Kill the Moonlight
97. Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
98. M.I.A.: Kala
99. Girls: Album
100. The Microphones: The Glow, Part 2

The thing about this list is that so little of it represents the music ordinary people have been listening to in the past fifteen years. Although I have followed less and less commercial music since the late 1990s when albums qualifying for this list begin, what most people have been listening to during this period is quite different.

Radiohead have been described by “janitor-x” as “a one-hit wonder for mainstream rock radio and a corporate rock band for the underground”. This does give you some idea of what line Radiohead have walked (with a lot of success, of course) over the period under review. The same is true of the Strokes, whose music is nothing more than bland “alternative” rock. Arcade Fire and the Fleet Foxes, whose music I once lsitened to in a store, are the same: they hark back to the past without offering anything new.

The “freak folk” movement that made the most interesting music of the period since the grunge revolution of the Bush Senior Era is modestly covered, whilst such movements as metalcore (e.g. Converge) that people like “janitor-x” said represented the genuine underground are quite naturally completely overlooked. Although I have had little look in my extensive study of music at the primarily instrumental underground that arose from the fertile “post-rock” movement of the late 1990s, that still does not prevent me from overlooking it, although unlike metal and hardcore it has little popularity among the working masses in America.

Then, of course, it is possible to argue that there could be a failure in the list to represent movements that were genuinely popular, from teen pop to “nu”-metal. Whilst it is unlikely anything would be of value among such movements, there could still be more efforts to reach a different audience.

All in all, Pitchfork cannot be said to have created a “people’s” list, rather they have created an “academic’s” list that may not even reflect where music is going today.