The Idea of a 'Music Pantheon'

Codifying one’s favorites certainly, from a philosophical angle, emphasizes churning out decisive judgments of art over simply trying to appreciate the art you engage. Is a work alright, great, or a complex mosaic of both? Trying to pick “the best” leads to a simplification where a gradient can be dismissed: the average score across the entire work is given and treated as representative rather than acknowledging nuance. For example, to me, the Terra Route of Rewrite has a very mediocre start because it, in my view, presents uninteresting and possibly counter-productive themes on terrorism. However, this work seems to challenge itself, and grows into an ultimately powerful narrative about the environment and humanity’s role in the world. Yet when I characterize this route as “very good,” I may neglect to mention that the beginning is mediocre to me. By entering a “favorites” mindset, I would just describe the work as “very good” and drop the qualifier.  

However, determining a work’s quality can be ambiguous: a simple frameshift may be all that separates the good and the great, or the bad and the good. When choosing favorites, this frameshift is even harder – then the distinction between the good and the great must be coupled with the distinction between a cool work of art and a favorite work of art. Can only veritable masterpieces be included? Or can non-masterpiece works be included provided they provide similar levels of enjoyment? 

These musings led me to codify my own music pantheon, the collection of albums that certainly describe my music taste well. As of now, this pantheon is incomplete. It can be seen below.

Table 1. The albums tentatively included inside my music pantheon. Listed in no particular order. This list is more meant to represent my music taste as a whole rather than my favorite albums and artists, per se.

Artist	Album
Asobi Seksu	Citrus
ClariS	Party Time
Brian Eno	On Land
Eluvium	Nightmare Ending
Harold Budd	Avalon Sutra
Brian Eno and Harold Budd	The Pearl
Asian Kung Fu Generation	Sol-Fa
Dead Can Dance	Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
Babymetal	Babymetal
Yo La Tengo	I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One
Do Make Say Think	Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn
Gojira	From Mars to Sirius
Murray Perahia	Bach: Goldberg Variations
Deaf Center	Pale Ravine
Opeth	Still Life
The Pillows	Happy Bivouac
Kenta Nagata, Hajime Wakai, Toru Minegishi, and Koji Kondo	The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker OST
Akira Yamaoka	Silent Hill 2 OST
Blur	Think Tank
Howard Shore	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings OST
Warpaint	Warpaint
Throwing Muses	Throwing Muses
Sonic Youth	EVOL
Neurosis	Live at Roadburn 2007
Deftones	Koi No Yokan
Mogwai	Come On Die Young
Slowdive	Souvlaki
Cormorant	Dwellings
Joy Division	Closer
My Dying Bride	The Dreadful Hours
Yndi Halda	Yndi Halda
Seattle Symphony Orchestra, John Luther Adams	Become Ocean
Seattle Symphony Orchestra	Symphony No. 9 in E Minor[1]

From reading this list, I can tell that I stretched beyond albums that I consider perfection. To be honest, I just cannot conceptualize a “perfect” album – a score of 100%, to me, represents the ability to move me and teach me and not the absence of flaws. Part of this mindset stems from my fickleness – many times I am not in the mood for many of these albums, which could seem like a flaw. With this list, I described what comprises my music taste, not as much a telling of my favorite albums. In my pantheon, context is apparently valuable; I picked albums I enjoyed while emphasizing musical diversity. Here, post-punk, orchestral music, shoegaze, and whatever-the-heck-Dead-Can-Dance-is are all represented. And this list extends beyond America. I tried to grant a more worldly perspective here.

However, I fear that bias permeates this list in a systematic manner. On one hand, I clearly do not have music represented outside of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, and the United States. Nor are works of electronic music – how could I forget Aphex Twin and Pan Sonic?? – or hip hop or folk or blues, or really a whole host of styles. Furthermore, Black and Hispanic – and related – artists are completely not here. However, in making this list, I strove to not include albums just to counteract gaps – this list cannot be called all-inclusive. I doubt that it can even represent my music interests fully. For example, Portland Taiko’s Big Bang and NaS’s Illmatic are both works that I enjoy that would increase the diversity of music found here. Many works hint at broader horizons, even though I did not include them here. Perhaps how I chose albums for the “pantheon” is wrong and I should decide whether I want ‘favorites’ or my ‘music taste.’ With time, I hope to refine the entries and become more satisfied with this list. However, music taste is intractable so perhaps I need to sample – that is, actually listen to more music – albums and create a better list. This entire exercise has helped me understand the development of my taste rather than uncover definitively my taste. I probably will not learn how to make more specific, decisive judgments. However, I better understand the effort that goes into actually selecting favorite works of art.

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[1] This refers to Dvorak’s “From The New World”