Year-end lists typically rank work produced in the last calender year.
I don't criticize the 'year' as an arbitrary unit, but the development of music hardly obeys the call for the production of work in neat, yearly batches. Music follows its own immanent logic, its own diversions and perversions, experimenting in sound, arrangement, and sensibility.
The distortion produced by thinking in production units of a 'year' is due to the primacy this thinking gives to the market.
The 'year fetish' demands that we favor 'new' music. This is how commercial retailers would want us to behave. Easier to stock their shelves that way. This is how record companies would want us to behave. Easier to know who to promote and who to let go. This is even how artists wish us to behave, insofar as artists typically want us to focus on what they're doing next, since they invariably are sick of their last year's work. The year-end lists gives record companies a last sales boost before they restock with next year's model.
Attention to this year's model promotes the acceptance of the quick obsolescence of creative work. It degrades at an ideological level the value of repeated listening. It limits our range of evaluation to the contemporary, rather than in relation to music's own differentiated history. I don't wish to dismiss the punk aesthetic, where the shock-now of sound is what matters--but that's not connected to this year's model, but rather, this minute's model. Totally different.
At an institutional level, the year fetish puts the evaluation of music into the hands of experts who are given promotional copies and are otherwise paid to listen to music everyday, all the time. But that is not how we mere amateurs listen to music. To aim towards ingesting the full scope of music in order to rank and file them is to answer to a norm of totalizing rationality: let's evaluate all before we can make sense of one. But why shouldn't a highly partial evaluation of music be better, since it is only within a narrow scope of opportunity that we listen at all. The new music that we take in is new for us, even if it was not produced this 'year.'
But notice that 'experts' borrow and pervert this logic of heteronomy through the concept of genres. They will specify music with respect to its nearest kin. The problem is that this use of 'kin' does not reflect lived experience. It is only through the already highly ordered and genre'd-out world that this sort of evaluation makes sense. But this puts the cart before the horse. Let's listen first. The error on the part of critics to genre-fill forces musicians to make genre-specific decisions about instrumentation, arrangement and what not. Musicians are pressed to satisfy expectations rather than demand of themselves genuine production. But we can hardly take such responsiveness seriously as music; it is instead serious only as an example of a concept, and this is a perversion of music, for it emphasizes only its consoling function. Music consoles to the degree that we can comfortably identify its sonic pedigree, and this is because we already know where it fits into our lives: reggae for feeling loose, classical for thinking, jazz for feeling down with it, right? Where music already answers the questions we pose to it, it has stopped listening.
Consumers take in music not on a rational model of full exposure to this year's work, nor through genre-specific ear phones, but on the very particular wendings of accident: we hear a song at a friend's house, on an oldies station, written about in a magazine, on our kid's boom-box, referred to by a movie star we adore, mentioned in a book about something else, off a record picked from a crate on the street, played as a standard in a club, used on a t.v. commercial or radio jingle, incorporated into a dance project, from a tape picked up at the lost and found in an airport, downloaded by typing in random words into an mp3 search engine, because we were attracted to the sexy CD cover art. Of course corporate interests try to control what's out there so random encounters are already severely filtered. Fortunately such total administration is well beyond their reach, though we listeners need to be sensitive to the political economy behind apparently random encounters.
As music consumers, the year fetish makes a case that musical appreciation and even our self-esteem is beholden to what is 'hip and now.' Hogwash. The year fetish merely speeds up consumption cycles to accomodate production cycles. It falsifies the solidarity produced by a shared love of music by forcing its dependence on market swings. It deliberately displaces culpability from what the industry gave us last year. It rewards those who produce here and now instead of those who produce for the duration. It keeps an industry employed whose job is to keep the new before our eyes. It forces our eyes wide shut for the next big thing, rather than giving time to our ears to plumb the intracacies or just groove out on what demands more attention.
In short, the year fetish removes the idea of pleasure in research from its position as a contemporary and necessary component of our everyday. That's the major issue I have when the pace of consumption is dictated by the forces of production. It doesn't allow for our lifeworld to thoughtfully incorporate and to be enriched by its product.
I don't want to make the case that we should ignore new work--far from it. Simply that a category of new work ought not to be respected in a 'best of' unless it's good work. And the relevant groupings of good work, to my mind, are established immanently by musical traditions working themselves out in relation to the shifts in the receptive ear, by artists developing their own range and responding to what they see and hear in music but also more widely, and exoterically by accident of biography for artists and listeners.
If you take an interest in music, you quickly learn that the historical soundscape is overgrown. There are thousands of obstacles to hearing good tunes, and likewise, many, many openings. On the down side, there is too little time, money, too poor a distribution of many records, too much over-promotion of too few artists, too often the disappearance of small labels by hook and by crook which tanks whole back catalogs at a go. There are too many day jobs which don't allow for music, and of course other responsibilities beckon: crying babies, mortgage payments, television, etc. Listening takes work, and there are a thousand whys and ways to shirk.
Some music continues to speak to us, while other music we ought to be rid of. A 'best of 2002' list needs to reflect the music that we kept turning to again and again in that year, regardless of what year the music was produced. For it was effectively produced now. And that's the point of music.
Okay you get the point.
So here is the best music of 2002.
Modest Mouse, Everywhere & His Nasty Parlour Tricks. Sony, 2001.
Cat Power, What would the community think? Matador, 1996.
Mouse on Mars, Iaora Tahiti. Too Pure, 1995.
Matthew Shipp Horn Quartet, Strata. Hatology, 1998.
Daniel Carter, Laurence Cook, Peter Kowald, Jonathan LaMaster. Principle Hope. Sublingual Records, 2002.
Bill Laswell, Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974. Sony, 1998.
Organic Grooves, Black Cherry. Aum Fidelity, 2002.
Sonic Youth, Washing Machine. Geffen, 1995.
Tertúlia do Fado de Coimbra, Relíquias. Edisco, 1994.
Nightmares on Wax, Carboot Soul. Warp, 1999.
"Number Nineteen," by Dave Schramm, Folk und die Folgen. Return to Sender, 1994.
"Besame Mucho," performed by Cesaria Evora, Best of Cesaria Evora, BMG Int'l, 1998.
"Deep Inside," performed by Cat Power on the London radio show Peel Sessions. Original by Mary J. Blige.