Customer: Do you have Soul?
Rob: That all depends.
This private blog is online since six years now and during this time I have covered a lot of topics that touched me one way or the other. Love, music, politics, environment, computer….yes, I even wrote about cars the other day.
And yet there’s still one blog post that’s been idling in my drafts folder since early March 2008 and will probably never be published unless I just start writing about it:
My Top 10 list of music videos
I’ve never published it for various reasons. One certainly being that such a list will have to change over time, so to define such a list for good is almost impossible. It’s not like the above mentioned list of Top 10 cars which only includes classics. No, a list of most-loved music videos is a temporary love affair that becomes diluted by the constant penetration with new music videos.
I tried this the other day with a list of Top 10 favorite songs. I went through my music library, copied all relevant mp3 files in an empty folder, uploaded them, listened to my selection and realized I got it all wrong:
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TOP10 lists suck. Why? Because in the end you’ll realize that a selection almost isn’t possible and that if anything at all, it will just define the moment or a certain period.
It’s not the list that matters, but the selection process while searching and deciding which songs are eligible for such a list. And in the end you’ll just compile it for your own satisfaction and desire to have a Top10 list somewhere out there – on the internet or burned to a CD in your shelf.
Nah, I also find it absolutely impossible to create my own Top-10 list.
– First of all, it depends entirely what mood I’m in, when I listen to a particular song.
– Then, deciding one song is better than another, means that “no. 2” is not as good as “no. 1” – but there are many many songs which I like the same.
– I like different music styles. So how could I mash all that into one single list? And if I were to make a separate Top-10 list for each category, the question would then be which groups can be compared with each other. And what would then be the point of having a few dozen Top-10 lists?
Sometimes, after having listened to a particular song or album too many times,I get bored with it. Then, years later, I might suddenly really enjoy it again, simply because it may remind me of a particular event or some circumstances under which I used to listen to it. For instance, it always creates a smile on my ageing face whenever I hear “Toy Boy” from Samantha Fox, and think of how I danced with a particular chick during one of my first visits to the “Bubbles”-discotheque in Nairobi, way back in 1987! ;-)
Now I certainly wouldn’t put Samantha Fox on a high step, art-wise, but that song is now one of my favourite eighties-tracks. So how should I fit it into a list? The top-10-museum-list perhaps? *LOL*
I would normally find it discriminating. Having a Top-10 is fine for some MTV-commerce, where it’s all just about marketing statistics. But outside the pop-consuming mainstream, it is meaningless. If, for example, Britney Spears is number 1, it does not mean she’s better than Elton John or Michael Jackson; it simply means she sold more records recently. Why t.f. should I be interested in that?
The closest I usually come to creating my own chartsis when I copy various tracks onto an mp3-player, which I take with me when I’m sitting in a bus. And that’s usually just some background-stuff, because nobody could seriously concentrate on it that way.
Ach schade, ich hätte gerne außerdem Deinen Beitrag mit den Autos kommentiert – da wäre mir eine Top-10 Liste durchaus möglich gewesen, und einige Deiner Lieblingsautos finde ich auch extrem geil! ;-)
Dave, my brother! Pole about the closed comments on the car post. I’ve disabled comments on older posts to reduce the spam load.
The other question is: if music is part of our world, did you ask your wife for such a list of her top 10 songs? As mentioned, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a selection of her 10 best-liked songs, but instead the top 10 with the most meaning to her.
In my case, though, I think it’s the list of top10 with the – imo – best music, not meaning (bcs otherwise I’d have to include Dinosaur Jr.).