We made an effort to include records at their highest level of placement whenever possible, but never higher than that position. RIP to "The Age of Pitchfork" and all their "important" music coverage.
They had a very good run, but they're now equally as relevant as Rolling Stone with their best days behind them and their most devoted readers chasing a nostalgia dragon. Our respect for Pitchfork's recommendations had all but disappeared since their 2015 acquisition from Conde Nast these end-of-decade lists officially sealed the coffin. It's probably the single worst "listicle event" from any major publication in the history of music journalism. It's worth noting that Pitchfork's "200 Best Albums of the 2010s" had the opposite effect. But sadly, their bland best-of-2019 selections squashed that hope. Instead, Vice's Top 10 featured less precious outliers like Young Thug at #2, OPN at #10, and (best of all) Power Trip at #4.Īfter this Vice post, we spent summer and fall of last year temporarily convinced that Vice/Noisey might be our new spot.
An anomaly for this decade, the Vice list felt like its curators actually paid attention to what young music fans actively enjoyed throughout the past 10 years, instead of cheerleading for Clairo and 19 other rich kids that sound like Clairo. Incidentally, Vice/Noisey was the only other popular blog to place ANTI in their Top 10. We also included Vice's shockingly great zoomer-friendly decade round-up. What would it look like if we removed all the crap and compiled one list focusing on the best records and most accurate placements?įor this exercise, we cherry-picked placements from "The Big Four" of music blogs: Rolling Stone for the boomers, Spin for the Gen Xers, Pitchfork and Stereogum for the millennials. But 25% definitely adds up to more than 100 albums.Īnd so, we wondered. It's not an impressive percentage, especially compared to the more widely consumed decade lists at the close of the '80s or '90s. The ratio of good to boring was probably around 1 to 3, or 25%. The editors occasionally granted positions to some truly great records that usually showed up on only one list in the #76-100 section. As skilled press agents grow more adept at emphasizing the "importance" of their clients' expensive album campaigns, more mid-20s music writers and blog editors repeatedly fall for the ruse.Īdd it all together, and we end up with millions of eyeballs reading through a failed attempt at a canon favoring capitalism-indie and all of the blue checkmark rich kids' favorite artists. The armchair writing on RateYourMusic might not flow as nicely as on Conde Nast, but their community's lack of disinterest or apathy prove that unpaid opinions can possess equal value to paid opinions. There are more music news reporters and music opinion writers today than at any other point in human history, and most of them born after 1985 possess questionably average levels of music knowledge.
With nowhere else for music fans to turn, the potential value of music journalism shot up exponentially. By 2010, MTV and local radio no longer widely influenced new music consumption. The landscape of music journalism has grown far too wide. The Spin list also helped us reaffirm glaring constants among the past decade of music blogging. In either case, the record will become eligible for nostalgia reassessment around 2028 meanwhile, a large anticlimactic brushstroke of anticonsensus from the bigger publications appropriately and frustratingly reflected the growing entitlement of the 2010s. Before last week, the legacy of ANTI felt destined for 8-10 more years of "stans only" devotion. The biggest surprise: Spin's #1 album matched our own, gratifyingly. They won the "firstness" battle by coming in dead last. Earlier this week, Spin posted their 101 Best Albums Of The 2010s, officially marking the close of end-of-decade season.