We lose too much of what's great about living with music by playing the album-ranking game.
Image by John Gara/Buzzfeed
Fall hasn’t yet arrived but I'm already bracing myself for the great end-of-year fracas – not the blur of twinkle lights and wrapping paper and way too many cookies that is the month between Thanksgiving and New Year's, but that other head-swimming annual occurrence, The Grand Season of Listmaking. For some, it's the most wonderful time of the year, worthy of carols and movies starring young Jimmy Stewart. But every December I feel more devoid of the spirit that allows so many of my fellow music fans and critics to distill their listening years down into tidy, painstakingly ranked catalogs of taste. I'm Scrooge before the ghosts come calling. I'm the Grinch, pre-coronary enlargement.
For those who delight in list-making, though, Christmas came early this year. In August, Pitchfork opened up voting for its first-ever People’s List, asking readers to vote for their top albums released between the years of 1996 and 2011, the site’s first 15 years. Radiohead’s OK Computer topped the poll. I’m a contributing writer to Pitchfork, but I didn’t file a ballot, in part because I got so hung up trying to reconcile all of the music I loved and all the different ways I loved it over that decade and a half — that span of time comprises my late adolescence and the entirety of my adult life so far. How could I rank the albums I loved that summer against ones I loved at age 12, or in college, or last year, or last week?
To be clear, the lists I hate are the ranked ones — not unordered collections of favorites or other related items, but the kind where the number order is most definitely meant to imply an ascending or descending degree of superiority. These lists don’t always crop up at the end of the year, but they often do. They have long been a way for music publications (magazines, and now blogs too) to establish their own sort of canon while currying the favor (and/or drawing the ire, or at least eyeballs) of readers, and somewhere along the line the practice became de rigueur among fans, too.
Although, if you go by the very beautifully presented data profile of the People’s List respondents, it’s a practice vastly more popular among dudes — 88 percent of the Pitchfork list-makers were male, just 12 percent female. This makes sense to me, anecdotally at least; last fall, when I started a Tumblr project called Unbest to offer folks an outlet to write in-depth about music they loved in 2011 — not just make a list — about three-quarters of the respondents were female. Lists are talked about in terms of what they “missed” and what they “forgot,” like they’re spelling quizzes and not fundamentally whimsical expressions of one staff or one person’s personal taste.
Source: pitchfork.com
List-making does such violence to the actual experience of living and listening that I can barely stomach it. I don’t relish a single step of the process — not the parsing, not the ranking, not the final forcing of a list out into the world and not the subsequent defending of all the arbitrarily made decisions that I feel inexplicably defensive about as soon as they’re inevitably questioned. I resent the ritual’s false bracketing of time, especially the idea that my listening habits reset each January 1 (or, with how year-end lists tend to creep these days, each November 30; one year, while I was on staff at Paste magazine, we began to hammer out our best-of-the-year list in October). When I plug an album into a list, I feel like I’m sealing it in amber — it’s trapped there, forever; it will never not be my number one, or my number three, or my number seven, sealed there with all these other specimens that it often shares nothing with other than the 12-month time span they were pushed into the world. Writing down resolutions at the beginning of the year is supposed to make them easier to keep. Inking my favorites at the end of the year renders them a staid artifact, something forever of the past, not something to grow and change with me on into the next year.
Are music magazines and blogs to blame, training us to think this is the way we’re supposed to think despite the fact that lists often serve no grander purpose than a nightcrawler on a fishook? Maybe it was High Fidelity that codified this very particular brand of random, rigid, exclusionist thinking as the de facto mode of modern music fandom, even as it pretty clearly showed — in novel and movie form, no less! — the cultural and psychological and romantic pitfalls of those same habits? I just desperately want someone to blame for making my love of music take on the air of both math class and sports, two things I got into music to avoid in the first place.
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