The misconceptions of end-of-year lists
As mentioned previously on The Musical Chairs, I’ll be doing a Top 50 list for 2009. However, it’s not really going to be a top 50 of sorts. It’s one thing to pick 50 albums, but it’s another thing altogether to list them. Trying to list them is a task with the words ‘doomed mission’ all over it and even after you’ve done it you can’t help but feel it’s wrong.
Either way, I hope that people look at that list in the right way (a list that reflects the writer’s taste in music and, hopefully, a guide to music you may like) as opposed to something completely different. In recent years I can’t help but feel that people have gotten way too serious about this kind of thing. The blunt truth is that it’s a throwaway feature, yet one that is unashamedly fun to do in some respects. It’s frequently staggering how some people get their knickers in a twist over it. Some people, mistakenly I think, take a list by a magazine or a website and think to themselves that they must have every single album on that list or face a future of non-enlightenment. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this theory is banal and silly. Even if this was the case you’d be bankrupt after buying everything in that list.
There are also the people who look at these lists and go ‘Balderdash! Here are 50 albums that you didn’t include that are far superior!’ I’ve been guilty of this on occasion in the past but to claim that you have a greater taste in music than say Q, Drowned In Sound, or the NME is totally absurd in a world where music is incredibly subjective. Paul Morley, who also discussed the subject when he appeared at The Guardian’s Student Media Conference in London last week, wrote about this in his Observer Music Monthly piece yesterday:
If there’s one thing worse than a carefully collated pseudo-objective quasi-cool neo-diagnostic list of the best 50 albums from the previous year or decade published in the run-up to Christmas that narrowly and predictably reflects merely the general taste, cultural character, passing fancies and subjective musical prejudices and expectations of the magazine and its writers, then it’s someone petulantly responding to the list by plunging into their own particular taste, character, fancies and prejudices and exclaiming – with superior feeling and a self-righteous sense of outrage, annoyed with the whole idea of art, music and entertainment being endlessly filtered through the simplifying, commercial, reductive conveniences of lists, compartments and charts but responding with their own alternative suggestions, which, of course, allegedly actually contain a better, richer reading of the previous year or decade’s various patterns, narratives, innovations, scenes, hypes, next big things, random developments and deeper meaning.
All I’m posting in the next few weeks are the 50 albums I happened to enjoy most in the last year, and that’s pretty much it. It’s not necessarily a ‘shopping list’ but I do encourage you to at least listen to one album on this list that you’ve yet to listen to, since one of the joys of music, at least for myself anyway, is discovering new things through recommendations. When the articles do go up and when you do get a chance to read them, consider these three things:
- If there’s a glaring omission, it’s for one of two reasons – either I didn’t get round to listening to it or I thought that, contrary to public opinion, I didn’t think it was that good.
- The ordering is very, very loose. Don’t take the ordering is conclusive as I’ve been tempted to tinker with it several times before realising I’d be wasting my time.
- This is just my opinion. If these albums were the greatest albums of 2009 then there would have been some scientific formula in place by now.
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Posted on November 30th, 2009 by Max
Filed under: Features, News
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