i don’t know if this is just a symptom of having a twitter account but i feel like pop culture discourse all seems to have devolved into a perpetual game of tug of war. ‘taylor swift is good!’ proclaims the vast majority of human beings on planet earth, inviting an inevitable chorus of ‘actuallys’ to drown that opinion out to the point where counter-‘actuallys’ ultimately swallow that pseudo-hot-take alive. we all know this is just a matter of individual opinion and hardly anyone is even trying to pretend otherwise—it’s just the normal state of affairs in a post yanny/laurel world where the world’s most prominent figures have tricked us into seeing them as the underdogs after accumulating so much positive attention that a negative backlash of equal force becomes inevitable.
in the insular sphere of culture journalism this effect comes out most divisively at the end of the year when publications roll out their ‘best of’ lists, which do us all a favor by confidently assigning objective rankings to titles within various corners of media that any rational person would argue can’t possibly be compared. it’s a facet of the industry that most people look forward to, until they don’t anymore for one reason or another, until they maybe do again when they find new merits in these rankings, or maybe when they find a publication that finally represents their individual interests (this particular seasonal tug-of-war unfortunately also unfolds over twitter: ‘actually, lists are good!’ says some guy seemingly only in response to something he tweeted in 2016). it’s so, so stupid, but it’s also incredibly fun to be a part of and to observe.
personally, i was anti-list before i joined the flood staff, ever since whatever year it was that kendrick, sufjan, joanna, kamasi, bjork, and grimes were unimpeachably in everyone’s stop spots. my biggest gripe—as is most people’s—is the way every website still seems to list the same albums in their top 10s only in slightly different orders. it feels like a blatant admission that we’ve all been copying off of each other’s assignments all year before either continuing to copy off each others’ final exams, at worst, or at best doing the assignment ourselves after our brains have been molded by the groupthink mentality we’ve engaged in over the past 11 months.
from an editorial perspective i’ve recently come around to year-end lists as i’ve begun to recognize that it permits our writers to conceive of one last mini-essay on the music they’ve spent the most time with over the course of the year, permitting them to share more informed and genuinely impassioned takes on the releases than can be found in a review typed up on a tight deadline in order to be published before or around release date. this year i noticed a trend in other sites’ blurbs getting shorter, which made me glad to be able to offer more space for this kind of writing rather than just assigning a superficial copywriting gig to complement an album cover and a big fat number. i’m not particularly optimistic that our readers engaged with these blocks of text, but i do feel good about these informed takes being archived on our site—rationalizations for our borderline-baseless decisions to include the albums in the first place.
but this year there was one thought that stayed with me through the process of choosing titles for our lists: who are we doing this for? what is our target audience, and perhaps more importantly, at what point in history will that audience be reading this? it kind of feels like we’re writing for readers of the future who want a sense of what was popular in 2022—like etching objective cultural information into tablets for future societies to uncover. but with the more common perspective that these are entirely disposable, a product that will be immediately and quickly consumed and tossed aside, it’s hard not to think back on that image of an underprepared test-taker insecurely double-checking their work against others’ hoping not to get docked for a wrong answer.
as an editor, it’s tempting to mention the fact that when i solicit my writers for their personal year-end lists in order to lay the foundation for the site’s cumulative list, what they send me often reflects the lack of original thought among our final list and those of our peers—largely the same pool of releases in different order, with the occasional left-field pick thrown in for good measure. the fact of the matter is that most of these freelancers are making ends meet by contributing to these other sites, helping to shape their editorial focus, while additionally reading those sites to get a sense of that editorial focus, if not merely as a fan looking for recommendations. in turn, those sites help shape the writers’ tastes which are then projected back onto us.
the simple solution to uniformity in list-making, then, seems to be a stronger editorial voice championing unique artists or genres to differentiate ourselves from the sites we’re instead trying to mimic. but that solution becomes a whole lot less simple when you factor in just how hard it is to find writers who specialize in these unique artists or genres (let alone the fact that publications rarely hold onto permanent staff members with those unique voices for a full year). instead these releases are often relegated to a weirdly backhanded genre of list seemingly forged by disgruntled writers and editors of yore whose top picks didn’t make the final cut for being too obscure, which praises these releases while fully acknowledging that they didn’t make the ‘best albums’ cut. as i’ve come to realize, it’s so much easier to assign blurbs when the album’s getting cosigns from half the pool of contributors.
(side note: whenever i see a ‘best releases of the year you may have missed’ post, it almost feels like a more apt pronoun should be ‘we,’ considering these off-the-beaten-path picks are generally fairly mainstream titles by artists who don’t/can’t hire big-name pr firms to ensure every writer and editor hears the record in advance. (another aside: if i see billy woods on one more of these lists i s2g.))
without that distinct editorial voice, and without impassioned writers offering their distinct critical voice to more ubiquitous music, the industry falls into this weirdly somnambulistic assembly line routine, the dreaded contemporary evil that is the ‘content machine’ endlessly churning out headlines barely longer than the posts themselves—seemingly condensed out of fear of going off script, whether that means stepping out of line critically with our peers or venturing too far off course from mass-duplicated press releases. at this point year-end lists hit like the reveal of a lineup for a music festival you were never planning on going to, but you still thoroughly scan the names before concocting an unsolicited take on it. after all, what is music journalism anymore besides curation of proper nouns?
i keep thinking about how when we posted our best albums list to twitter last week, the first engagement we got was a user who likely began following us when we offered positive press to a cult songwriter with a fairly large fanbase, who simply replied to the tweet with a picture of that artist’s new album’s cover—no commentary, just a petty acknowledgment that we’d let them down by overlooking a release we’d claimed we were riding hard for earlier this year. and honestly? fair! we were seemingly one of the only publications to offer the artist critical exposure, even if they seemed to have accumulated an organic following elsewhere.
while i don’t personally think that particular release was worthy of being called one of the top 25 albums of the year by my personal standards, or even those of our website, it’s entirely valid to get upset after following a publication for a year due to them tapping into a corner of music that’s so often overlooked only to have them betray you at the end of the year by reminding you that this music is still worse than beyonce—an unbeatable metric by nearly anyone’s standards. kinda makes me realize that at the end of the day it feels like we’re only doing these lists for ourselves out of a sense of resignation, if not in self-defense. a definitive proclamation of ‘actually’ addressed only at our own priorly stated opinions.