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Thursday, November 30, 2006
ON A NECK, ON A SPIT
Grizzly Bear Yellow House Warp : 2006
RIDE AROUND SHINING
Clipse Hell Hath No Fury Re-Up Gang/Jive : 2006
I have a confession to make: the heshers pictured above don't actually feature that prominently in this post. But today I'm thinking about crystallization; they're called Crystal Blaze, and they look pretty awesome, so we'll roll with it.
Crystallization is a bad habit, but people seem to crave it -- everyone hates year-end lists, but loves haggling over their particulars. As such, I blew off my posting duties yesterday (sorry team; thanks Alex) to push off into a tempestuous sea of spreadsheets and iTunes playlists. I had to nail down what I thought were the fifty best songs and fifty best albums of 2006. In descending order. According to a sliding point-based scale. Suicide statistics tend to show a marked increase this time of year; this is usually attriubted to holiday depression, but I wonder how much of it could be accounted for by critics who lose the plot trying to weigh the relative merits of, say, Grizzly Bear and Clipse, as well as predicting how one's colleagues will rank them and trying to take this into account for ideal list placement and maximum point-efficiency, as well as wondering if there mustn't be some song out there so wonderful that it would make Clipse and Grizzly Bear sound uninspired, and imagining how one might track down this mythical song in an ocean of dreck, and musing on whether or not the local bean-counting factory offers dental, and having moral crises about slaving over lists while other people stage protests and volunteer at local soup kitchens, and, and, and, and....
With some years of list-making experience under by belt, however, I've gotten a lot better at not totally freaking out every December, and I have some helpful tips for list-makers and list-readers everywhere. It's not exactly voluteering at the soup-kitchen, but hopefully some small measure of good karma will accrue.
First, don't stress out about not having heard absolutely *everything*. In an age of cheap digital recording technology and massive music distribution networks, trying to keep tabs on every blog track and self-released EP is the quickest route to musical and critical burnout. You have to just listen to as much music as is humanly possible, accept that some things are going to evade your radar, and trust that your diligence will produce a worthy, if not definitive, list.
This segues directly into tip number two -- don't imagine that your list will be definitive. The top 20 slots will generally be pretty easy; they'll quickly fill out with albums and songs you unabashedly loved, and which you loved with enough nuance to eke out some sort of defensible hierarchy of worth. It's in the bottom 30 or so when things start to get murkier -- at this point, you're probably down to a bunch of albums and songs that you really really liked, but it's harder to distinguish which ones you liked better than others. At this point you have to put your intellect and intuition into overdrive and just do the best you can. It helps here to remember, again, that no list is definitive -- to make a list is to strive for something impossible; it has that beautiful futility, and there's no need for the end result to be perfect, as long as enough thought and work has gone into it to make a surface, comprised of inarguably interesting music, for people to test their own opinions and values against.
If all this fails and you're still trembling in fear at the prospect of making your list, there are several drastic but viable options still at your disposal: you might look at your colleague's preliminary lists and take the number one selection from each to make your own, or list all your favorite albums in alphabetical order, or ask your mother to rank them based on the appeal of their titles. The downside of this is that it'll probably get you fired; the upside is that you won't have to make lists any more. By the way, if my editors at Pitchfork happen to be reading, let me make it clear that I've been slaving over my list for weeks, and did not employ any of these dubious strategies. No. I just put a bunch of album names into a hat....Labels: brian
posted by Brian
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