It is easy to feel despair at the state of affairs in all realms of creativity affected by the existence of generative models, LLMs, and other AI that dumps slop at the click of a button. I know I feel this way. Is it possible to fight back?
This weekend while organizing I pulled out my whole stack of developed film that I keep in a cabinet. I remembered there was a film frame that I wished had been better scanned at the lab, so I pulled it out, with the intend of just doing a regular scan using my Nikon Z6 III. I did that, and the result was, fine…
I could babble a lot about this here, but the jist of it is that there is so much music out there that to try to create any list of best/great/important/influential music will always leave out deserving mentions. And if it’s intended to be a recurring thing, well, this just moves the question to "why weren’t any of these part of last year’s one?"
So instead of just moaning about it, I decided to create my very own list. One more! How much harm could that bring. However, instead of highlighting what I believe (and yes, these are always subjective) to be the greatest albums, I’ll instead highlight albums that should simply be more widely known. I don’t intend to be prescriptive or thorough here, and I’m assuredly missing many, many more, but I think these are a good list to start with. (Yes, I might make more!)