There Are (Almost) No African Records on Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums List

It’s not that attempting to rank the best albums ever made can be wholly categorized as a futile effort, but it’s best approached as a canonical endeavor catering to already lauded albums. “A ranked list rewards order and penalizes disruption. As a result, the most heard albums still get upheld for simply being the most heard,” American critic Sheldon Pearce wrote in his essay dissecting the Rolling Stone’s updated list of the best 500 albums in 2020.

Last year, Rolling Stone updated its list once again, replacing older classics with more than a handful of contemporary choices. On cursory glance, it’s telling that well over half of the albums on Apple Music’s new list are present on the Rolling Stone list. Because one list features five times more albums than the other, it can be considered as a more expansive undertaking. However, what both lists have in common is an ultra-western perspective.

Rolling Stone’s 2023 iteration of their best albums ever list only just fares better where African representation is concerned. Fela Kuti’s hilarious, masterful recount of one of his most famed times in jail, Expensive Shit, is at No. 402; Burna Boy’s Afro-Fusion declaration, African Giant, is ranked as the 330th best album; and a King Sunny Ade greatest hits compilation is in the mid-400s. The only non-Nigerian fare is the South African compilation album, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, which is ranked 497.

For its process, Rolling Stone asked 300 artists, songwriters, critics and music industry experts to submit their 50 best albums, then aggregated the collated lists to arrive at the top 500. Apple Music hasn’t made public the number of experts polled nor the number of albums submitted per person.

According to the global editorial head of hip-hop and R&B for Apple Music, Ebro Darden, voters were asked to objectively submit albums that aligned with several touchstones like, “Albums that represented a cultural moment for the artist or genre,” or “Albums that are timeless and reached far beyond the genre categorization,” and other intangible factors.

we beating a dead horse but this Apple Music list is very American and British….. they was suppose to go a bit worldwide to shake the TL

— HOOD VOGUE is tired of poverty (@keyon) May 21, 2024

In the hours since Apple Music unveiled the top ten of its 100 best albums, which it had been rolling out for days, social media has been — as expected — dissecting the merits of the list, and it will likely go on for about a day or two before everyone moves on with their lives. It’s an aftereffect that’s as expected as African albums and music from the broader Black diaspora being ignored in compilations like these.

For those cynical about the comparative critical value of African music, the next question might concern which albums by African artists deserve spots on a list cataloging the best albums ever. To be equally cynical, that’s a revelation of a bias that music from the African continent is innately inferior to music from America and the U.K. It might scan as a heavy accusation, but the voters of these best ever lists are caught in the middle of these cynical sentiments.

Or it might just be ignorance, willful or not. Regardless, what these lists reveal is that, no matter how authoritative they want to come across as, they’re a culmination of perspectives that are obviously limited.

I could easily make an argument that Osibisa’s eponymous 1971 debut album is better than half of Apple Music’s best 100 albums and is “timeless and reached far beyond the genre categorization,” or that Ali Farka Toure’s The Source and Asa’s eponymous debut are two of the greatest folk-rock records to exist even in their clear sonic differences, or that Black Coffee’s Home Brewed is a touchstone house album. That’s not counting the several dancehall and reggae projects that I think deserve to be in the running, as well as a few Brazilian funk albums from the 1970s.

Perhaps all of this circles back to the continued global appeal of Afrobeats and varying forms of African music, which has in turn amplified the embrace of external validation — western validation. Now, artists are rejecting the Afrobeats tag, would rather go all out for a single, if culturally momentous, category at the Grammys rather than attend and respect homegrown award shows, and tour the world but perform sparingly on their home continent.

Of course, there are other factors involved, economic primarily, but the outside-facing validation certainly plays into a situation where considerations for “best albums” barely factor in the fact that African artists, of today, yesterday and tomorrow, have definitely made the best albums in popular music history.