Which artists, albums, or songs are you most surprised to be included on Acclaimed Music?

I am referring to recordings you never would have thought of as critically-acclaimed.

Here are some shockers to me:

Celine Dion - "My Heart Will Go On"
Chumbawamba - "Tubthumping"
Prince - "Batdance"
Christina Aguilera - "Genie in a Bottle"
Fountains of Wayne - "Stacy's Mom"
Los Lobos - "La Bamba"
Garth Brooks - "Friends in Low Places"
Backstreet Boys - "I Want It That Way"
Kelly Clarkson - "Since U Been Gone"
Britney Spears - "Oops! I Did It Again"
Los Del Rio - "Macarena"
Hanson - "Mmmbop"
Aqua - "Barbie Girl"
Mariah Carey - "Vision of Love"
USA for Africa - "We Are the World"

I might list some albums later, but I think that's all for now :P

Does anybody else find it surprising that any of these songs are included on AM?

Not a surprise at all, considering the general level of acclaim for FoW - two of their first three albums are on the top 3000, and the other is a Bubbler.

Also, "Since U Been Gone" is a brilliant pop single. As are a lot of the others on this list.

(There's no excuse for "Macarena," though.)

I must be one of the few people who actually like this song,Stevie Wonder is killer on it. And the video is one of my favourite ever,seeing all those legends appear one by one...

"Batdance" rules!

I completely agree with all those choices. I'd be fine never hearing any of them again.

This one calls the entire process into question...

For some reason tweeny-pop seems to factor well on critic's lists. There's far less of those weird inclusions on the album list than the singles list.

aren't ranked all that highly, though (with some bubbling under). In some cases, it just takes a few notable placements to appear.

I agree about "Macarena"- what were critics participating in Pazz-N-Jop thinking? Same with Blender, for its Top 500 list.

Thought of another one: Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca"

Fountains of Wayne, perhaps. But "Stacy's Mom"?!

Well Midaso, I agree. And I have a long planned post with a few short thoughts on the song that I am going to finaly post now (in a separate thread).

MMMBop somehow won the Pazz & Jop singles poll in 1997.

I agree Stacy's Mom is undeserving of critical acclaim, but its video might be one of the all-time best, at least from the perspective of someone like myself who was in middle school when it came out.

I noticed almost every song on the "unacceptable" list is from my least favoriote genre, teen pop.
For some reason I thought that Stacy's Mom was an 80's song because my mom liked it.

Well I hope the rest of the stuff on the album is better,I just won an auction for it a couple of days ago...

If many of those same critics updated their lists years later, may of those songs wouldn't be included, but at that time they were considered some of the best of that year. On the other side of the equation, how many songs that did not make any year end lists are now considered by many critics to be amongst the greatest from that year? How many critics are going to put a song like Katy Perry's "California Gurls" in their top song lists this year? This is what makes this forum so much fun to debate these things... now I have to get the infectious "Mmmbop" out of my head!!!!

It's one of the best and most underrated albums of the decade. It's one of those albums that had massive critical acclaim the first year it came out and it's been falling from the rankings since. I still can't believe the Permission to Land is ranked higher than Welcome Interstate Managers.

I'm pretty sure, given their respective performance in EOD lists, that Welcome... will rank higher than Permission... in the next update.

I'm really not getting the dislike for "Stacy's Mom". It's not like the song was some poppy sellout for FoW - ALL their songs are insanely catchy pure-pop-for-now-people. It's what they do. The difference was that this particular song tapped into a universal adolescent male fantasy, in an insanely catchy way. And, obviously, That Video helped a lot too.

"Stacy's Mom" isn't even a departure -lyrically- from the rest of FoW's catalog. Far from it - listen to the words and it becomes fairly obvious that the titular object of the narrator's obsession doesn't reciprocate and probably isn't even aware of his feelings at all. In other words, the song fits nicely into the band's gallery of wildly unreliable narrators, including those of the two terrific songs that frame it on WIM: "Bright Future in Sales" (about a guy who can't quite grasp that his failure to live up to his potential might be connected to the fact that he's a fall-down drunk) and "Hackensack" (in which a guy tells the now-famous actress he went to high school with that he's back home waiting, in case she ever returns, even though there's absolutely no indication they ever knew each other).

"Stacy's Mom" is far from FoW's best song, but it's no anomaly, and it doesn't belong on a list of songs that don't belong.

A lot of the most acclaimed songs on AM aren't included on ANY year-end lists ("Like a Rolling Stone," "Satisfaction," "Good Vibrations," "Respect," "Johnny B. Goode," "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay," "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," "Stairway to Heaven," "Louie Louie," "My Generation," "Be My Baby," "Heartbreak Hotel," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "You Really Got Me," "What's Going On," "A Day in the Life," "River Deep Mountain High," "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," "Imagine," "What'd I Say," "Tutti Frutti," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "I Want You Back," "Sympathy for the Devil," "Light My Fire," "Reach Out (I'll Be There)," "Superstition," "Purple Haze," "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "The Tracks of My Tears," "That'll Be the Day," "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock," "Layla," etc.) And that's just from the top 50. 33 out of 50 songs have no acclaim from year-end lists.

Probably because year-end lists weren't very common back then.

Perhaps the year-end lists should carry even less weight in the equation of the top 3000 than they already do?

Well, I'm not sure how it all works. I'm sure Henrik has it all figured out so that it's fair :)

It kind of makes me wish there were more published lists of songs pre-1954.

I believe he already weighs all-time lists greater than year-end. Year-end lists didn't really come into prominence until the 90s (at least based on what's been collected here).

I'm very curious to see what the Top 3000 will look like when the end-of-decade lists are included! :) Will they be included in the next update?

It's my understanding that Henrik weights lists based on how long after the album came out they were made.

Yes but I also have a weighting factor for the percentage of EOY lists. For an album from a recent year with lots of EOY lists, each individual EOY list has a very low weight.

I like most of these songs, but I agree that critical acclaim has no business hanging out with them. I'm very surprised. "Macarena"? "Barbie Girl"?

I no longer feel even the slightest twinge of guilt for voting Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours" my #9 song in the most recent song poll. :)

Yes, exactly. "Tubthumping" and "Mmmbop" are actually guilty pleasures of mine, but I am also quite aware of how despised these songs are, and how annoying most people find them, and perhaps most notably, despite the number of critics who liked these songs 12 years ago, there are more critics who are very vocal about giving them honours as some of the worst of all time.