I don’t know man, that seems like a pretty legit observation to me. Arguably Watch the Throne fulfilled the ‘highly visible’ criteria but that’s about it. Do you think there’s an album that WAS, by this definition, Important?
Oh, I just find the whole line of thinking incredibly narrow-minded, based in some boyish need to rank things and deign some things as Important and other things Not Important based on some incredibly hyper-specific criteria that basically boils down to, “Well, it feels like I’m right!” Regardless of the “objective” argument you can make that the AnCo album was “important,” facts remain that something like 99.9% of the people in the world did not listen to it, and unless you’re inventing new definitions of the word “important” that seems to disqualify it, as well as most albums, from that conversation. Maybe a better term would be that these albums are “Important To Very Serious White Dudes On The Internet Who Primarily Talk About Music Over Gchat And Get Most Of Their Music From Pitchfork,” which is fine if you’re talking in a room with your friends, but God, putting these big broad labels on music seems to defeat the whole point of discussing these things online, which is (I hope) to carry the conversation in an open field where you can see other people and topics standing off in the distance and call out to them/walk over to see what’s going on, not burrowing tunnels into the Earth and finding out that you’ve gone too far to go in another directions without walking all the way back or destroying the entire structure you’ve created. I just don’t get it at all why anyone would want to be that pedantic. I guess the AV Club’s motto is “Turning nerds into snobs,” so it’s not like you should expect any deeper type of analysis from them besides “Can I feel important talking about this at a party.” (Also sidenote, the AV Club has the absolutely WORST commenters and columns like this are just invitations for undisguised rockism and bros talking about the lack of There Might Be Giants records in the release pipeline.)
I mean, year-defining? Whose year, maaaaaan?
