last year i blogged at you about coming to terms with year-end list culture, a topic that means the world to people who contribute to year-end lists and one that means absolutely nothing to everybody else. i still stand by everything i wrote last december, but i should maybe add the caveat here that while i do love blurbing things for lists, and throwing together cursory lists of my own, and scrolling through other people’s lists while shaking my head and saying tsk tsk tsk out loud to the audience of interpol agents assigned to my webcam, i’ve never felt even remotely comfortable publishing my own finalized list at the end of any given year.
the reason for this is twofold: firstly, i feel like i’ve barely even made a dent in the ever-growing pile of albums or movies i might want to include on anything remotely definitive. secondly, and this is important, read this part, don’t skip down further as you would if this post itself was a year-end list, even if i’ve almost certainly said this exact thing before in this exact newsletter, i don’t think anyone could possibly know for sure how they feel about any given piece of media after only a year (at most) of having consumed it.
speaking as someone who can kind of almost claim to be a professional in the field of listening to music and knowing what to think about it, there is so much fluctuation in the running lists i keep all year; there are records i go into just assuming i’ll love them because of who’s making them which will pop up on shuffle months later and make me go what on earth am i listening to this needs to stop without realizing what it is and knowing what i’m supposed to think about it, while others reveal their appeal to me years later once i have more context for them.
for the past two years i’ve written up a (relatively) formal list of my 10 favorite movies of the year 10 years prior (2011, 2012), and this exercise alone has been really eye-opening for this realization. each year there were a couple movies i rewatched before blurbing only to realize i’d only seen them once (sometimes around the time they were initially released)—absolute shite movies i’d wrongly considered to be among the 10 best of that year for nearly a decade. humiliating! if there’s one guy i’ve learned not to trust it’s me a decade ago. you should see the leather jacket i wore in 2013 which i thought i could pull off.
i think it’s even tougher to rank albums immediately after they’ve been released. as much as i hate to see music treated as a disposable product whose life cycle directly overlaps with its release cycle in a venn diagram, i can understand why it loses its appeal after a week or so. beyond its immediate, replaceable value, it’s an empty vessel to ultimately be filled with nostalgia, whether that’s personal memories tied to the period of your life when the record dropped or broader cultural cache (you know that thing where you have the thought for the first time ‘oh shit this sounds like music from 2013’ rather than just ‘oh shit this sounds like music’?).
i wonder if people who don’t exist within the same critical bubbles as me are able to connect to music better in that way (without full-on getting forever stuck exclusively consuming whatever media they loved in college)—in fact i wonder if the people who do exist within these circles have something to learn from it: avenues for individuals to write about media in engaging, non-objective-bullet-point ways seem to fan out more and more as time passes, far beyond the anniversary write-up model of presenting the subject’s cultural impact. you’ve gotta have at least one story about a buzzy garage-punk record being ruined for you by listening to it while a friend serves you a mystery shot he calls ‘the gulf of mexico’ which you soon find out, to your horror, is just tequila and a mountain of salt, and that’s gotta make for an interesting revisitation of it!
maybe i’ll expand on this idea next year but one of the posts i’ll be sharing over the next couple of weeks as i roll out what the poetic voices of our generation have termed ‘engaging content’ celebrating 10 years of 2013 is a list of 40 albums from that year that i still return to (as well as, yeah, some i’ve heard for the first time recently) paired with write-ups that at least in part see me try to put myself back in the headspace i inhabited when they first dropped without sounding like your uncle ensuring you the last good rock band was, i don’t know, fuckin…..ratt. i wish i had a story as cool as the gulf of mexico one to apply to each of these but i don’t, so don’t get your hopes up.
otherwise, i’ll have the next installment of my top 10 movies from a decade ago which i’m excited to share, not only considering the fact that none of them bombed as hard as some of the previous years’ initial entries had, but because each one made me feel such a visceral emotion which is—regardless of which emotion that is—the precise thing that makes me want to write about media in the first place.
there will also be some absolutely stupid shit. prepare yourself for some really, really dumb shit. in fact, i’ll probably send that first. just to get it out of the way.
i couldn’t find a decent pic of the leather jacket so i’ll leave you with a few of the poems i posted to a bagel company’s official facebook page in 2013 in hopes of securing some free product: