Each list is a problematic list. This feeling of absoluteness and authority exudes – “official” and not so much personal – lists that we see from time to time in music magazines and on sites with the “best” of the year, decade, century, etc. , accompanied by all sorts of “buts”. “Where is so-and-so”, “But speak so lowly” and all these quarrelsome wells, which – admit it – seem to give us pleasure.

It seems that each list is created in order to “erase” the previous one to some extent. – otherwise why make lists of mileage that require double-digit hours of work? Sometimes lists work too as self-criticism and harmony with time – like, hi, the one from Rolling Stone with the best records of all time, which in 2020 was “combed” again to “darken” as needed, as well as include newer releases. For some reason, the Beatles with “Sgt. Pepper” were moved from the top that Marvin Gaye had taken with “What’s Going On” (among other changes to the previous RS chart).

Refer to cause open discussion now takes pitchfork, what, in continuation of the “great” lists he publishes from time to time, she has done with “150 Best Albums of the 90s” (predecessor of “Top 150 Tracks of the 90s”).

After a solid scroll, several questions/conclusions easily arise:

“Tragic Kingdom” from Without a doubt better than “Scrimadelica” from Primal cry.

His indie epic “69 Love Songs” from magnetic fields, i.e. the fork drive (which was rated 9.0/10 in the media in 1999) finished the race in 78th place.

His trip hop masterpiece Sly “Masinquay” reached 64th place.

They didn’t go to help slint with “Spiderland” (at least for a while) bleak post-rock? Location 83 is ok.

Where do you say there in the mid 90s britpop swept the UK – and beyond. What Pitchfork keeps from this era is simply “Another class” from pulp and their self-titled album elastic -not to mention Oasis and Blur.

What happened to the Bjork guys? Sixth place in the list of records (with “Homogeneous”), and from another list we learn that he also wrote the second best track (“Hyperballad”) of the 90s (the first is a remix of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” with Ol’ Dirty Bastard…).

They are Nirvana the most important legacy of 90s rock? (Yes, it is.) Why not stop it “No matter” in tenth place and be surpassed by guitar recordings such as “Live It Out” from Hole or “Without love” from My bloody Valentine?

as far as “Dislike”, Did you know that in addition to the top in the microcosm of shoegaze, she also owns all the 90s?

I could give dozens of such examples as I go over and over the list, but this is enough to reiterate that lists are becoming more and more structural components of pop culture archiving and evaluation. they function as fields of sensationalism, confrontation, obedience to political correctness and, in the end, as links of potential virality.

It’s not that dialogue is illegal when it comes to such things, it’s just that half the fun for those more intimately involved with music comes from it (and sometimes almost all of it, but that’s another, long conversation). It’s just that in an era when fireworks seem brighter than suns for their own purposes, media like Wil (and not only on this list) follow the logic “we push the agenda / put the classics / defiantly cook very high on the list and we’re ready.”

Of course, what finally reaches our hands and our screens are lists that, chasing their tail, say more about the medium that makes them than about their subject matter. And in general, this is not bad in itself. Let’s just not forget what we knew.