Listing music

I’ve always loved lists of music. As a child I used to record songs from the Finnish weekly top 40 chart to a c-cassette and loved to watch TV shows listing best music videos. Nowadays I avoid looking at the best-selling charts but instead wait eagerly for year-end lists – and lately decade-end lists – by music magazines and web sites. There’s always excitement in the air while going down the numbers, finding many of your own favorites and speculating the number one.

On the other hand, I can’t help but to think about the insanity of placing albums in a numerical order, especially when some albums have been given a whole year time to affect you while others are brand new. The effect of different release dates is the more relevant the longer the time span observed. So in addition to the problem of making lists of twenty or even hundred albums out of all the albums heard during a time span of ten years people making lists of a decade’s music have the impossible task of comparing albums like Is This It and Kid A, which have had time to effect the musical world, to albums like Merriweather Post Pavilion or the XX, which still seem quite fresh and whose effects on future releases are yet to be seen.

The consideration of the effects a music release has on other music leads us to another problem in making lists: the criteria on which to compare albums. The listings I’ve been talking about, as well as traditional album reviews, tend to emphasize on originality or uniqueness of the sound and the effects on the musical world that the music or the phenomenon around it have caused. This is natural for music media since these are two of the most objective criteria for judging music. However, when a listing is made by a single person, who represents only his or her own opinions, there are no obligations to be objective. Instead, a personal list of albums is a list of albums important and meaningful for an individual. The albums can be pieces of a person’s history with strong memories involved or just great sounding albums which you feel you never want to stop listening to.

Whether a list of music is made according to the music’s cultural effects, memories connected to the music or just by thinking what feels right at the moment doesn’t really matter. As I see it, the task of a list is to allow us to organize the music, as well as knowledge, memories and feelings connected to it, in our minds. For an active music listener, especially in today’s world where all music is a few clicks away, there is an enormous amount of information to deal with. Making lists is one way to keep it all together and bring forward the more important things while leaving behind less relevant ones. In year-end or decade-end lists this listing is combined with the units of time used in our culture. This allows us to group all that musical information in our heads in a hierarchy and network of overlapping categories and subcategories. We use this network as a map when travelling on our own world of music and when we explore areas of the musical world previously unknown to us.