words by jace.
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#
3. First
off: pretty much nobody who bothers to write up a "top X albums
of the year" list actually buys albums. Most of them are
journalists, which means they receive free copies from publicists
hired by the artists/labels to repeatedly bug media workers to generate
buzz about said albums.
A
significant chunk of what you've read online or off- is basically
rehashed "one-sheet" prose. Publicists send out
info sheets along with the album, explaining the music, giving
context and suggesting spin angles, hyping the CD using metaphors and
comparisons and imagery that inevitably get recycled into reviews and
writeups. (Happens so frequently it's funny; writers must
absorb one-sheet images subconsciously.) And not just in music, of
course--unimaginative journalists crib from publicity
sheets all over: film, literature, news. In Washington it turns into
lobbyists, and things go really haywire. In every big city you'll
find a bookstore specializing in reviewer's copies of books:
reviewers get free promo editions, read them, then sell 'em. Lots of
CD shops turn the same trade.
Then
there are the DJs like myself, who buy tons of vinyl singles yet only
shell out cash for a full album when there's a song on it that we
really want to play live.
Then there are the hardcore music fans
with a reasonably well-paying day job, honorable folks who actually
purchase CDs by artists they like. These same people probably vote
regularly in local and national elections, and if their savings
aren't tucked away in some sensible investment portfolio yet, they
will be soon. Everybody else downloads everything. The only CDs we
buy are blank.
#1
My first problem with top 10 music lists is that applying
hierarchies to artistic endeavors is absurd at best. It's like
talking about the weather using superlatives ("April 9th was the
best sunny day of 2004!").
I'm not into dudes with big record collections pretending they can
build a canon, or even wanting to try.
#2 My second problem with top 10 lists is that when music is hottest and most interesting it isn't concerned with being "the best". "The best" is always retrospective. Good music is always ahead. If you want taxidermy & placards explaining it all, go to a natural history museum. (A few years back they finally removed the stuffed dead African "Black Man" on display here in Cataluyna Spain).
More broadly, music moves in currents. For example, grime & dancefloor breakcore were cool this year, but neither genre coughed up any albums that captured the excitement of the scene it stemmed from. Both scenes flourish around singles, mixtapes, parties, radio shows, and stoned producers who rock out with their mini-entourage in the attic or basement of Mum's house, towel jammed under the door so she don't smell the skunk.
Albums coming from hot scenes tend to arrive long after the heat has moved on. Dizzee's debut CD hit so hard because it was many listeners' first grime immersion. His 2nd album paled in comparison for a lot of reasons--namely substandard beats, but his former companions blazed ahead making crazy brilliant half-music, shooting off whitelabel singles and one-off dubplates, agile and warped and fast, while expensive ads for Rascal's Showtime album lumbered by on the sides of London doubledecker buses.
This year I
heard a lot of hype grime mixtapes (Logan Sama, Lord of the Mic, etc)
& pirate broadcasts (Flex, Jah Mek the World, many more), and I
saw a lot of amazing breakcore (Snares, Sickboy, Shitmat DJing). But
albums that channeled or redirected the wild energy of sketchy FM
transmissions or singed bass on overworked soundsystems...
Not really.
#5 The whole "album" concept when looked at via the popular narratives of music criticism makes little sense. There's a contrived, quietly racist division between music that is naive native genius aka "street" (i.e. raw, unselfconscious, stylized representations of a lifestyle that happens in a neighborhood where you would either be afraid to rent an apartment or where you want to rent an apartment because it's edgy/has colored people living there) and music that is more brainy, less populist, less real. One of the main ways these straw-men categories are reinforced is by people condemning the latter for mistakes while praising the former for doing the same thing, and vice-versa.
When Kayne West raps about buying furniture at IKEA it's a big deal, he's breaking rules and upending conventions via behind-the-scenes confessions--look, it's a bear suit!; whereas when Anticon raps about anything at all the same people couldn't care in the least. It's good to keep an eye out for what artists can break the (unspoken?) rules and what artists people don't think any rules apply to. Rules behind the rules is what we're trying to crack here.
