Top 10

For as long as anyone can remember popular criticism has been reduced to making lists of "the best" of a certain genre, year, artist, etc...

I personally have nothing against this, but it seems to be taken a little to liberally by most publications (electronic and otherwise) lately. Pitchforkmedia has a new top ___ list every month, and as history will tell us, overkill devalues the original product (to speak in blatantly capitalistic terms.) So I will never (I hope) release a "top" whatever list of anything, I'll say that I like things, or what I interpret things as, but you won't see a top ten list coming from this face, nope.

The format of the top ten list seems to function in popular culture as a sort of canonization of material. Let's take Pitchfork's top 50 albums of the year lists. They tell readers, from an authoritative source (an authoritative source being anything someone is reading to learn about something new to them, in this case music) "these are the best albums of the year, one must enjoy them." This, I suppose, is what criticism boils down to anyway, the canonization of texts (or documents) but this is such a dumbed down version of criticism that it results in pure drivel. Albums are taken not of someone's own accord, but on someone else's, a so called "authority" and I'm sure this relates to capitalism in it's purest form somehow, I just have to finish thinking through it before I bring that 'round.

To Be Continued...