A Scholarly Rebuttal to James Acaster: Why 1993 Was, In Fact, the Best Year for Music

When James Acaster released Perfect Sound Whatever—a delightfully chaotic, oddly moving argument that 2016 was the greatest year in music history—I read it immediately. I laughed. I highlighted. I nodded along. I made a playlist. I told other people to read it. And then, like any reasonable person fuelled by equal parts admiration and pettiness, I held onto one core belief:

He’s wrong.

He’s wrong in the best, most lovable, most thoroughly British way possible. But wrong nonetheless. Because, while 2016 gave us Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Mitski’s Puberty 2, and Blackstar by David Bowie—brilliant, genre-defining, paradigm-shattering works—I’m afraid none of that matters.

Because August and Everything After did not come out in 2016.

And therefore, by both emotional logic and empirical measurement (see: charted feelings, acoustic peak-to-sobbing ratio, frequency of lying on floors while listening), 2016 simply cannot be the best year in music.

1993 is.

Let me present my evidence.

Exhibit A: August and Everything After Is the Most Flawless Album Ever Released (This Is Not Up for Debate)

Released September 14, 1993, August and Everything After is not just an album—it is the album. It is 51 minutes and 42 seconds of lyrical devastation wrapped in a velvet-lined hoodie. It is poetry for the sleep-deprived. It is crying at sunset in flannel. It is that one ex you never recovered from, but now you’re weirdly glad you didn’t.

It contains no skips. That is not an opinion. That is data.

Consider:

• Round Here = devastation with a tempo.

• Omaha = oddly danceable existential crisis.

• Anna Begins = a slow descent into emotional ruin that feels like a warm bath.

• Rain King = a confetti cannon of self-loathing.

• Sullivan Street = the kind of heartbreak that feels like you invented it.

And Mr. Jones? Listen. If you’ve never screamed “I wanna be someone who believes!” in a car at 11:47 PM with tears streaming down your face and mascara somewhere in your hairline, I genuinely don’t know how to help you.

This album is perfect. It’s a sealed time capsule of 90s ache, California moonlight, and whatever haunted spell Adam Duritz put on his vocal cords that makes every word sound like he’s bleeding in lowercase italics.

No other album—not even the good ones from 2016, James—feels like August and Everything After. And I would know. I’ve felt them all.

Exhibit B: 1993 Was a Freak Year of Musical Brilliance and You Know It

Look at this lineup. Look at it and tell me the universe wasn’t trying to impress someone:

• In Utero – Nirvana

• Siamese Dream – Smashing Pumpkins

• Vs. – Pearl Jam

• Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) – Wu-Tang Clan

• Midnight Marauders – A Tribe Called Quest

• Debut – Björk

• Exile in Guyville – Liz Phair

• Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell – Meat Loaf (yes, it slaps)

• Automatic for the People – R.E.M. (technically late 1992 but spiritually 1993)

• Under the Pink – Tori Amos (recorded in 1993, and we are counting it)

It’s like every genre woke up and said, “Let’s just all peak at once.” Alt rock, grunge, hip hop, indie, pop—all hitting their emotional and sonic stride like there was a cosmic deadline. Even Celine Dion was gearing up. Shania was warming up in the wings. Everything that made the late ‘90s tolerable was planted here.

1993 was a greenhouse for greatness.

Conclusion: James, You’re Still Brilliant, But You’re Incorrect

I will always love Perfect Sound Whatever—it is a fantastic read and a beautiful exploration of how music saves us when nothing else does. But your conclusion was flawed. And not because you didn’t make a compelling case. You did.

But because August and Everything After exists, and 2016 was too late to contain it.

So let’s call a truce.

You keep 2016. Mitski, Beyoncé, Bowie—they’re yours.

I’ll be here in 1993, crying in a candlelit room to Raining in Baltimore, wrapped in a cardigan that smells like hope and regret, whispering “There’s things I remember, and things I forget.”

And James? I remember everything.

Also, yes—this is a rebuttal of your book six years after its release. Which in music terms, makes it basically right on time.