Another example of the attempts to differentiate into existence street music & bedroom music: both breakcore and grime are weird, oftentimes abrasive peripheral dance musics being made by a handful of in-the-know producers and released through tight DIY distribution networks. But critical consensus is quick to praise grime as raw/street/populist and breakcore as individualist/bedroom even when, in absolute terms, breakcore records are selling better, the genre is more widespread and grassroots and internationally-catchy than grime. (It's like survival of the least fit!) The categorization is goofy but yes, I believe the world's 'street' is vibing more with breakcore right now.
Hmmm.. I don't remember how all this relates to reason #5... Maybe something about how albums are hastily cast, either/or style, as individual gems of idiosyncratic brilliance or shiny platinum-selling metonyms from a vibrant subaltern culture. ???
#4 My fourth problem with top 10s is my lack of a problem. People ask me to write Top 10 lists, I oblige. Everybody needs filters. Everybody has new stuff to learn from people whose tastes they trust.
#6 Problem number six: why start & stop at music? I want to see anybody's Top 10 Scary Pieces of Legislation Passed in 2004. Or the Top 10 Non-imaginary Threats to Healthy Democracies in 2004. And if people really wanna boast about how cool they are, instead of naming a bunch of musicians and rappers, why not the Top 10 Things I Did to Make A Globally Horrible Year Slightly Less Horrible.
I, for one, didn't do anything, hence all this talk about music. . .
mpc (URL) - януари 1 2005
u talk a lot of sense. totally agree about dizzee. i haven't found many people who were willing to say that dizzee's second album was pretty poor. his first was 99% produced by him and sounded raw and amazing. his second had some very good producers on but just didnt work. also, some of the tracks dizzee produced on the new LP were very poorly done.- - - - - - - -
szzl - януари 1 2005
A great but slightly pointless post. Aren't there more important windmills to tilt at then the year end pronouncements of music journalists making a list of all the music they think they're supposed to have liked this year? But then again, I have always been an advocate of great but slightly pointless things ie: most of the music I have made. Also, stupid as they may be, I always enjoy lists, making and reading. I think we should expand our top tens as you suggest and have more, not less.- - - - - - - -
sizzling spray of words - януари 1 2005
re: Dizzee, I agree the album is poor. I think he made a mistake by trying to seperate himself from the 'grime' scene at large in all it's rapidly moving disposable competitiveness, the scene which was largely responsible for the level of sharpness and focus he achieved on his first record. In seeking to leave the scene and close the door behind him Dizz landed halfway between the crackling innovation of street competition and the art-for-the-consumption-of-posterity most people believe has to go on albums. I think the album is swiftly becoming a dead format for a lot of genres (yes yes another pronouncement of 'the death of the something'). But really I dont usually like to listen to that many minutes of music in a row made by one limited group of people. More mixtapes please.- - - - - - - -
recury (URL) - януари 1 2005
Re: #1: I don't have a problem with ranking artistic works necessarily, it's just when people list the "best of" whatever that bothers me. The implication is that whoever it is that's making the list can say that these albums are the best for everyone (and, as you point out, they usually try to do this without any kind of retrospective). Really, I don't think these kinds of lists would bother me that much if they were called "favorite of" lists or something.- - - - - - - -
Matos W.K. () (URL) - януари 2 2005
wait a second--you honestly can't figure out that nomenclature aside, when there's a list in a publication or a website that says "best" on top that it's actually someone's "favorite"? and that the lists are written (mostly) by individuals who are talking only about their own preferences? wow!- - - - - - - -
Matos W.K. () (URL) - януари 2 2005
(that was for recury, not Jace.) (hi Jace!)- - - - - - - -
wrongspeed () - януари 2 2005
