When can an album be considered a classic? Is there a specific criteria that you use? TELL ME IN THE COMMENTS.
For about as long as I’ve been writing about music, I’ve semi-jokingly used the phrase “undisputed classic” to refer to albums that I think are perfect. I even started a website called UndisputedClassics.com, which I coded in HTML myself, took down, relaunched on Squarespace last year with grand ambitions, then stopped updating when I realized it was too much effort for basically no reward. It’s still online until my domain expires or I inevitably automatically renew it for five more years. Maybe I’ll update it again someday but probably not.
When I came up with the idea of an Undisputed Classic, I had strict criteria for how an album could qualify. An album is undisputedly classic if it’s been out for at least 5 years, it stands the test of time, and every track is still great.
Now, I would like to acknowledge that I was wrong. This approach is too arbitrary and, ultimately, not accurate.
My original thinking derived from a reactionary distrust of stans who immediately crown a new album classic the day it comes out. Any time Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift et. al put out a new project, there’s bound to be a bot onslaught insisting it’s flawless. Recency bias afflicts us all, I thought, but an album couldn’t possibly be a classic unless you can listen to it years later without cringing at that assertion.
I now no longer believe there should be any time restrictions on when a music fan can legally declare an album to be an undisputed classic. In fact, discussing albums in terms of time is a fundamentally misguided approach. Albums only ever truly exist in the moment someone is listening to them.
I talk about this ad nauseam in my writing and to anyone unlucky enough to sit through an in-person pseudo-intellectual lecture from me, but recorded music has only been a part of the human experience for an incredibly short period of time. As one of my childhood heroes told me on the phone recently, “Music is a spiritual form of communication that predates language.” It’s innate. Recording technology only emerged in the late 1800s, thousands of years into human existence. This altered humanity’s relationship to music. The artform of an album came about due to technological advancements (and relative limitations) of the mid 20th century. It’s essentially irrelevant now due to digital media, but it persists thanks to those who were alive when it was the predominant musical product.
When you consider the incomprehensible scope of the timeline of human history, and the likelihood that humans were sharing musical experiences throughout most of that time, every single “album” basically came out a day ago. Why should 5 years be the rule? Why not 500? Why not 1 day? Why not less?
This is the likely-flawed logic that led me to the conclusion that albums can be declared classic at any point. Even, or especially, the day they’re released. As our attention spans shrink and musical content proliferates in various digital forms, the role of an “album” in culture has changed drastically. Perhaps since the dawn of the form, an album has only really existed in its present moment. That’s when it has immediate impact.
I don’t hear a lot of people calling Kendrick Lamar’s GNX a classic, even if they’ll say it for good kid, m.A.A.d. city. I would argue that GNX was and still is a classic, because of how it represented the culmination of Kendrick’s historic Drake-decimating year, and the platform it/he gave for many young LA artists with disparate but unifiable sounds. All of these opinions come with my regionalist bias and taste. I haven’t listened to GNX in weeks, but for the few weeks that I did, it was classic. So it still is. Even if I forget about it in five years.
The older I get, the more I realize how fleeting fame truly is. A few artists, like Da Vinci or Shakespeare or Mozart, are remembered over vast swaths of time. But the majority of artists who have an impact on society or culture while they’re alive don’t survive in the memories of subsequent generations. Again, in relative terms, the 1950s were yesterday, so Elvis doesn’t count. And I couldn’t even name one Elvis Presley album off the top of my head. Many of the bands who made “classic” albums in the 50s and 60s, when the LP really took off, just happened to be recording music before others got around to it.
Almost nothing stands the test of time, so requiring an album to marinate for years before calling it a classic is unfair. MAYBE there’s an argument that a classic can get more undisputedly classic if it passes the time test, but I don’t think so. A classic is and will always be just that.
I remember older people talking about Burt Reynolds being the most famous person in the world and not knowing or caring to find out who he was. I see the look on Gen Z’s faces when I mention Regis Philbin (this happens often, I don’t know why, don’t ask). The most famous people in the world don’t really have anything that anyone else has. They’ll be dead and forgotten someday, like all of us.
