What is this obsession with ranking records?

The best and worst double albums ever. The 50 greatest cover versions of all time. The 100 greatest British albums of all time. The greatest indie anthems ever. The 100 greatest albums you've never heard. The 50 darkest albums of all time. The 101 albums to hear before you die.

Why must we always rank rank rank these records?

Let's have a medium-sized dive on the urge to rank, whether it's helpful or not, the pluses but also the minuses. 

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Transcript

Ranking records: good or bad?

The best and worst double albums ever

50 greatest cover versions of all time

100 greatest British albums of all time

The greatest indie anthems ever

John Lennon 20 most underrated tracks

100 greatest albums you've never heard

50 darkest albums of all time

101 albums to hear before you die 

Not my words but a selection from NME’s ranked charts of the last few years. 

What is it with this epidemic of ranking? I can talk. At the end of each year on my sister podcast Sombrero Fallout, I produce a Festive Forthy which rounds up what are in my opinion 40 of the best tracks from the previous year.

So let's take a medium sized dive. And let's start withthe question: where did this urge to rank originate?

Medium size dive

In the early 1930s Billboard Magazine in America began publishing a list of sheet music leaders as well as songs most played by certain radio station. It was called a network song consensus. Then in 1936 the magazine published its first record sales charts which would eventually be called the Hit Parade. This first pop record chart listed only the top 10 records released by each of the three major labels.

The 1939 description of how the hit parade was calculated is illuminating: “The hit parade checks on sheet music, sales of records, sales requests from bandleaders at night clubs, ballrooms and hotels, and requests mailed to radio stations.” 

In 1940 arrived the Billboard Music Popularity Chart which separated out radio play, sheet music and jukebox charts. Then in the last days of the war Billboard introduced the Honour Roll of Hits - the nation's top 10 tunes. And then they added a best selling popular record albums chart. The first number one album was Nat King Cole Trio's album collection of "Favourites". 

It wasn't until 1955 that Billboard debuted a new chart called the Top 100 which remains today the primary pop singles chart. At the time it was merely an auxiliary chart to the Honour Roll of Hits. The big change was a focus on performer recordings rather than songs which the Honour Roll of Hits had focused on - and that was a persistence of the old Tin Pan Alley business model. So the big change was 1955 when the performer and their iconic recording became the point of attention rather than the song itself and the charts have never looked back since.

An entirely reasonable debate

Origin of the urge to rank

You might say and I wouldn't disagree with you that the tendency to rank favourite records has its ancient ancestry in the need to survive in a hostile world. Let me just unpack that a little more.

Early humans would know that with spiders some of them are harmless and some of them are so venomous they can kill you within minutes. So you are left with the choice. You could either teach your children to test every spider individually or to simply avoid all spiders because one simple mistake would mean certain death.

So we at heart categorize everything because it has proven itself to be a good strategy in order to survive. The human avoiding spiders saw what happened to another human when they were bitten and then categorized all spiders as being dangerous. They survived longer than the spider category mistake people. And therefore spread their predisposition for categorization around more and more of their descendants until it became the dominant, well I want to say gene, but that's probably biologically incorrect.

The helpfulness of shortcuts

Next let's talk about shortcuts baby.

We tend to rank things because it provides a simple and efficient way to compare and evaluate options, acting as a mental shortcut to understand relative quality or importance, especially when faced with a large amount of information; essentially, it helps us make decisions quickly.

So I think the most important reason we rank things is to provide a heuristic or shortcut. Now that's interesting because it might not be the reason why we think we're ranking things which is something to do with an objective tallying of what is best.

An interesting parallel might be how we do the weekly supermarket shop. Without our knowing it really or maybe we choose to ignore it the supermarket itself has more or less ranked what they want us to buy. This could be for any number of reasons but primarily because it's how they can drive more customers in and ultimately make more profit of course.

So they'll put maybe 3 shelfloads of Coca Cola and Coca-Cola variants at eye level. They might put some Pepsi Cola on the next two shelves down say and then they'll add some variants, maybe organic or a local producer, right down on the bottom shelf. As an example, I'm not saying this is exactly what they do.