agree with the album bit, i mean i'm fed up with the awe with which intelligent people spout on about them, it only exists coz of the media 'object', right now there's a few of them that are OK e.g. Marvin Gaye et al but generally a DJ mix is far and away the best way of listening to music......- - - - - - - -
recury (URL) - януари 2 2005
i guess now that i think about it it's not as much of a problem with year-end lists or with lists written by individuals, but more so with the best of a decade or best of all-time lists or ones written by committee. and besides, the post was about nomenclature, so it's not really nomenclature aside then is it?- - - - - - - -
Jesse () - януари 3 2005
To me the real problem is that there are quite a few people out there who write top-10 lists with the air of authority that their editors wish them to express, because these top-10 lists will be viewed by a remarkable selection of the population, and as a result the content of "mass" consciousness will be affected. The problem specifically is that these people (MSN.com springs to mind for offering a large public such a forgettable top-10 list that all I remember is how quickly I forgot it, although now I wish I could remember) more often than not tend to perpetuate, even in little things, all the bullshit (much of it racial, though there's still plenty of gender stereotyping, for one thing) that so many like to pretend is a thing of the past. I think that's a bit of what Jace was getting at, if I remeber right. Sometimes I think of it as the frameworks that are in place, but the other day it dawned on me that it's more like an endless river of shit that certain people want to keep flowing no matter what, the flow is the main priority. Here's to streams flowing in different directions, and the possibility that the counterflow gains force in 2005.- - - - - - - -
jace - януари 3 2005
river of ish, river of forgetfulness. one lil point for Matos (hey man!) & Recury: (i'm hairsplitting, sorry) but i do think "best of" shouldn't exactly equal "favorites of". For example: i agree w/ everybody who says the best Neptunes production of 04 was "Drop it Like It's Hot", but my *favorite* Neptune's tune was Slim Thug's "I Ain't Heard of That".- - - - - - - -
ghislain () (URL) - януари 3 2005
Also, we can like tracks even we know they're not good. And we can still don't like tracks who are really good. :)- - - - - - - -
JohnnyGuitar () - януари 4 2005
I think you overlook the fact that many critics view end-of-the-year lists as a chance to make extra-aesthetic points. "The best" need not mean "the most nearly perfect piece of music judged on purely aesthetic grounds [whatever those could be]." It could mean "the most undeservedly overlooked," "the most politically necessary," "the one that made me think of college." In short, I don't think anyone pretends that their best-of lists are anything other than a record of their idiosyncrasies. Only those lists compiled by critics already worth reading are interesting in their own right. And criticism is a valid genre: nor do many critics stop and start with music. I think you've constructed something of a straw critic, unless you have Entertainment Weekly in mind.- - - - - - - -
cdawg () - януари 5 2005
i like the wire bashing 'cos as lists go (and everything else pretty much) alot of appreciatng music should mean knowing when to shut up about it- - - - - - - -
recury (URL) - януари 6 2005
"In short, I don't think anyone pretends that their best-of lists are anything other than a record of their idiosyncrasies."- - - - - - - -
Sebcatlitter () - януари 11 2005
(Hi all)- - - - - - - -
ragudave () - януари 11 2005
I like reading about specialist / left field top 10 or festive 50 type lists. Basically it puts me onto new things I might have missed for whatever reason. A lot of people like to knock The Wire. I dont understand or agree with everything they write or cover and they can sometimes be over analytical but they do review and cover shed loads of music. Since I got my first Wire a few years back I have had my mind opened up to heaps of music that I would never have heard. This includes anticon, nu dub, nu roots, left field hip hop, euro electronica et al.- - - - - - - -
mini/komi () - януари 11 2005
id like to see top 10 generous breakcore artists to hit up for CDRs- - - - - - - -
The Ape () (URL) - февруари 24 2005
Cd Top Ten of the year...- - - - - - - -
calico (URL) - юли 5 2005
great post.- - - - - - - -