Ely Vance
Well, it’s the end of the year again. For seniors like myself, that means the end of our last fall semester is upon us (truly frightening), and for everyone else in the University of Maryland, it’s a reminder you’ll have at least one more September to December slog to get through (truly frightening).
For college students, this time of year is typically associated with finals prep, frantic paper writing, sleepless nights and gray, groggy days. But if you’re a manic culture consumer like me, December is also list season. Seemingly every publication, be its focus on music or movies, books or television, sports or fashion, releases multiple cumulative rankings meant to celebrate and evaluate the year. “100 Best Songs,” “50 Best Albums,” “20 Best Films” — we get the same articles every year, with new content filling the borders.
All of this can seem depressingly regular. Was the point of listening to a record in March just to figure out where it might fall into your best-of list? Did you go see that movie in July just to keep up with the taste of some Internet critics? Hopefully not: Ideally, art is experienced for its own sake, not to put it in some desperate race with other art. The best-of list, some feel, can obscure or confuse that notion, can create competition where none is needed, can take the focus off the art and place it on angry opinions.
And about those opinions. Many also feel that the whole conceit of a best-of list is faulty, that an objective ordering of works of art is impossible. Now, I would disagree with anyone who claimed that art is necessarily subjective, and ask someone ready to go to bat for that idea to defend Adam Sandler’s acting next to, say, Joaquin Phoenix’s. Regardless, even I would concede that trying to definitively judge whether, for example, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly or Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell is the better album is a ridiculous endeavor, and anyone who claims to do so is infinitely suspect. How can you assign anything but taste to reasoning out making a real comparison of worth between a sprawling, wild-eyed, jazz-inflected hip-hop opus and a quietly devastating, immaculately acoustic record? It seems completely arbitrary to declare one better than the other, and it probably is.
But that, I submit, is completely the point. Best-of lists aren’t valuable because they demarcate a definitive, qualitative ranking that truly, objectively measures an artwork’s place. They’re valuable because they get us thinking about that kind of thing at all. The best kind of best-of list will, hopefully, remind you of albums or movies or books you forgot you enjoyed so much, or, better yet, expose you to something you haven’t heard or seen or read before. Best-of lists force us to reflect instead of madly pushing forward into the future, and that’s healthy. They make us think about why we liked certain media, and what that might mean. We should always be cautious about haphazardly creating narrative where none is needed or assigning sweeping trends to bind vague ideologies, but thinking about how music, films, books or any other art form functioned in a given year can be enlightening.
Some might still see the creation of a stratified list as arbitrary, but then, so is a year. The Gregorian calendar year begins on Jan. 1, the Chinese between Jan. 21 and Feb. 20, and the next Islamic year will begin around Oct. 1. Human life is often organized around arbitrary concepts — that doesn’t make them not valuable.
For me, best-of lists aren’t just helpful reminders or tools for discovery; they’re fun interruptions. It’s fun to see a record or film you loved be given more respect and acclaim by professional critics; it’s sometimes even more fun to vehemently disagree with something you thought was great being snubbed or something else you thought was uninteresting being placed way too high. As long as you don’t take them too seriously, the kinds of conversations and lighthearted debates that come from best-of lists can be wonderful and stimulating, and all of that can be a welcome respite from the dregs of the pre-holiday season.
Especially for us college students, so stressed and so exhausted and so pushed onward, we should take the time to distract ourselves with these silly rankings, allow ourselves to briefly look back instead of forward. Even if you don’t find it as healthy and fulfilling as I do, it’s a nice break.
Oh, and by the way: To Pimp A Butterfly is better. Sorry, Sufjan.
