New shit has come to light, man

After hours of mulling, fingers gently rubbing the barely post-pubescent stubble on my chin, I have chosen to call myself out--in a way.

So a few weeks ago I posted about my disdain for the year-end list. It was quite possibly the most obvious and inane thing I've ever written (don't count that Best Buy entry--it has been disowned but not deleted), but--to quote some famous St. Charles residents--I got angst. I turned into the 14-year-old LiveJournal devotee and I put my angst into words and likely made a fool of myself.

Maybe I'm going too far, because I'm not trying to discredit myself completely. Like many people, the year-end lists annoy me like nothing else. After the flood of personal year-end lists on people's Audioscrobbler journals and half-assed blogs (I follow these both very closely so I can justify my existence), I got tired of lists with no backing because I simply don't care. In fact, even lists with backing started to piss me off.

Where I erred was in my discussion of the flaw of the list concept, because I'd be a hypocrite and a liar if I said that I don't regularly read and subscribe to certain lists--I'm often a whore for them, in fact. See, here's my a little scope into my music tastes: I have an immature fear of being ignorant. The fear that maybe somewhere, at some point in the near future, some great almighty pop culture and music god will come down and demand: "MY SON... HAVE YOU OR HAVE YOU NOT HEARD THE LATEST OFFERING FROM XIU XIU?"...."wait, wait, i gotta switch to lowercase... you're kidding me, right?"..."wow."...."yeah, you heard me, you're fucking banish-ed."

It's great and all that people recognize the significance of certain music in respect to themselves, but it really is of no interest to me. What does often interest me is the comprehensive list--the one where a good chunk of (hopefully) respectable opinions are combined to define the greatest and the most essential of a certain time period (particularly the past). As I mentioned in the previous passage, I know music, but I don't know all of it, and while knowledge of a high volume of music is near-impossible, there's always someone who knows more than me. It's through these comprehensive lists that I deduce that if an album has affected so many people over such a period of time, it just might affect me too.

I guess the real question here is, "Why should I trust a critic?," and that I don't think I can answer. Then again, what have we learned from Gallup-style opinion polls? You guessed it--"Hybrid Theory" is the greatest album of all time. I suppose this all means that this inner circle of critics, musicians and obsessed music fans are really the only ones "that get it." I want to say that is complete bullshit, but... I guess some people really do just "know."

So, lists... can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Proposition (GASP!): We hold an election of all the people that get it, each "I get it person" writes a top ten, and every five years we re-evaluate our "Best Albums of the (Insert Decade)" lists. Then I go to the record store. It's that simple.


Oh, and about that podcast... now that I actually have an excuse (headphones broke), I'll give you the "keep cool, my babies!" for now.