Click to copy Listen to the 63 Grammy winners for album of the year, and they'll tell the story of the last six decades of popular music. Except, well, not really, at all. Zoom out on all 63 and squint a little and you might be able to see a general progression from jazz and vocal standards to rock to pop and hip-hop, but the timeline traced by the album of the year winners is really more of a Jeremy Bearimy: constantly curving, skipping around and looping back unpredictably. That's part of the fun of the Grammys canon, though: The tale it tells isn't always the most coherent, but it's rich with moment-in-time pretzel logic that makes sense when viewed in totality -- not to mention fascinating quirks forgotten in most enduring pop narratives of the past. And every so often, the Recording Academy gets it totally right, rewarding an album so undeniably essential that all voting roads lead back to it as the one and only answer.