This February, I began obsessively making lists. Songs with cellos. Every book I read or every documentary I watched this year. Different things that you can eat with ginger-scallion sauce. Stories involving balloons. I don’t usually make lists, although I will generally risk malware or worse to read other people’s rankings. (Top ten N.F.L. draft busts. Worst movies set in Boston. Fifty songs from the sixties that anticipated eighties techno.) Right now, many critics are compiling their lists of the best movies or songs or books of 2020. Most years, I tend to retain only a hazy grasp of my cultural diet, and it’s been possibly a decade since I contributed in any meaningful way to a ranked best-of poll. Instead, I have an unaddressed e-mail draft where, every few months, I type things that I recently heard and liked, should anyone ask.
Years seem to be an increasingly random measure of time, especially when it comes to culture, where albums drop randomly, movies get pushed back according to studio whims or awards-season brinkmanship, and our sense of pleasure rarely aligns with the calendar. A song becomes a favorite when I can imagine enjoying it in the future, not just because I listened to it during a twelve-month stretch. My list-making this year initially grew out of restlessness. Maybe it would someday be useful to have a spreadsheet detailing how I spent my pandemic—every nineties movie I rewatched, everything I bought online. I began organizing my listening habits into private playlists—more exhaustive than the ones I usually make—according to mood and memory. I was working on a memoir about the nineties and ended up studying charts of the popular songs of 1998 to come up with a playlist for that year. Was this playlist actually what listening to the radio in 1998 felt like? Not really, because nobody limits their listening habits to music that came out during an arbitrarily demarcated time span. A more accurate reflection of the time were the lists I made that were loosely associated with my old addresses from back then: “Ida Sproul,” “Dwight Way.”
Other lists were placeholders of a sort, in which I began to sketch out universes I wanted to someday visit. Songs with kalimba. Artwork involving flowers. These lists indicate nothing about my sense of taste. But they suggest a compulsive awareness about time’s passage, a desire to displace anxious energy into nerdish ritual. The most fastidious list I maintained collects all the books I read this year. Looking back, it’s a reminder of how 2020 has felt less like a year than like a series of mini-epochs or eras, peaks and valleys. There were two weeks when I read a lot of nineties satires of race and multiculturalism. The week when I really got into artists’ monographs. A weekend when I read some soccer players’ autobiographies. Each cluster of books was a portal I wanted to escape into.
Lists make the world seem manageable, communicating the possibility of order. They offer boundaries, a sense of finitude. Keeping my tallies became a strategy for imagining some kind of forward momentum in a period of global stasis. As I neared the end of Helen DeWitt’s “The Last Samurai”—in the month when I went back and read novels from the past fifteen or so years I remembered seeing on the front table of the local bookstore—I was as excited to learn where the young hero’s journey ended as I was thrilled to input another title into my spreadsheet. Maintaining the list became part of a string of tasks meant to normalize a strange year. Keeping it suggested the possibility of some day in the future when I would no longer need it—when we would no longer feel compelled to dwell so deeply on how we were spending our time, and everything we would prefer to be doing.
This September, Rolling Stone released its latest version of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” The first version of this list was published in 2003, and an update followed in 2012. The magazine has long been in the business of canon-building, from its various special, decade-in-review issues of the eighties and nineties, to the prize of a Rolling Stone cover or lead review, to its era-defining books, such as “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll” or “The Book of Rock Lists.”
When I received an invitation to contribute my fifty choices, I thought about the art of list-making—the populist favorites, the curveball, the choice that symbolizes something about your unique psyche. Every choice seems like an opportunity for self-expression, communicating a relationship to other critics or some presumed consensus. But, in this case, I just tried to fill out my ballot in as little time as possible so that I could get back to reading. Consequently, it was more like fifty albums that I liked enough to remember, rather than the fifty I would press upon everyone in my life. I left out entire decades, whole genres of music that moved me.
When the list was finally released, there was some hoopla about what this update meant. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” held the top spot, and the list was noticeably younger and more diverse than Rolling Stone as an institution often seems. Rather than enlisting just music critics, Rolling Stone invited a range of artists and influencers to vote. People wondered whether this decision would lead to a new consensus or was just an overcorrection for decades that privileged the same boomer favorites. Increasingly, canons don’t matter, and lists like these exist so that we have something to argue about. It’s a way to pass the time. The editors of the magazine admitted as much in the essay introducing this list, when they pointed out the astounding traffic that previous “Greatest” lists had drawn to their Web site.
The Rolling Stone lists were very important to my father when I was growing up. Previous versions of the magazine’s greatest-albums list were cherished objects in my household. We had no Bible, but we had 1987’s “The 100 Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years.” He would sometimes transcribe the lists by hand to a notebook, then determine what to buy. For him, these lists communicated a sense of how to be a good listener. How to respect the artists and traditions that had come before. They offered guidelines for how to be cultured and eclectic. As I filled out my own list, which privileged a narrow band of music from 1994 to 1998, I thought about the times when I was a child and I accompanied him to the record store. We would be in there for hours, immersing ourselves in new worlds. Or maybe it was just minutes, and it felt like hours. I remember how it sounded in those stores, but I don’t remember any of the music at all. The sounds I remember are the gentle rattling of a cassette, the soft plink of plastic on plastic as people thumbed through CDs, the whooshing of the heavy door each time a new person entered, searching for a new way to feel.