And that in turn becomes, as it were, a self fulfilling prophecy. We simply haven't got time or the energy to evaluate all the cola options every time we go to a supermarket. We quite like Coca Cola, the family quite likes Coca Cola, maybe once in a while we'll have a quick look at some of the other options, but rarely -there's other things to do. If you evaluated all the options in a supermarket based on first principles, your weekly shop would take you all day every week.

Shortcuts are an underestimated, incredibly important part of life. If we had to go back to first principles every time we change gear in the car, or took the journey to work - it may well be that if you evaluate all the possible journeys to work every morning you might shave a couple of minutes off by going down a certain back street on a certain day but that's a lot of time and energy needed to do that, more so than the return you'd get from taking the shortcut .

So ranks and lists first and foremost provide a much needed shortcut through life. As I think I've probably mentioned before there are 100,000 new tracks released to Spotify everyday. That's millions of new records every year rankings provide a shortcut through a complex jungle of options.

So do rankings always get it right?

Well obviously there is no right or wrong. Music is subjective; that goes without saying.

All a ranking does is provide a popularity poll. But popularity polls are better than nothing. As noted in the first topic it helps prevent you waste time.

What you may decide is that popularity isn't necessarily for you. You may be the sort of person who's not drawn to catchy choruses, songs that do well on the charts, something that appeals to the masses. You might be more interested in more peripheral or angular music for example. Which is fine, of course.

What I find more interesting is that rankings can change overtime. You can get sleeper hits. Nobody was listening to Nick Drake or the Velvet Underground at the end of the 60s. They’re two of the most popular alternative artists of today. A track can lie neglected for many years and then typically a Netflix series or film will features song on the soundtrack and, before you know where you are, it's become the most popular track by an artist.

And then for a myriad of cultural reasons tastes change overtime. Engelbert Humperdinck's 'Please Release Me' was number one at the expense of the AA side 'Strawberry Fields' and 'Penny Lane' by The Beatles. The charts didn't lie; it was the most popular song that week. You might argue that one had more artistic merit than the other but again many people would disagree with you.

So no, rankings don't get it right, in inverted commas, because they can't. That's not what they're for. In fact for some people they might provide a map of what to avoid. If everyones listing to Sabrina Carpenter or Chapelle Roan or Taylor Swift some people might say I'm going to avoid those artists and head for the margins. And then other people will call the musical snobs who don't get it.

And so it goes.

Can rankings be a bad thing?

I think there's one way in which you can argue that rankings are a bad thing.

I suppose one drawback might be if people think that they know more or have a better understanding of what is a better record because they understand the rankings better. Conversely they might feel superior because they prefer a more obscure record so there's that.

I think more importantly, it's a problem when the urge to rank overtakes the integrity of the music.

If we take the kerfuffle around Oscars time as a parallel. There are whole teams who assemble in order to promote films from studios who for their own reasons want to push those particular films almost regardless of the film's inherent merits. You may wonder why some particularly odd choices end up as Oscar nominations and even winners and the answer is it's a function of pushing those films up the rankings. You may not be surprised to hear that it was Harvey Weinstein who pioneered some of the most brutal and ruthless manipulation of rankings.

And although we'd all like to think that musical artists love sleeping in the back of a van for 10 years most of them would probably prefer to stay in at least a medium ranked motel. And your rankings which are very easily checked these days will always determine how much a venue is prepared to pay for your services. Now you could argue that that's a meritocracy and a good thing. But you could also argue that it inhibits experimentation, adventure, curiosity and freedom of expression. If you think you're going to get judged and ultimately remain a viable proposition as long as you play by certain rankings rules then that's going to affect your growth as an artist. Others might argue it just puts a handbrake on self indulgence. You can choose your own lane there. 

One thing I have noticed is that I don't tend to listen to entire albums now. I frequently don't get to the more obscure tracks on an album at all any more such is the volume of new music coming out. That may be inevitable. But there have been times over the years when I would listen to an album and generate an obscure favourite. Only years later would I discover that it was one of the least well regarded tracks on an album I'm particularly fond for example of Candidate on unknown pleasures. Turns out that's no one's favourite track on the album so the ranking system can work against you developing your own personal repertoire of favourites.