There’s no need to make a list of your Top 50 songs, my friend cautioned. He and two friends went through the arduous task a few months before, and he was encouraging me to do the same—but he wanted me to know that it was no simple road ahead.
“If you’re like us, it’s going to take a while,” he said. “Lots of second-guessing is involved.”
His warning was appreciated—and accurate, I soon found out. A list of my Top 50 songs took a while to assemble. It had been some time since I’d done anything like it—the last time was probably a decade ago when I was still keeping up a weekly culture blog.
“Top” lists require an open mind—to come up with potential music in the first place—and a critical one—to then winnow beloved picks down to a chosen few.
Let me tell you: it doesn’t feel good to cut nostalgia picks or long-time favorites.
It would be easier to just make one long playlist of “stuff I like/love” and call it a day.
But the exercise is editorial—it involves decisions that make claims of value, this over that, that over this.
For most of us, this thinking is easy at the broad lens of all music. Few listeners, save professional critics, are true genre-agnostics—listening to jazz, classical, disco, reggae, blues, hip hop. We can say, pretty confidently, that we’re not a fan of, say, techno.
But the micro level of a favorite artist’s discography is much, much trickier. It’s also what makes the exercise of a Top 50 list so much fun.
Taylor Coe 