Five Best Ten Best Posted by Ben Greenman

December 4, 2009
Five Best Ten Best Posted by Ben Greenman

First, I'm going to list all the lists that I drafted and discarded: Ten Best Albums of the Year, Ten Best Songs of the Year, Ten Best Album Covers of the Year, Ten Best Albums of the Decade, Ten Best Artists Who Passed Away Within the Last Decade. I discarded them because the desire to make lists was being exhausted by having to read other lists. Everywhere I went, I saw them—on blogs, in newspapers, on the tips of people's tongues. They were everywhere I turned and some places I didn't turn. Taken individually, they were proof of fandom, of a writer's interest in surveying the scene of pop music and applying some landscaping skills. Taken cumulatively, they were something more confusing and sinister: an attempt at expertise in a world where opinion is increasingly democratized.

But I am a scientist, and, as a result, to make sense (and nonsense) of those various issues, I decided to link to a handful of other lists, summarize their findings, and react to their top picks. I figured that visiting the blogs I sometimes visit would reflect, however imperfectly, on my own tastes, although that only turned out to be partly true (some of my favorite sites haven't made their lists yet, and some of the kinds of music I depend upon—hip-hop, say, or new records from artists who started back in the nineteen-fifties) are hardly represented. I also didn't want to go to the biggest sites and leave out smaller blogs; that would have been like doing a top-ten album list and only mentioning Beyonce and Rihanna. Without any further delay, here is my list of lists.

* Music Induced Euphoria

I don't know much about this blog other than that it's written by a music fan from the Bay Area, and that I like to read it now and again. Her profile note includes the somewhat presumptuous remark that "I spend all of my money on music and think you should do the same." Here, the top-ten list leans heavily on indie rock, with an emphasis on rock: Them Crooked Vultures made it, along with Julian Casablancas' solo début, Black Lips, and Phoenix. Her top pick was Telekinesis, a group that is, on album, basically the solo work of a Seattle musician named Michael Benjamin Lerner. When the self-titled record came out in April, I remember listening to it and thinking that it was a winsome, unassuming, but very emotionally solid group of pop songs. Evidently, Music Induced Euphoria agreed.

* Random Thoughts From the Revolution

Chris Queen, the proprietor of this blog, is a Georgia native who works as director of communications at Eastridge Community Church in Covington. His list is a mix of country (Pat Green), Beatle-derived (he talks about the Beatles remasters in his intro, and includes Peter Mayer's "Goodbye Hello"), and Christian (David Crowder Band, Hillsong United, Future of Forestry). His top pick is Gomez's "A New Tide," which I was surprised to find, since it is neither country, Beatles-derived, nor Christian; I also must respectfully disagree, since I found the record deeply uninteresting, and the fact that there was a song called "Win Park Slope" (the Brooklyn neighborhood where I live, and where some of the band members now live) irked me. On the other hand, Queen admits that even his favorites are flawed, which keeps his list from simple boosterism.

* Criticism as Inspiration

One of this blog's contributors posted a best-of list at the end of summer, which made things harder for the contributor who wanted to round up his year-end favorites. But he soldiered on, noting his disappointment that several of his favorite artists delivered subpar records this year (Morrissey, Pete Yorn, the Doves) and that some of the biggest releases had to be left off for other reasons ("I intentionally neglected to include U2's album, as I am unable to evaluate their work in isolation from their status/body of work"). What remains is a songwriter-heavy list that includes David Bazan's "Curse These Branches," Neko Case's "Middle Cyclone," The Mountain Goats' "The Life of the World To Come," Hayden's "The Place Where We Lived," and Regina Spector's "Far." It sounds like the list of a musically aware twentysomething until the remark that Passion Pit's "Manners" is "my kid's number one choice off my iPod."

* Stereogum

One of the problems with best-of-the-year lists is that the year's not over yet. What if Charlotte Gainsbourg's "IRM" or Mary J. Blige's "Stronger With Each Tear," which are coming out in late December, are career-defining masterpieces? For that reason, I went back to a different kind of list: the end-of-2008 lists that looked forward to releases slated for 2009. Stereogum's list basically covered only the first third of the year, and included albums from Dirty Projectors (Bitte Orca), M. Ward (Hold Time), and Neko Case (Middle Cyclone) that turned out to be some of the most decorated releases. On the other hand, there are mentions of groups like Blikk Fang (Kevin Barnes + MGMT) that turned out to be nothing more than a rumor.

* Sound Opinions Message Board

The Internet is all about processing a welter of voices, right? Your neighbor has a different sensibility than you, so how do you ensure that both his favorite record (some weird glitch-hop exercise that sounds like a sputtering appliance) and yours (pained country singer-songwriter) get counted? Well, one way is to start a thread on a well-attended message board like Sound Opinions. Since the first post calling for year-end lists, back on November 29th, there have been more than five hundred posts that nominate candidates, criticize nominations, suggest revisions in criteria, and so forth. There's no such thing as a clear winner here, which is part of the point; run through the jungle of posts and see what sticks. If there is consensus, it seems to point to the critically acclaimed alternative rock and songwriter albums that get most of the ink: Dirty Projectors, Neko Case, Lily Allen, Grizzly Bear, Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I heartily agree/disagree with these conclusions.
Five Best Ten Best: Goings On : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/goingson/2009/12/five-best-ten-best.html
http://snipurl.com/tv7eh