By this point in the year, most of my friends are pretty sick of me but this year, I'm starting to fear for my safety. As you might remember, I'm one of the few Chicagoans who is an unapologetic fan of winter. Far from a popular position in an average year, this year it was the kind of thing that had visions of torches and pitchforks dancing in Chiberians frostbitten heads.
But even after a winter as historically bleak as this one I will still defend my love of true winter because it makes the spring all that much sweeter. This morning I smiled because it was raining. Rather than snowing. In late March. Only someone whose dealt with freezer burn on their lungs could find happiness in a drippy, 40 degree day.
Indeed spring in the midwest is a brief and flighty thing that exists for, at most, six non-consecutive weeks between March and early June but it's no less glorious because of it. A long-time spring fever sufferer, I still dream every year of the utterly giddy feeling I got in college when the season's first day over 50 when I could get away with skipping an afternoon class, throwing together a mixtape and go tooling down country roads to find a place to walk amidst woods and birds.
Don't get me wrong, as a whole, spring 'round these parts is perhaps the least satisfying season. But like that girl/boy/other you always had a crush on growing up, the brief moments when the light shines on you are unbelievably heady in a ways a solid. steady relationship/season (OK, this metaphor is getting out of hand) never quite could.
Oh another year, another set of best-of lists. This year, having contributed to both PopMatters and Spectrum Culture (as well as their respective year-end list-making) I've been exposed to more music and forced to think harder than ever before about these rankings. Ignoring for the moment that this entire exercise is, in the grand, or even medium-term, scale of things, fairly insignificant, it's been a humbling experience.
You see, the more I listen to music, learn about music and write about music, the more I realize just how functionally infinite is the pool of recorded creativity and just how little of it any one person can hope to survey to even a cursory degree. With that in mind, my caveat for this year's lists of songs, albums and concerts is even more forceful. These aren't definitive (God knows I'd seriously revise last year's list now, given half the chance), they aren't exhaustive (you know how exhausting it was just to do this one?) and their very premise is riddled with holes, exceptions and other qualifiers.
But what kind of music snob would let quibbles such as those stand between them and a good arbitrary ranking? Not I, good people, not I.
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