top ten addiction

NOTE: this piece is titled "top ten addiction" because it began as an exploration of top ten lists. when it went elsewhere i decided to leave the title as-is.

revised: 01/17/2005

It seems that these days you aren't anyone and you haven't done anything if you are lacking a position on some list that ranks, orders and quantifies an aspect of our culture. There are only 50 most beautiful people in the world. The rest of us belong to a class of the lesser and least beautiful people. Last year there were ten movies better than the rest, and only ten. If you look hard enough, and have enough underemployed character actors and comedians to comment on them, you can illuminate the world about the 40 Most Awesomely Bad #1 Songs . . . Ever.

The list has become a short hand method of understanding where different aspects of our world connect with our individual existence, or perhaps they are just a way to fill time. Regardless, the list has become omnipresent in our lives. They tell us about our history, they contextualize our present and they inform our view of the world as it relates to our condition.

Some lists are objective, and maybe, to some, even useful, the Fortune 500 and the Billboard Hot 100, even the New York Times best-seller list give us a glimpse of the ebb and flow of dollars and public taste. Others illuminate the trends of popular sentiment when the public is allowed, in an excercise of democracy gone wrong, to "vote" for the Best-Worst-Most Known articles in a particular area of the culture (SEE The People's Choice Awards).

We know what the 100 greatest films of all time are, because the American Film Institute took the time to tell us. If we could only read 100 novels in our life, and we only wanted to read the best, thanks to the Observer we know which novels are the 100 greatest ever. (The Modern Library also has a 100 greatest novels list in two parts, one list from "experts" and one list from readers. Seven of the top ten novels on the readers' list were either by L. Ron Hubbard or Ayn Rand -- but not to give sway to so called experts, on the accreditted side we have The Wide Sargasso Sea -- the reimagined prequel of a classic Victorian Novel-- coming in at 94 and Jane Eyre -- aforementioned Victorian Novel -- was . . . not on the list.) We just closed out a millenium, and fortunately there were numerous lists of the most important people, places and events of the last 100, 1000 years all laid out in tight bulleted lists explained in brief pithy sentences.

The list, at its worst, is our cultural junkfood standing as a tiny monolith of truth and finality. At its best, the list becomes a jumping off point for further exploration. I know, for example, that at some point I need to get some Captain Beefheart records. I know this because Trout Mask Replica is on any list of any note of "THE GREATEST ROCK/POP/AMERICAN BLAHBLAHBLAH OF THE CENTURY/ALL TIME/EVER/FOR NOW" and because it is so ubiquitous I have to admit some curiosity.

A beautiful thing about pop culture lists (and especially my favorite list archtype -- greatest album of all time [a good source for these is rocklist.net]) is that they are beginning to get some history. Because, despite all out best scientific efforts and cosmetic advances, time is linear and EVER is a continuum, there are always new ideas, new products and new opinion sacks on the scene and we need to constantly reevaluate the absolutely meaningless standings of cultural and entertainment properties.

A few years ago, The Clash were everyone's favorite dub-punk outfit and a classic, no doubt. But now that London Calling has been remastered and repackaged and rereleased with TONS of really cool extra bonus features including and interactive CD-ROM for the total virtual punk experience, the Clash are now hailed as the greatest punk band ever, and the aforementioned album is now one of the most important documents produced by hands of man since the Magna Carta. The Clash is moving, with the assistance of shrewd public relations and an inexplicable nostalgia for the '80s, up in the world and in the rankings. In 1998 Q magazine's Readers poll of the "100 Greatest Albums Ever" ranked London Calling at 32nd. Five years later tha album climbed 18 spots to 14th greatest album ever. Recall that these lists are respectively nineteen and twenty-four years after the album was released. Did London Calling really get that much better in five years? And on the same lists, R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People fell from a high in 1998 of 3rd greatest to a respectable 30th greatest. Did AFTP get that much worse? Did twenty-seven really great albums get released in those five years? No, of course not. (It is important to understand that these "readers' polls" are barometric in nature and the vascillations of taste are reflected therein. In 1998 KulaShaker's K was ranked in the top 50 albums of the Q poll. In 2003 the majority of people would be hard pressed to name a song by KulaShaker, but would invariably agree that KulaShaker was a really great name for a band that only expected to have one hit.) New Musical Express published a 1985 list of the magazine's writers "All Time 100 Albums" that did not even include London Calling, however in the same publication, eight years later, the album had risen to seventh. (In the interest of full disclosure, in NME's 2003 list London Calling had fallen to 12th. So, not everyone thinks the album is getting better.)

