The music one listens to can reveal a lot about a person's state of mind. Just got paid, and feel like cutting loose? Drop that Little Richard. Just got laid off? Maybe some Nina Simone. Feeling happy? Put on "Happy." So it is with great interest that we pore over Amoeba Music's best-selling albums of the year.
The Bay Area record store hips us to our collective vibe, telling the Chronicle that just as you might expect, our tastes are all over the place.
But before we get into it, a note about methodology: vinyl sales are apparently not included in the list, as they tend to be heavy on the old/vintage albums (which, that info would be pretty interesting, actually, but I guess that's another list.)
So here, in reverse order (because that's how these things go), are the best-selling albums in Amoeba stores during 2015.
- #10 - Dr. Dre - "Compton"
- #9 - Run the Jewels - "Run the Jewels 2"
- #8 - Sufjan Stevens - "Carrie & Lowell"
- #7 - Sleater-Kinney - "No Cities to Love"
- #6 - Alabama Shakes - "Sound & Color"
- #5 - Adele - "25"
- #4 - Bob Dylan - "Shadows in the Night"
- #3 - Tame Impala - "Currents"
- #2 - D'Angelo and The Vanguard - “Black Messiah”
- #1: Kendrick Lamar - "To Pimp a Butterfly"
Which: yeah, that makes sense. Especially the Kendrick, whose track "The Blacker The Berry" off To Pimp a Butterfly was for some reason annotated by Bay Area-living, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon on Rap Genius last February.
"Lamar’s 'I' is not (or not only) Kendrick Lamar but his community as a whole," writes Chabon. "This revelation forces the listener to a deeper and broader understanding of the song’s 'you', and to consider the possibility that 'hypocrisy' is, in certain situations, a much more complicated moral position than is generally allowed, and perhaps an inevitable one."
Truly chart-topping stuff.
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