Over on the bulletin boards, our annual "Best Of Music" lists have brought out the annual round of complaints: The list is too obscure, too mainstream, too hipsterish, too uniform, too male-oriented, etc. Some of the more passionate dissent bums me out–if only because this is supposed to be a fun exercise, more a celebration than a canonization–but mostly I try to stand clear of the fray, because I'm reaching an age where I love music maybe more than I ever have, yet I have zero interest in arguing about it.
It wasn't always that way. There was a time when the content of someone else's year-end best-of list would've meant a lot to me, and might've even made me stew. In fact, it's fair to say that ten years ago, I might've hated a guy like me: A middle-aged music critic getting increasingly set in his ways, visiting and revisiting the same set of favorites, year after year. Part of me still hates guys like me, except that the guys like me I hate spend all their time listening to Lucinda Williams, not Josh Rouse (which is a pretty fine distinction, I realize.)
So every time I think to myself, "Why does it matter what's on my list? Make your own list and we'll all be happy," I force myself to remember why it might matter. For example, even though now everyone's sick of hearing about hearing how great Wilco is, there was a time when Uncle Tupelo couldn't get a tumble in the mainstream rock press. (A couple of Tupelo fans had to start
their own magazine to try and rectify that situation.) When it seems like great bands aren't getting a fair shake, it's only natural for fans of those bands to take umbrage.
But maybe the situation seems less urgent to me now because there are so many on-line publications and specialty mags to tell people what's out there. Also, I get a little fed up with the backlash element to this whole process. It's not enough for people to tell me about the great bands I'm missing, they also have to insist that the bands I like actually suck. Which is mildy insulting, since I listen to something like 500 or so new CDs a year, and have been doing so ever since I turned pro over a decade ago, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of albums that have become a fairly permanent part of my life. That doesn't make my opinion any "righter" than anyone else's, but it does mean that when I say that Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings The Flood is really something special, it's no mere caprice.
On the other hand, once again, I was naysaying the list-toppers myself once upon a time. I graduated college in '92 and started freelancing almost immediately, during a time when rock radio was opening up again, though largely for bands I didn't like. In my early '20s, I wrote scathing reviews of Soundgarden, Counting Crows, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Hole, Weezer, Pearl Jam, Green Day, Beck, U2 and even Nirvana. Some of those I later turned around on–and savaging U2 then was kind of a case of "kill your idols"–but at the time, it seemed terribly important to me to elevate Superchunk and Yo La Tengo and Archers Of Loaf, and steer readers clear of Alice In Chains.
There are still plenty of musicians out there that I don't like, but I rarely write about them–or even worry about them much–because I tend to feel that just about any piece of music must have some merit if lots of people like it. What changed me? In part it was spending nearly a decade writing about local bands. It's one thing to rip apart some rich major label employee 1000 miles away, and quite another to attack a bunch of young musicians from around the corner, working hard and just trying to catch a break. I used to think that the best way to foster a healthy local scene was to treat the small-timers as harshly as I would the big-timers, but after a year or two of interviewing these folks and hearing what they were trying to do, it was tough to stay a hard-liner. And after a while I began hearing what they were trying to do, and appreciating it even when I didn't like it, per se.
Obviously, there are limits to this kind of equanimity. Open your mind too much and your brains fall out, whatnot. But
like I wrote earlier this year in my blog entry about learning to approach movies differently, my still-developing aesthetic isn't about elevating crap to the status of the great, but about recognizing a bigger pool of "good." A lot more "B"s, but the same amount of "A"s, to put it another way. Or maybe even fewer "A"s, since the more I listen to, the less original everything seems. (Of course, originality is overrated … but that's a subject for another blog post.)
Anyway, the whole notion of music–or any pop art–being "overrated" or "underrated" is kind of silly, even though I use the terms myself more than I should. Most of my friends haven't heard much of anything I listen to, and myself, I barely register what's on the charts these days. As time goes on, I do tend to subscribe more and more to Dave Marsh's theory that pop music needs to connect broadly to be really meaningful, but I also understand that the vicissitudes of the market sometimes prevent that from happening as it should–and anyway, sometimes even the obscurantists are onto something that needs to be recognized. So who's really rating what, and how? People who read a lot of music press may be fed up with The Hold Steady; but the band sure ain't getting rich off good reviews.
So, bottom line: I understand why people get worked up about lists. I just can't anymore. I like what I like, and so be it–I feel I listen to enough music to have earned the right to settle down a little. Right now, when I'm not listening to the Lynn Anderson anthology or the John Phillips reissue that have been cycling through my car's CD player, I've been spinning my two favorite albums of 2007, so far: Field Music's Tones Of Town, and The Zincs' Black Pompadour. Both are smart, melodic, guitar-based rock–not groundbreaking, but excellent. I look forward to telling everyone why these albums are so awesome in some future review, and I look forward to listening to them all next year. And when I put them on my best-of list, I dread having to defend them.