Sunday, July 04, 2004

Pitchfork's Top 100 Albums Of The 70's and The Making Of Lists    I'm halfway through Pitchfork's top 100 albums of the 70's and I'm contemplating the inherent dilemmas of compiling such a list and conflicting feelings felt when reading it. What is the purpose of making a list like this? Perhaps it's all for the best of reasons: to illuminate the listening experience of the populace. Of course, this is an inherently flawed concept giving that most people will already have heard the vast majority of the records on the list (given the intended Pitchfork reader) and already have their own opinions on them. Still, some records will be new to people of course so there's still some learning to be taken from the experience: just not that much.    Perhaps the reason to compile this is just to get people talking. Everyone will inevitably disagree about the records on the list and complain how -record X- got left off, serving to make us all feel good about ourselves for knowing so much more about music than the pompous folks who had the nerve to put the list together. I mean...as pointed out here, the whole country genre is forgotten. Maybe it's overly ambitious to try to compile a decade's top 100 albums list across every genre...it's essentially impossible to do without leaving out a lot of worthy contenders if not whole genres.    Of course, as always, non-English language releases are almost completely absent. That always happens when the list is compiled by people who just so happen to speak English. It's pretty unlikely that only people who sing in English make a decade's best music! Also, in this case you have primarily a bunch of  twenty-somethings choosing what makes the cut. How much music could these people possibly learn about in the ten or even fifteen years that they've been truly digging for musical knowledge? This is not to denigrate their impressive analysis or how much they have absorbed in such a short time; they obviously have spent most of their lives truly searching for musical knowledge and have acquired a lot of it.    It's just that most of their historical analysis would have to be learned long after the fact. I'm not sure that even matters really...should it matter that people are passing judgement on the merits and placing the historical contexts of records released before most of them were born? I'm not sure. All I know is that the longer I live and the more I hear, the more I realize I just don't know about music. There's so much I'll never know...and just because I don't know it sure doesn't mean it isn't important! I guess I feel like the more I learn the more I know I'd never really feel comfortable making a best-records-of-the-decade list: especially across genres and times I wasn't around to truly experience as they happened...    Maybe I just lack the guts of these Pitchfork folks! Either way, I commend them on their efforts and well...I'm going to enjoy the rest of the list. The sooner I finish the sooner I can complain about what they forgot/got wrong/etc! Perhaps that's the whole point! Here goes!... 10:38:45 AM    comment []