![]() I'd caught a couple of minutes of one of the Destiny's Child videos on TV, but, then, so has everyone who has access to a television. Diddy & the Bad Boy Family "Devils Night," by D12 "Break the Cycle," by Staind "Survivor," by Destiny's Child "Jagged Little Thrill," by Jagged Edge "Take Off Your Pants and Jacket," by Blink 182 "Lil' Romeo," by Lil' Romeo "Skin," by Melissa Etheridge and "Hybrid Theory," by Linkin Park. These were, in descending order, "Songs in A Minor," by Alicia Keys "The Saga Continues. I decided, however, that my own lack of familiarity with what people are actually buying in bulk was far too shaming, and so I sat down and listened to the ten best-selling albums in the United States according to the July 28, 2001, issue of Billboard. Some might argue that the critics who wrote about Marvin and Aretha thirty years ago are the very same people who rave about Lucinda Williams today, and they'd have a point: rock critics now seem to have tenure, like senior faculty, which could explain why current youth-targeted music seems relatively unexamined. that you can find at the front of your local HMV. (These lists may well have been born of the music critics' despair at popular taste.) There is "literary," critically approved pop-Lucinda Williams, say, or Wilco, or Nick Cave, none of whom trouble the Billboard statisticians much-and the MTV-driven hard rock, rap, and R. Now, however, in addition to the self-explanatory top-seller charts, we have myriad other lists, from MP3 downloads to top alternative albums to top college, whatever that may mean. You can imagine that at the time even the most curmudgeonly critics might have found it in themselves to gush over at least a couple of those. The Billboard charts of top-selling LPs in the month of July, 1971, included "Sticky Fingers," by the Rolling Stones "What's Going On," by Marvin Gaye "4 Way Street," a live double album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young "Aretha Live at Fillmore West," by Aretha Franklin and "Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon," by James Taylor. In 1973, for an essay published in The New York Review of Books, Gore Vidal read his way through the Times best-seller list in an attempt to understand popular taste, trashing as he passed, among others, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the author of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull." We have long known that there is a division between literary fiction and the mass market, but it says something about the fragmentation of pop music that there is now some kind of musical equivalent. ![]()
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