Year-End Music Lists

It's been three weeks since I wrote about NME's "Tracks of the Year" list, and I've been promising to write more ever since. Since then, I've picked up the year-end lists from Q, Uncut, MOJO, and Spin, as well. (Fortunately, you don't need to buy all these mags, you can just go to Metacritic to see a compilation of Top Ten lists from these sources and more.) The several magazines provide a range of opinions, but many threads occur throughout. In many ways, one of the top stories of the year was the Arcade Fire. Despite the fact that their album was released in North America during 2004, it didn't hit the UK until earlier this year, so it qualified for the 2005 lists. Uncut named them the New Band of the Year and placed their album, Funeral, at the top of their list (Uncut also called Orange Juice the Old Band of the Year, rated The Glasgow School as the year's best reissue, and had Edwyn Collins's first interview since his aneurism).

Arcade Fire took the sophomore positions on each of NME's main lists with Funeral and the single "Rebellion (Lies)." Bloc Party's Silent Alarm was named NME's album of the year, but should it have been Arcade Fire? Maybe it was. Londonist.com made that claim before the NME list came out, but NME's lawyers convinced the Website to withdraw its post. Apparently Londonist.com received an earlier version of the NME list that featured a less commercial, more adventurous line up of albums. You can still read about the claim that NME editors juggled their Top 50 Albums to please commercial interests through this Guardian article, or if you're persistent enough, perhaps you could find a mirror site featuring the cache of the original post. Although Londonist.com never posted the list they'd been given, it apparently featured the top two positions reversed and saw distinct improvements for albums by Babyshambles, Oasis, Elbow, Madonna, Kate Bush, the Brakes, and Test Icicles. British Sea Power apparently dropped considerably, and New Order, Patrick Wolf, Beck, Wrens, Cut Copy, and the Tears disappeared completely. But does any of this matter? I suppose it does if you're a fan of any of the aforementioned artists. But it's not as if we've ever had vote counts assigned to any of the NME lists of the past. I recall several years ago, 1988, I think, when the magazine (although it could've been Melody Maker) made reference to a particularly close vote in which Pixies' Surfer Rosa edged out the Sugarcubes' Life's Too Good. The blurb about Surfer Rosa seemed to have been written by a Sugarcubes supporter who groused that when the vote split with some album I no longer recall, the dark horse Pixies won out. But that's the clearest the voting process has ever been.

In The Guardian, NME editor Connor McNicholas called the mechanics of the year-end lists a "fuzzy process." No doubt he's right. We may assume that these lists are straight votes by writers and editors, but there's no reason to think we're correct. Would some writers or editors have more clout than others? Would writers and editors lobby for their favorites or against those they disliked? Of course it's a fuzzy process. I would hope commercial considerations are less important--we don't want the critics to make choices based on ad sales, and I'd rather they didn't make them based on sales appeal, but I'd be naive to believe perceived popularity of particular acts among readers doesn't enter into the process. As to NME, I think Arcade Fire would've been a more adventurous choice. The Bloc Party album is fine, but it breaks no new ground and doesn't add much to the argument. I'd say #2 was too high a ranking for it, as well, though I'd've been surprised if it hadn't made the NME Top Ten.

Q made by far the safest choice possible for its Album of the Year: X&Y by Coldplay. While Q has never seemed to be a fringe magazine, I didn't think that they were quite so straight-down-the-middle mainstream. At least this year, unlike in the past, the two Q best-of-the-year CDs featured only tracks from albums that actually appeared on the Top Fifty list (excepting tracks from greatest hits collections by the Prodigy, Basement Jaxx, and Kirsty MacColl). Q also joined Time by naming Bono its Man of the Year (although it didn't include the Gates in its calculation). And Bloc Party came in at # 25.

MOJO made a choice that was both safe and forward looking, naming Antony and the Johnsons' album I Am a Bird Now its Album of the Year. Safe because it had already won the UK Mercury Prize, but forward looking because it was something we hadn't seen before 2005 (well, it was Antony's second album, but you had to be Lou Reed or someone otherwise part of the New York hipster scene to have heard it). I'm not sure what kind of a long-term career Antony will have, but a year-end poll doesn't measure promise or staying power, so we can only judge on what's actually in front of us. In other matters, MOJO had Arcade Fire at #2 (bridesmaid again, although they did get MOJO's nod as Debutantes of the Year), Bloc Party at #34, and Coldplay at #37. (By the way, Uncut included neither Bloc Party nor Coldplay in its Top Fifty, although A Bigger Bang by the Rolling Stones came in at #6.)

For reasons that remain beyond me, Spin named the Killers its Band of the Year. I'm still holding my position that they're a flash in the pan. Spin argues that you can't deny some of the Killers' pop hooks, and I'll give them that, but the music is so derivative that I don't see a future. Call me when the second album comes out, and we'll see how interested people are then. They make Arcade Fire their Breakout Band of the Year and M.I.A. Artist of the Year. M.I.A.'s an interesting choice, representing cultural collision perhaps more than any other artist out there. I saw some but not a lot of coverage for her in the US press, so it's good to see this exposure. Perhaps 2006 will reward her with a higher profile on this side of the Atlantic. Spin's Album of the Year was Kanye West's Late Registration, which probably did better in this country than it did overseas, although NME put it in at #8, Q at #12, and Uncut at #14. For Spin, Arcade Fire's Funeral was a 2004 album, but Bloc Party was in at #6, and Antony and the Johnsons' came in at #28. Coldplay didn't make the Top 40, but, to my own appreciation, Art Brut's Bang Bang Rock'n'Roll was #38, and it's still an import. Does that mean it qualifies for Spin's 2006 list, too?