Year-end lists showcase change in musical taste, but older songs keep their diehard fans.
Year-end music lists tend to get me excited (it really is about the small pleasures in life) and because of them I can be found trawling through ridiculous amounts of web pages and spending many valuable man-hours reading about and listening to music from the past year that has figured on the favourite music lists of the Western music media.
Of course, all of it is subjective and often devised with some amount of ulterior motive, and, when you really think about it, the Fleet Foxes could hardly have made the best album in 2008 in the entire world. It could well be that an artist from Ghana might have made a better album, but who’s to judge, and, well, that’s just the way it is. So I enjoy music lists. I wouldn’t swear by them, but they introduce me to new music, keep me updated and, at the very least, make for very interesting reading. Can’t really complain.
Though I’ve recently discovered that what makes for even more interesting reading are the comments that people leave in reply to the year-end lists online. While some applaud the choice of “best album of the year”, others are vexed enough to leave comments that border on death threats (see Stereogum.com’s user-voted Gummy Awards for further illustration). I suppose that this could be taken as another sign of health for the music industry, to have people passionate enough about music that they listen to, to get involved with it online and go so far as to have verbal showdowns claiming that their favourite music is far better than what someone else listens to.
One of the more unfortunate things about the age that we live in is that there aren’t enough people around discussing new music. There seems to be an (over)abundance of fortysomethings claiming to be intellectual authorities on CSNY, Pink Floyd, the Beatles and everything else from 20 years ago, but it’s only getting harder to randomly bump into people who share an enthusiasm for the new TV on the Radio album or even good new music by Indian artists. Which makes year-end lists so much more important to people interested in new music — music that directly reflects and is linked to the world we live in.
Looking through the more popular lists for the year gone by does suggest that whoever put them together paid no attention whatsoever to genre. It now seems only natural that artists like Bon Iver, Portishead and Erykah Badu would appear in the same list. The good thing is that it re-enforces the fact that more music and a greater variety of music is being appreciated by people all over the world than ever before.
And it has very little to do with people being exposed to music through traditional music television and radio and more to do with people finding and buying or illegally downloading music online and being exposed to new music through films and television serials and other kinds of new strategies. So, as people adapt in terms of consuming music, their tastes in music seem to be adapting too. Interestingly, there could not be a more optimistic (musical) note to end the year on.