It is that time of year when the pundits and hoi polloi alike sharpen their pencils to whittle down the previous twelve months’ worth of music into crisp, definitive lists of favorites. The intensity of this navel-gazing exercise varies widely, but the imperative remains the same: one must make a top 10 and publish it, preferably with a lot of pomp and fuss.
For someone like myself, a public radio program director, music blogger and podcaster, it is part of my job, so misgivings notwithstanding, you are going to see my top 10 albums of 2023 here. It is a good list. Maybe not what you would pick, but a solid group of great albums which are deservedly celebrated by music aficionados and casual fans alike. But what the list contains is not my focus here; what the list itself represents, and its context are what gives me most pause. There is an accelerating irony at play here, where every favorites list adds to the declining returns of their overall impact, where these tidy summations of a year’s worth of music are a tool that answers the problem of having too much good music for any one person to take in by nailing it all down into a format that presumes we could actually listen to it all.
The amount of music produced now is astounding: there are something like 11,000 songs released daily. For music lovers, that has to be a great thing, right? Well, yes and no. There are a lot of great songs in that 11,000, sure. But even if it were humanly possible to listen to all of them, who would spend all their time that way? And with this much music at our fingertips, how does that affect our listening, and how we value songs and albums? Music is a medium that is more like wallpaper then ever, with each song and album blurring into the background of our near constant consumption of curated playlists and social media reels. There never really was a time when we shared the same well of music to draw from, but our exposure to music was at least far more uniform — back in the day, you might not have cared for Prince, but you could likely hum one of his tunes. Today, you know who Taylor Swift is, but you can avoid her melodies easily enough because there is so much more to choose from on so many more platforms than there were when Prince’s music was inescapable.
We are all more like the blind men from the parable about the elephant than ever before, feeling around the massive musical beast and concluding that what we found in each part of what we explored was its sum total. Every top ten list, every year-end favorites collection springs from this myopia and lands with what is supposed to be a sharply focused picture of at least a large swath of the musical world. This is no great revelation, granted, but the fact that you already knew this on some level does not help you come to terms with a yearly landslide of lists, each of which invariably, probably immediately make you realize just how much you missed. Each of which serves to show you just how few experiences in common you have with your fellow music lovers with every unfamiliar name you read, with every pick that did not make it onto your own list.
That is the heart of it all — those common experiences with music. In our quest to boil down the year’s offerings into a favorites list, we are all abstracting a big chunk of what it means to be alive, and implicitly, hoping that others affirm that experience as well. With much less common ground but far more ground we could cover, we find ourselves sending out our messages in a bottle only to then find the shore piled with bottles containing messages that reflect a world we never knew. In an exercise that works to make sense of the musical universe, to connect with fellow music lovers, and hopefully receive some affirmation of our lived experience, we are more and more looking at a jigsaw puzzle that is impossible to solve, but are still trying to solve it the same way that we did when it had about a million fewer pieces.
This may seem cynical or pessimistic, but truly, I do believe that making a favorites list is still a worthy endeavor. Many of these lists with their unfamiliar artists are a great way to discover compelling new music. I hope you may find something here that inspires you to discover what made me feel most alive in 2023. Would that I could have fallen in love with many more that might have made it onto this list, but then again, that is a good problem to have.
1. Pony Bradshaw – North Georgia Rounder
2. Mapache – Swinging Stars
3. Mighty Poplar – Mighty Poplar
4. Viv & Riley – Imaginary People
5. Wednesday – Rat Saw God
6. Nick Shoulders – All Bad
7. Miss Grit – Follow The Cyborg
8. Get Right Band – iTopia
9. Bella White – Among Other Things
10. Justin & the Cosmics – Cool Dead
This is not the first time I have written about year-end favorites and the phenomenon of choosing them. Here is an article I wrote in December of 2010, with a focus on the psychology and rationales of list making. Enjoy, and Happy New Year!
During my preparation for a conversation with NPR's Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton about the year in music, and in sorting through all the hundreds of fantastic records in contention, I thought about the whole process of year-end lists and the personalities of those who make them.
There's the erudite list, with artists you've never heard of. The makers of these lists are the holier/obscurer-than-thou stereotype. Anything celebrated by people outside their niche, especially including their past favorite artists that went on to become popular outside those circles, may be pointed out for ridicule.
The inverse of the erudite list is the reverse psychology list, wherein an uber-hipster picks a massive hit or hits in posturing that they are truly self-actualized. "You've got Horse Feathers as number one?! Obviously you just won't admit to the genius of Jack Johnson."
There's the dilettante list, with flavors of the month and ubiquitous hits. The makers of these lists often go by name recognition and may make them after consulting with their hip friends first, and may or may not have actually listened to the albums in question.
Closely related to the dilettante list is the idolater's list, with records from all-time favorite artists. These lists will gladly inhale any bathtub farts, tout covers records as far better than the originals, and if necessary, sift down to collaborations and guest appearances.
The stepchild of the idolater's list is the campaigner's list. This is created by an artist's band mates, girlfriends, relatives and friends in an effort to gain attention that they never got in the form of actual airplay. It often involves alliances with other artists and bands to vote for each others demos and EPs as many times as humanly possible. The aural results of these year-end favorites can resemble a pot luck dinner with everyone bringing, say, casseroles or desserts.
In the same vein of the campaigner's list but from a smaller segment of the music business is the you-scratch-my-back list. Writers, publicists and broadcasters are the usual authors of these paeans to the hands that fed them, with the (usually) conscious decision to keep their supply chain of clientele, favors and access well-greased.
There's the bonus list and the short list, with either more than 10 albums in a top-10 album format, or fewer than 10 (because this year's crop wasn't up to snuff, ya know).
Don't forget Pazz and Jop lists, weighting the picks. In this list, you divvy up 100 points amongst the ten albums according to how good they were.
Also there is the agonized list, with untold numbers of drafts leading up to a year-end favorites list that has been second, third, and fourth guessed.
A cousin of the agonized list is the desperation list, which is often a last-minute exercise in navel gazing that can lead to picking Wolf People when you really liked Wolf & Cub instead but got confused, or dismissing Black Angels because Black Mountain is already a lock and you just can't have too much of the same sounding bands in your list.
There's the atheist or nihilist list, which will be a protest vote of no favorites or something like all reissues from the time period when the list maker still felt alive.
Does anyone make a bottom 10 list? That's what I would like to see.