Question: What albums can everyone love?
I'm not talking about the "best" albums. Not even your "favorite" albums. I'm talking about the albums that appeal to nearly everyone. The albums you can recommend to all of your acquaintance with serene confidence.
Recently, in an attempt to identify this rare breed of album, the All Songs Considered blog conducted a series of polls. Some of the results might surprise you.
Whereas 47% of readers said they "loved" the Garden State soundtrack, 48% admitted they "hadn't really heard" M.I.A.'s Kala, which was associated with a far more successful film. 63% declared their ardor for Michael Jackson's Thriller, but 7% claimed they hadn't listened to it. How is that even possible? The damn thing sold like 60 million copies! Almost every track got radio play!
In many other respects, though, the All Songs Considered polls met expectations - and not always in a good way. The audience of NPR being what it is, the hip-hop genre took a beating. Only 62% of readers had an opinion on Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a Billboard #1 only two years ago. Even more alarmingly, 69% hadn't heard Nas's 1994 masterpiece Illmatic. (Note on that link: many, many f-bombs and n-bombs. Beware, seniors.)
To be clear, I'm not saying you're an awful person if you don't listen to hip-hop. Everyone prefers certain sounds to others. (Me, I like fuzzed-out guitars.) Nevertheless, I find it instructive that more than half of the All Songs Considered poll-takers had never listened to Jay-Z's Blueprint, a mainstream hit and an era-defining statement - and about the same percentage had not only heard but actively "loved" Arcade Fire's Funeral.
If NPR epitomizes middlebrow culture, then middlebrow culture has some color-line issues.
The Beatles, on the other hand, were predictably dominant. Rubber Soul received a 77% "love it" vote; The White Album, 83%; Abbey Road, 85%; Revolver, 85%.
Nearly as popular was Paul Simon's Graceland, which has always been my go-to album-everyone-can-love. I can almost guarantee you'll love it. And your parents will love it. Your metalhead step-cousin will love it. Only your anthropologist friend, who will take issue with Simon's blithe appropriation of African pop, won't love it.
(No matter. Your anthropologist friend is kind of a douchebag.)
Unsurprisingly, Graceland polled at a robust 70%. By comparison, The Beach Boys's Pet Sounds, regarded by many musicheads as the greatest pop album of all time, garnered a 63% approval rating.
The secret to Graceland's appeal? I'll leave that for another post. Provisionally, though, I might gesture toward the album's mixture of formal innovation and auditory inoffensiveness. It sounds like little else, which makes the critics happy; but it doesn't sound weird, which makes your grandma happy.
Paul Simon's Graceland: bringing the critics and your grandma together.
So I turn it over to you, dear readers. (Ye few, ye happy few!) Which albums would you recommend with equal conviction to the young and the old, the dim and the bright, the hip and the unhip, the stoned and the sober?
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