A Top 10 list in the 2020s?

Inevitably, we begin with High Fidelity.

Now that that’s out of the way…

What does it take to make a Top 10 list in the 2020s?

Streaming has been a game changer.

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Here’s a question:

How often do you listen to your favorite albums beginning with the first track and all the way through?

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Here’s a few more questions:

How often do you re-watch a favorite episode of a favorite tv show?

How often do you re-watch a favorite movie?

Who decides what you’re watching? Is it you, or another actual person? Or, is it an algorithm?

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If you had asked me for my Top 10 favorite podcasts a few years ago it would have been entirely different. Here’s a newish area that has rapidly shifted. We’ve allegedly hit “peak podcast” more than once. Before podcasts, if you asked me about my favorite radio shows (not so different), they would have all been on NPR.

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How can you determine your Top 10 favorite movies?

One method is to consider the movies you would be delighted to watch at least once every single year for the rest of your life.

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What about favorite songs?
Maybe the answer is tracks that you can listen to every day without feeling they’re played out. Or, you play them out but only for a short time and then you come back to them quickly.

More factors come into play in the case of songs compared to films or a much-loved tv series.

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Is it possible to have all-time favorite visual artworks or is this a form of self-deception?

This is a tough one. I believe we’re probably operating [perhaps subconsciously] on many factors, and a great deal of them are external. Pressures about what is good, meaningful, valuable, good taste.

For sure, we can debate what areas of art require or result in the most debate about what amounts to “good taste.” Taste is, of course, subjective… to an extent.

I like to quarrel about what is “guilty pleasure music” given that you are at once acknowledging much you enjoy the art and yet chastising yourself for liking what you have been taught to believe makes this art somehow less than.

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For visual art, you might jump to considerations of what you might gladly have on your wall in your house. Sure, that would be a sign you wouldn’t mind looking at this artwork fairly often. But seeing it enough you would stop noticing it most likely. It would become yet another piece of décor. Or would it?

An indoor houseplant changes over time and calls your attention. A finished work of art typically does not change over time. You change and, in turn, your relationship to the art. It looks renewed because you are no longer the self who saw this work before. That old self within remembers, with nostalgia, the feelings and associations, the neurons that fired and wired. Now, truly, the work is indeed new. It really is different for you. But only to an extent.

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Literature does this as well. The written words are not the changeable factor—you are. Your favorite books from your high school or college days are, likely, among your remembered favorites. But do you wish to re-read them today? Do you really? Knowing full well the experience would not be the same. In fact, like memory, like remembrance, to an extent, the act of reengaging with the work changes your fond memories and creates new associations that are altogether different. This is understandably why we sometimes shy away from thinking too hard back at old loves. The glory days are only glorious so long as we preserve the sentiments that memorialize them, that freeze these impressions in time as if chiseled into stone.

We walk around all too ready to undo the fascinations and obsessions of our old selves. Much to the dismay of our past personhoods who wish to remain vocal parts of who we are in the here and now. In truth, deep down, we know they only deserve a fraction of our attention.

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So, then, what matters?

With each step we chance into branching possibilities.

What we have long favored may be an albatross around our neck.

Our old loves too often speak too much about the frailties of youth, inexperience, lack of understanding of the impact of time, of lived duration (aka. the passage of time), on significance.

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Why do we enjoy what we enjoy?

Delight, relief, love, validation, joy, gratification, calm, intensity.

Art is a release.

Art is a meeting ground.

Art is a place to find solace.

Art creates community.

Art helps us clarify our understanding of ourselves, how our bodies move through the world, and our interpretations of our situation as a person in the societies and spaces in which we live.

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You can make a Top 10 list of anything. Top 10 houseplants. Top 10 tray tables. Top 10 pillows. Top 10 chairs. The list goes on forever. Most of these lists have little value. Humans love making lists. There is value in the act of list-making. Oh, to return to ye olde “mixtapes”.

We love to assert our taste. As if having “correct” taste validates our caliber as a person. It does not.

As it is said, we are our choices. We are what we do day in day out. We tend to engage in the things that provide value and conveniently nudge aside what is of less interest. This is a subtle form of ghosting, (really simply a slow backing away from), that which does not align with our preferences for how we go about are days which, as we know from Mary Oliver, is an indicator of how we live our lives.

The Ten Commandments are a reminder of how deeply rooted lists are (and specifically Top 10 lists are) in the human psyche.

That’s a hard follow, right?

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