I apologize for my failure to post last week. I was drowning in year-end lists, you see.
When I told my non-music nerd friends that I was "drowning in year-end lists", I got a lot of blank stares. Turns out that assembling a list of one's twenty-odd favorite albums of the year, ranking them in order, and writing little hundred-word blurb about each is not something that normal people do.
We geeks are a different story. For us, the Top 20 Best ______s of 20__ is a yearly rite of passage. This ceremony is not exclusive to music nerds. Book nerds, TV nerds, video game nerds, and all manner of obsessive losers gleefully participate. Lower-ranking nerds post their picks on Facebook or their private blogs; the inner sanctum of nerdery distributes its lists via various print and web publications. The latter type of publication typically allows the hoi polloi to disagree via comment threads, and disagree they do. This dynamic has become so pervasive that NPR published a hilarious best-of list of best-of list complaints a few days ago.
I am privileged enough to belong to the music nerd illuminati (is 'privileged' the right word?), though I'm a low-ranking member. 2011 marks my seventh year in this dubious company, and so it was the seventh time that I produced a widely-viewed best-of list.
This was also the first year during which I participated in year-end feature writing for multiple publications. I wrote a personal feature for Metal Review, and scribed a couple of different things for Invisible Oranges. If you've never tried to sum up an album in a hundred words, here's a word to the wise—it's a lot harder than it sounds. I did most of my year-end writing in about ten days; if I don't have to boil down another record to public-service-announcement dimensions until December 2012, I will consider it a mercy.
Every time I write a best-of feature, I find myself reflecting on the best-of process itself as much as on the albums that came out that year. Like most things I do, the whole thing seems sillier with each passing year.
When I started writing best-of lists, I took them very seriously. The list was my chance to MAKE A STATEMENT and EXPOSE THE WORLD TO DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH. I agonized over each list's population, their rankings, and the accompanying blurbs. It was vital to me that my best-of feature perfectly represent the best albums released in that year.
I can't really blame myself for taking list-crafting so seriously at first. I was a teenager at the time, and teenagers do nothing so well as take everything really seriously. But when I look back at my older year-end writeups, it becomes clear how ludicrous my aims were.
For one thing, my readership on sites like IO and MR is often just as knowledgeable, if not more so, than I am—especially back in 2005-2008, when I was still finding my footing in the music world. Even now, I find that my readers are impossibly learned stores of music lore. It's tough to educate people about what they already know.
More importantly, these features are never my last word on a given year. At best, I'm able to process 70 or 80 new albums a year. That's six or seven albums a month, and when I say "new," I mean "new to my collection." If I only ever listened to newly-released music, there would still be huge swaths of quality music that I'd miss—in the metal world alone. So there's tons of great, possibly life-altering music that I never even hear.
And let's not get started on the arbitrary-as-hell ranking process. Reducing music to numerical comparison is always a bad idea, and these lists are a textbook example of why. Gigan's new album is #4 on my list this year, while Rwake's is #5. Why'd Gigan get the higher ranking? Honestly, I don't have a fucking clue. They both released really good albums. In fact, I think I like the Rwake album more. But I guess I was in a Gigan-y mood on submission day.
These lists are arbitrary because they rely on the writer's mood, tastes, idea of his own tastes, agenda, and so on. Even for older folks, these features change frequently. And for a youngster like me, they change all the fucking time. In 2005, I gave Darkane's Layers of Lies my #1 spot. I don't remember the last time I played that album. That same year, I gave Gojira's From Mars to Sirius #6. I still listen to the Gojira album all the time. It's not that Darkane sucks, or that Gojira released a timeless masterpiece; my notion of desirable music has just shifted to exclude one of them.
The point, in short, is this: music depends on the experient for meaning. Experients are people, and people change and make mistakes. This fact makes music really hard to accurately evaluate in the way that best-of lists suggest it can be evaluated. So they shouldn't be taken too seriously. Arguably, they shouldn't even be made in the first place.
But I do make them, year in and year out. I am a nerd, and this is my idea of fun.
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