Just Pick the Best Album

I've been participating in a music tournament on Twitter for some time.  It's a delightful way to debate the merits of old favorites while being exposed to plenty of "new" artists.  The community there is great and I highly recommend joining in if you are so inclined.  Me being me (outwardly civil but inwardly cantankerous), I did want to remark on one thing that's been bugging me.  That is, people will often judge music primarily based on what I can best summarize as its "legacy."  The post below is but one of many such examples, but it's a particularly illustrative one:

I have a few issues with this line of thinking:

1. Not every such argument explicitly ties the past to the present, but those that do (this one included) belie the actual state of rock in 2023.  Anchoring the legacy of past greats to the relative morass of today only makes those records look worse.  After all, failsons (and daughters) don't exactly make their parents look good.

2. While I don't deny that great artists have influence and that musical trends develop over time, arguments like this overdetermine and constrain this process to a comical degree.  Put another way, nobody today sounds all that much like either of these two artists or really anyone from the nineties rock scene.  And if that's true, this influence can't have been determinative or discrete enough to matter to such an outsized degree.

3. The idea of art as having value in its ability to affect progress (see the "led by women" comment) is silly because art is fundamentally a mirror and is not the thing itself affecting change.  And this specific plaudit further misses the point because there were plenty of other women doing that same thing contemporaneously.

4. Most importantly, these takes sacrifice the actual greatness of the work itself.  By valuing legacy above all else, this ethos doesn't outright deny the accomplishment of the work, but it does render it irrelevant.  Liz Phair (or Nirvana for that matter) becomes worthy of praise not for the act of creation but for the subsequent ability for fans to place that creation in the continuum of some larger mythology.  Ironically, my favorite "designated cheerleader" piece I've written for the tournament addresses this directly, and concludes that the absence of an obvious legacy for some of my favorite weirdos is, if anything, a feature and not a bug.  If you can create something so singular and precious that it cannot be sufficiently imitated, perhaps that is the point of art.  As I said for my favorite album of all time:

"In the end, Spiderland is the musical equivalent of an inherent contradiction.  A surface-level description of its contents would lead anyone to dismiss it out of hand, but that's only because there's nothing like it.  Because something like it could only happen if everything goes right.  And as of today, everything has gone right only once."