We use lists as a medium to define our experience. At the end of the year we comb the inevitable shower of lists defining everything from the top movies and music to the best new products for the home and compare them against our experience. It's an inventory we take. Did I have the best year I could? Is there something I missed? (I do this compulsively. As I get older, my score drops. I see fewer movies and have less interest in new music. I try to catch up in January, cobbling together a complete view of the previous year, a year in which I was not in a coma but still . . .) These year end lists also serve as cautionary reminders to the consuming public. This is when the critics have the opportunity to tell us about what we missed because we were too stupid and un-hip to "get it." Appearance on the year end "best of" lists has become a pop culture consolation prize. I remember the year (1998) In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the album by Neutral Milk Hotel, appeared on nearly every "top album of the year" list. Without a blitz of marketing or radio play or a spin around TRL anyone who paid attention to the critics in December of 1998 knew who Neutral Milk Hotel were. While NMH are not jetting around tropcal locales sipping Cristal thanks to the effusive praise of Scott Hellman, et. al. the considerable attention the album received did allow, if only briefly, the members of the band to quit their jobs at the local gas station and do the thing that they really love for a while. The American Dream can have a singular sort of fulfillment.

This is not a sudden phenomenon. Lists have been made for a long time, but often they were (and still are) statistical in nature. This is where we must make a distinction between lists that are fact and lists that are opinion. Ask two agricultural experts what are the top five agricultural exports of the state of California by dollar value, and you will get the same response from Expert A that you will from Expert B. Ask them what are the five tastiest agricultural exports from the State of California, and you will find some differences and a better idea for a television pilot. There has been a growth of late, it seems, in the weight and number of subjective quantifications.

I'm looking for specific origins of the holy grail of quantification: the Top Ten list -- the keystone of our cultural taxonomy. Why ten? Why not seventeen or eight? The advantage of ten is that it is small, but comprehensive, it's an even stable number. I've searched for an earlier instance (and I'm sure it exists) but the first instance I can find of the Top Ten appears in 1950, with, you may have guessed, J. Edgar Hoover's list of the FBI's Most Wanted. Combine this with the first Nobel Prize in 1901, the Academy Awards in 1927, the emergence of Mr. Blackwell's list in 1960 and the debut of David Letterman's Top Ten list in 1985 and we see a progression of the subjective. An accretion, if you will, of pithy banter; a lot of sizzle and very little steak.

I am sure that this inquiry drives much deeper into our collective psyche than can be addressed in this brief space. We have bestowed laurels upon the chosen and the exceptional since, well, the Greeks and their laurel wreaths. But an olympian accolade comes from the besting of one's competitors and, assuming nobody bought off the French judge, the placing of the performance aknowledges one's place among peers. Throughout history we have had many public honors and recognitions for service, deed and acheivement (not always positive, "Wanted, Dead or Alive" doesn't exactly buy you a condo in heaven). In Greece of the Golden Age there were awards for writing and sport and, in Athens, popularity. The Catholic Church had(has) a grand hierarchy of increasing veneration and honor. Kings granted titles of nobility and ordered the social column. Armies have, in memory, granted medals and rank and even spoils of war to warriors key to victory or valiant in defeat.

There is a social order, imposed or constructed through mutual agreement. We all make the little judgements and decisions that take us from craddle to grave. We have personal metrics of beauty and value. In an age and culture where reproduction is inevitable, perhaps we are turning our attention to the cultural genes we are leaving to the next generation. There is an entire byzantine area of study devoted to these artifacts and phenomenon, memetics. (The very existance of memetics leads me to believe that we have too much food and not enough war to keep us occupied, but that is for another time.) We all want to participate in the ordering of society. We want to evaluate our place and test our judgements against recognized authority. We want to be the authority (insta-web-polling) and mark our influence on the next thousand years. And so we stack blocks or watch others stack blocks. We order and reduce our environment to give a comprehensive view of ourselves. It's not good enough exist and observe. We have to shoot for the top ten.