If you’re interested in the list, you can find it here.
They’ve done similar lists before at the middle of the decade. And why not? A decade is just an arbitrary length of time we’ve decided is somehow important. So, why not just look at it at the halfpoint. If for nothing else, it will give us another interesting look at how perspectives have changed during those five years. Well, they seem to have changed quite a bit during these five years.
They actually started from late 2019. I think their cutoff point was basically everything that hadn’t come out when they made their best of 2010s list in late 2019. There’s already some interesting changes in approach from that period of couple of months. FKA twigs’ Magdalene is understandably on the list after being number 2 on the Best Albums of 2019, but missing the cutoff for 2010s. However, the inclusion of Blood Incantation’s Hidden History of the Human Race at 41 and Kim Gordon’s No Home Record at 24 don’t quite feel like they would have made it, but they are at 95 and 46 respectively.
But that’s the great thing about the list. We have seen Pitchfork make major changes in their approach before. They gave Andrew W.K. a whopping 0.6 for his album I Get Wet, but later also included it in their best albums of 2000s while also giving the reissue an 8.6. Then there was the Kylie Minogue’s Fever debacle:
the lead review that day was Kylie Minogue’s new album Fever, written by Dominique Leone, a prolific contributor to the site in the early 2000s whose primary beat was left-field and experimental music. The idea, which turned out to be half-baked, was that Fever was a pop album, the kind of thing the indie-steeped Pitchfork wouldn’t touch unless it was to pan it. But Dom, who listened to plenty of pop alongside Boredoms side projects and records by the French progressive rock band Magma, thought it was a decent record and wrote a straightforward evaluation. “There was a lot of that happening on Pitchfork back in those days, where there was just some music that would just either never get written about or if it was, it was going to be negative,” he tells us. “I wouldn’t say I was a Kylie Minogue fan, specifically. But I listened to everything, and I thought I’d just approach it as another album.”
So though April Fool’s 2002 didn’t come close to landing as a joke, it marked a kind of turning point for the Pitchfork review section. These days, most who were there remember the post-millennial moment as an unusually powerful one for pop and rap. Schreiber and many Pitchfork contributors felt that pull; a year later, Pitchfork’s Best Songs of 2003 list was topped by Outkast, Beyoncé, and Justin Timberlake.
People change, times change, editorial staff changes, tastes change. So, why shouldn’t these lists as well? Also, it might just be the way they make these lists. Like that would easily explain why there is exactly one metal album on the list. There might just not be enough people advocating for that genre, which is kind of niche in the US.
It would seem that Pitchfork had decided to limit the number of albums from each artist to one on the list. I can’t be sure of this, but I would have assumed at least a few artists would have had more than one on the list, although I can’t imagine that it would have been that many, as the pandemic would have cut down on production during this specific era. Actually, 2022 is easily the most populated of the five (or six) years on the list with 32 entries (2023 being the second as 22).
But hey, let’s start with this: The albums from the top 20 of each year (2020-2023, as 2019 is largely on a different list and we don’t have 2024 year) that didn’t make it on this list and neither did another album by the same artist. Wow, that was convoluted, but here’s the list:
2020
Moses Sumney: græ (3)
Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways (6)
Jay Electronica: Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn) (14)
U.S. Girls: Heavy Light (15)
Run the Jewels: RTJ4 (16)
Róisín Murphy: Róisín Machine (17)
Fleet Foxes: Shore (20)
2021
The Weather Station: Ignorance (7)
Japanese Breakfast: Jubilee (14)
Snail Mail: Valentine (15)
MIKE: Disco! (16)
Cassandra Jenkins: An Overview on Phenomenal Nature (17)
Grouper: Shade (18)
2022
Special Interest: Endure (4)
Lucrecia Dalt: ¡Ay! (8)
Grace Ives: Janky Star (14)
Earl Sweatshirt: Sick! (17)
Makaya McCraven: In These Times (18)
Cate Le Bon: Pompeii (20)
2023
Sufjan Stevens: Javelin (6)
Olivia Rodrigo: GUTS (14)
Kara Jackson: Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? (19)
Mandy, Indiana: i’ve seen a way (20)
That is some very highly placed records that just didn’t make it at all onto the list. At the same time, some albums that are on the list didn’t make the top 50 of their year at all. Here’s those (that I could find, although it is possible that some of these are going to be included on the 2024 list):
Chquimamani-Condori: DJ E (9)
ML Buch: Suntub (13)
Cash Cobain / Chow Lee 2 SLIZZY 2 SEXY (19)
Asake Mr. Money With the Vibe (27)
Jane Remover: Frailty (33)
454: Fast Trax (37)
Bill Orcutt: Music for Four Guitars (54)
Bladee / Ecco2k Crest (58)
Tirzah trip9love..??? (61)
Chief Keef: 4NEM (63)
Jeff Parker: Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy (65)
Rio da Yung OG: City on My Back (66)
Rx Papi / Gud: Foreign Exchange (80)
KMRU: Peel (82)
Ken Carson: A Great Chaos (86)
Dijon: Absolutely (2021)
Jim Legxacy: homeless n*gga pop music (94)
DJ Travella: Mr Mixondo (99)
jaydes: heartpacing (100)
That’s 19. Five of which were never actually even reviewed by Pitchfork (although, as far as I can see, in each of these cases Pitchfork has reviewed their albums, if any, after that). Altogether 25 of the albums on the list, that were reviewed, fell short of the Best New Music label with one of the albums receiving a quite mediocre 7.2.
So what? Well, I like this. They have, in the past, actively remade lists just to see what has changed (and they probably get them pretty good readership as well). I do this myself as well with my ongoing project of making a list of my favorite movies every five years.
Lists are not important, but they are fun. Not all lists are equal either. You can make a boring list that just regurgitates what you believe others want to see or you can go all out and do something interesting. I don’t need to be told my favorite thing is also someone else’s favorite thing (or close to it). But if I see my favorite thing on a list, I’ll know whoever made that list has at least something in common with me and that can lead me to a whole new world of, in this case, music. I have been listening to the music from that list since it came out earlier this week. In some cases I’m just listening old favorites it reminded me of, but since there’s so much I didn’t really pay attention to at the time of release or even didn’t know of, I have plenty of new stuff to discover.
And being curious stops you from ever being bored.
Here’s a file I used while doing the research: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16TGyyp3-ty4mYPXE7v1DJbSijKDgBMlDGvSwLIaruG4/edit?usp=sharing on Google Docs.