10 Reasons Why Top 10 Lists Suck
1. They NEVER, EVER, EVER, correlate with the truth. The 'truth', is of course: Your Opinion. But to you, it is The Truth. And it should not be messed with. Or contradicted. Even your favourite journalist, with whom you feel the closest affinity will, at the end of the year, produce a list that is so earth-shatteringly misguided that you, along with a thousand others, feel compelled to write a letter to their editor pointing out the error of their ways and calling for their instant dismissal.
2. If you buy that last magazine of the year, filled with retrospectives and top 10 lists, all you are doing is telling the guys at the top that it is OK to be lazy. You are telling them that, in December, you stopped caring about new music, you are no longer interested in what films are being released in the cinemas and you are no longer following Lady Gaga's every wardrobe change with enthusiasm and zeal. They are laughing at you, whilst they thumb through the last 11 months of their work and cut & paste a shoddy edition together, safe in the knowledge they'll be charging you extra for the 'bumper Christmas edition.'
3. Top 10 lists are simply an opportunity to spread apathy. Why do we a need a Top 10? It's like when you start a new school and tell everyone that will listen that they are your new best friend. Pick one! Just pick one! Nobody needs ten 'coolest' people in their lives. Nobody could possibly keep up with ten fashion icons to copy. That way, confusion lies. Just pick one, tell us who it is and we shall follow. Blindly.
4. Generally speaking, there are never 10 things decent enough to legitimately populate a Top 10 list.
5. Top Ten lists are patronising. They tell us that we cannot think for ourselves. They tell us we do not like browsing, and are fearful of discovery. They suggest that, by purchasing the Adele album, like every other soul on the planet with a CD player in their house, we are, somehow a better human. You're not. You've heard all the songs anyway, You're just slightly poorer than you were before you bought it.
6. People that write Top Ten lists are simply trying to usher us to an early grave. Because essentially, the majority of Top 10 lists are 'things to do / buy before you die'. Buy it now! Then you are ready to die! That's the subtext.
7. You already know the answers before you even read them. We know what the Number one album of the year is, because it already won all the awards and spent all the weeks of the year at number one. Wet Wet Wet. we're looking at you. PJ Harvey? We're looking at you, too.
8. The innate subjectivity of the creation of most Top 10 lists is enough to send your average fan of music / film / whatever into a schizophrenic rage (like Michael Douglas in Falling Down - one of the top 10 films of all time. Maybe). A recent list of the Top 10 Greatest Guitar Players of all time missed out an entire gender. Smell that? That's the smell of a thousand underwired bras being burned.
9. Hands up if you can remember who released the Top 10 albums of 2010? Or the Top 10 movies? Who topped the polls for Sexiest man of the Year? Nope. Us neither.
10. See point 4.
