The Vatican's top pop picks

A list of Vatican-approved pop albums has been published in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper:

The Holy See’s top ten includes the 1982 album Thriller by Jackson, the video for which shows the late singer as a zombie dancing with other ghouls in a graveyard, and Pink Floyd’s meditation on time, death, mental illness and consumer greed, The Dark Side of the Moon.

The Beatles also make the list with Revolver, perhaps their most drugs-influenced, psychedelic album from 1966. In the song Eleanor Rigby Father McKenzie writes “the words of a sermon that no one will hear”.

Also given approval is U2’s album Achtung Baby from 1991, on which Bono sings in Acrobat: “I’d break bread and wine if there was a church I could receive in.”

As for Oasis, the Gallagher brothers — “enfants terribles of the working class”, the newspaper said — had given the world a “jewel produced by torment” in their 1995 album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory.

The article by Giuseppe Fiorentino and Gaetano Vallini, who recently wrote that Bono was a “true crusader for Christianity”, said: “To single out ten classic discs to take to a desert island is no easy enterprise.” They had no hesitation, however, in starting with Revolver, “issued by the Fab Four long ago in 1966” and a “point of no return in contemporary pop music” [...]

The newspaper said that it had not included Bob Dylan — who sang for Pope John Paul II in 1997 at the World Eucharistic Festival in Bologna — partly because his “visionary poetry” had turned “Messianic” after his conversion to Christianity, but also because he inflicted on the world “three-note songs” that “tried the ears and patience of listeners”.

- The Times, 15 February 2010