Ben Tausig on the problems with best music of the year/decade/etc. lists:
For another thing, and I apologize if this causes tsunamis and solar flares, but albums aren’t the only way people listen to music. This is not wild-eyed technological optimism, nor a denunciation of communities where the album format still obtains. There are just so many different outlets for hearing exciting things. I would personally be much more curious, for example, to read a smart writer’s “10 best YouTube musical compositions of 2009” or “10 best songs obviously written to be ringtones” or “10 best bands from the early 1980’s I heard for the first time this year” than his or her best albums of 2009 list, if only because there is no preexisting consensus for the former three. The further a list’s conceptual underpinnings are extended, the less we can anticipate its contents, and the more likely we are to receive it as useful information rather than an argument crafted, essentially, by rearranging a bunch of checkers.
I don’t have anything else to add to that really. Thinking about music as chronology, although somewhat necessary, has its limits. Music as evolution is interrupted by the recording device, where the past becomes the present and the future. The amen break is just a 5 second transition in 1969. In 1999 it has been an entire genre of music. I like albums, and I like people talking about music they like, but at the end of the decade canons seem more unimportant than ever before. Let the sound of a thousand sound systems boom.
Tags: philosophy
amen