The Problem With Lists
Don't think for even a minute that I'm not troubled by the crazy presumption involved in the making of end-of-the-year lists of favorite or best anything. I don't even usually do an annual list of my favorite albums, and already feel sort of foolish for knuckling under to no one in particular and doing one this year. You're welcome to look at the list I posted below (see entry from December 8), but I can assure you that I've already changed my mind about half the albums that are there.
That's what's screwed about the whole idea. I could probably make out a different top ten list every day of the week, and from day to day there might not be one album that any of them have in common. That might not be strictly true --I'm not quite that erratic-- but every day since I posted my 2002 picks I've thought of a record --or several records-- that I could substitute for most of them.
I put Henry Flynt's Back Porch Hillbilly Blues on my list, for instance, because I'd heard about Flynt and his crazy fiddle experiments for years and was thrilled to see the stuff finally surface. The guy's a seriously interesting character, and the stuff sort of made me giggle the first couple times I listened to it. The title is considerably misleading --Hillbilly Gamelan Music would be a more apt description. The disc made me marvel at the fact that there are actually people in the world today who are willing to make any kind of a financial commitment to such strange and deliberately marginal music --including, I guess, me. All the same, after giving one of the volumes another listen last night I concluded that there may in fact never be another occasion when I will feel compelled to play this music, which means that I probably shouldn't in good conscience recommend that anyone else spends $15 on it.
There are other records that I didn't put on my original list that I now must admit --at least for today-- that I like every bit as much as most of my other selections. RJD2's Dead Ringer, for instance, or Brendan Benson's Lapalco. Or Sonic Youth's Murray Street, Ash's Free All Angels, Tony Allen's Home Cooking, or one of the new Tom Waits albums. The Amon Tobin record. Tomorrow I could probably add another half dozen to the list.
The truth, of course, is that if I really made a list of my favorite records of the last year --the records I actually played the most, regardless of their release dates-- half or more of the 2002 discs in my lineup likely wouldn't even make the cut. There's an interesting question, I think: how many of the records on your list last year did you actually play this year? My own answer would be: not very many. I listened instead to PJ Harvey's Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea from 2000, and to The Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime from 1984. I listened to a lot of African music and to The Anthology of American Folk Music and to old Horace Parlan, Andrew Hill, and Cecil Taylor records. I literally spend hundred of hours listening to old regional funk 45s. I might have pulled out Love and Theft once, but I sure don't remember listening to Bjork, The Strokes, or Radiohead. I probably played Chuck Berry and James Brown more than all my favorites from last year combined.
That's the problem with new music; it takes away from all the great records you haven't listened to for far too long. When was the last time, for instance, you listened to The Basement Tapes or Astral Weeks or Singles Going Steady? Looking over my initial choices for my favorite records of the year I suspect that many of them --as briefly happy as they may have made me--will get filed away in the racks and largely obliterated from my memory by both the past and the future.
3:42:57 PM 
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