This is beautiful. I couldn’t agree with John Roderick more. And there are two unspoken, ignored elephant in the room, reasons that year-end, best albums top ten lists are passe:
1. Downloads are eclipsing hard copy sales and the popular perception of the album as an indivisible artistic unit is therefore evaporating. Why djinn up a list of antiquated groupings of songs?
3. Popular music, and other old, faithful, top ten list-able intersections of art and commerce such as movies, have been supplanted by computer gaming and computer interaction as the most important shapers of the public imagination. Why bother with music when there are so many more important interactions of aesthetics and culture? Black Ops and an iPhone rock the world harder than anything in 4/4 time.
From the Seattle Weekly site:
John Roderick: Reverb Residency
Top 10 Reasons I Hate Year-End Top-10 Lists1. Ranking things in order of how much you like them is a coping strategy of 9-year-old girls. I know people like to make top-10 lists because they’re fun and easy, and people like to read them for the same reason, but that’s Entertainment Tonight reasoning. Year-end top-10 lists are the unicorn stickers and glitter pens of music writing.
2. The concept of “best” is the enemy of individuality. I loved Dave Bazan’s record and I loved Portugal. The Man’s record. If I wanted to, I could put one on top of the other, but why bother? It’s the same as saying “I like this one record, but I would have liked it better if it sounded more like this other record.” Ranking things automatically presumes that the top-ranked thing is what everything else should aspire to be, and that’s not how we listen to music.
3. If you are too busy to discover new albums for yourself, the last thing you need is a list of more albums to buy. You should take a hot bath instead. I hear this from people all the time: They love top-10 lists because it helps them discover new music, as if discovering new music was some epic, heroic quest. I wonder–did they listen thoroughly to every record they bought last year? Did they listen to them all the way through, even? The people making records are still spending months and years on them, while the people buying them are munching through them like corn chips. Slow down.
Complete list is here.
