Walker sent me this New Yorker Talk of the Town piece reflecting the question, which (with my affection for year-end “best” lists) I have been noticing increasingly on the critics’ lips this season, of why exactly we need the lists at all. Louis Menand’s answer, here, is that the year would “not make sense” without the lists:
You need, you realize, a list, and in exactly the same way that a drowning sailor needs a life preserver. The people who make these annual lists, the daily or weekly reviewers, have crossed the great sea of packaged amusement, pathos, and distraction for us, and they have emerged, clutching in their hands just ten plastic jewel cases. Here, they say; these are the best. We can imagine the nausea and entertainment fatigue they must have suffered during their twelve-month ordeal. We admire their grit and their pluck, and we salute them.
I thought it was just that, as I have grown up and become otherwise preoccupied, I am less au courant with new cultural developments, in pop music especially. But Menand shares my experience:
It’s not just that you don’t recognize ninety per cent of the stuff for sale. You don’t even recognize the categories. Electronica, Techno-House, Alternative Country, IDM (it stands for Intelligent Dance Music, as opposed, evidently, to the other kind). There are rows of bins containing Christian-rap CDs, and people are actually looking through them.
This being established, he goes on to explore the skill and care that must be taken in crafting these lists (in the process, condemning those who list their ten picks in alphabetical order as cheating us of needed further distinction…). Not only must the choices on the list be good; the list itself must be a work of art itself, it is as if he is saying.
If the lists function to help us indulge wisely in a world of increasingly limited leisure time and a bewildering multiplicity of choices, how alarming to find that different critics have different films, or recordings, on their lists. First, this is a reflection of the increasing fragmentation of culture into, as Menand nicely puts it, “thinner and thinner demographic slices,” so that a responsible media outlet must be pluralistic. Menand closes his essay a bit abruptly for my taste; his way of coping with his anxiety about not being given a clear dictate about what was the year’s best is merely to emphatically state his disapproval of such pluralism and democracy.
So Menand’s reflections go a long way to address the question of why we need the lists. Metaquestion, not addressed: why is it now, this year, that the question is being asked?