The Velvet Underground & Nico is a classic album. I still believe that, in part, because it’s stood the test of time. Over 50 years since it came out, it still sounds innovative. But my perception of the album is also influenced by everything that occurred around its release: marketing, sales, legend, and the biases of people who kept the LP in the cultural conversation, leading subsequent generations to discover it.
I’m a different person than I was when I first heard The Velvet Underground & Nico, when Burt Reynolds and my grandparents who loved him were all still alive. I still think it’s a classic, but even if I didn’t, now I still would think it was at one point and therefore always is a classic.
Cuando era niño, circa 12 años, I would have told you Joe Budden’s self-titled debut LP was a classic. I cringe at that assertion now. But I still think the album is an undisputed classic because it was to me at one time. Thinking about it (because I sure as hell am not going to listen to it), brings me back to sitting on a hard wooden bench in the house I grew up on, “Pump It Up” spinning on my red CD Walkman, fuzzy headphones wrapped around the back of my head.
That’s the other thing about classics. Most of the albums onto which people bestow that honor tend to have come out when the bestowers were young adolescents. That’s the peak era of music discovery, when everything is new and exciting. Why should you have to wait until you’re an adult listening with nostalgic ears to state for certain that an album is a classic? Let it be one in the moment and then recall it fondly for the classic that it still is, whether or not you want to listen to it.
I know that nobody cares how I determine whether or not an album is an undisputed classic. If you’re a music fan, though, you probably have your own list. If not, you could quickly and easily come up with one. DO IT NOW.
Your list is likely completely different than anyone else’s and that’s what makes listening to and talking about music so great. And even if you’re not thinking of the criteria as over-analytically as I am, you probably could describe the specific distinctions that make sense in your categorization.
I guess I just wanted to go on a rant and encourage you to think differently next time you’re arguing with someone about whether or not an album is “classic.” It’s okay to call an album a classic—even an “undisputed” one—after hearing it one time, on the day it comes out. You’re probably wrong, but if you believe hard enough, maybe it’ll be true.
Thanks as always for reading my pointless rants. Subscribe and/or unsubscribe now! And seriously, let me know in the comments whether or not you use a certain rubric to determine whether albums are classics. I would be interested to find out what other people are thinking.
GOODBYE.
Fantastic article, I'll try to give my two cents.
First, you mentioned how in the scale of music in human history, all music came out at practically the same time. Now, while I get what you are coming at, I do still think that music is inherently judged, consciously or subconsciously, by prior works and the time at which it came out. For example, Beethoven's 5th Symphony and Autechre's LP5 came out around 200 years between each other, and by what you are saying, essentially at the same time. But if I went back in time and showed that album to a European aristocrat, would they be able to understand why a lot of people consider it a 'classic'? I'm not asking whether they would enjoy it, because that's subjective. But even if you don't like an album, you can still often recognize why others consider it a classic. Either way, I don't think they would be able to, because they wouldn't have picked up listening in any electronic music either by osmosis or their own procurement.
If I went five years before LP5's release and showed it to someone, they probably could understand why it's considered a classic by a lot of people, and probably hail it as one immediately. It's because it builds on the foundation of electronic music, Kraftwerk and the like, and is radically different from almost any other electronic music. And, just by osmosis, you probably have a decent idea of what most popular electronic sounds, by virtue of living in modern society. So even though these two releases are separated by next to nothing time-wise, by your admission, they still have a distinctly different effect on people depending on when they are listening to it, so I think that music is still pretty timebound and contextual in terms of deeming it a 'classic.' That's why I think people take time into account when judging an album as a 'classic.'
Second, this is more open-ended, but how much do you think timelessness plays a role in something being a 'classic.' I mean, a lot of 80s industrial music sounds pretty dated, but albums released then would still be classics of industrial music. A lot of experimentation in the 60s comes off as pretty dated, but we still call the experimental stuff the Beatles did 'classic.' How much do you think this factors into something being a 'classic?' Also, is there a distinction to you about something being a 'classic of X-genre' and a classic full-stop?
Anyways, keep up the good work. I am now inspired to make my own "Undisputed Classics" list, so thanks for the thought.
To play devil's advocate - and I have been known to call some albums an "instant classic" - as shorthand for something that is not only great but has stood the test of time, "classic" is hard to beat. Maybe it's a little like "genius," a word that has gradually lost a distinctive meaning due to overuse.