About the List

The method behind our best records of 2006 madness.

by Patrick Rapa

method/madness

Welcome back to City Paper's annual Top 21, formerly The Top 20, formerly The Ultimate Cassingles and Flexi-Disc Listacular, formerly The Best Things Phil Collins Just Did.

You know, 2006 was the first year we allowed ourselves to take the whole Death of the CD predictions somewhat seriously, mostly because Spaceboy and Tower shut their doors. But a list like this isn't about the medium, it's about the LP format, be it hard copy or download, legal or otherwise. So, let's just say this list is as relevant as ever. And let's be cynical about what that means.

Just how did the Top 21 list come to be? The process is surprisingly intricate for an irrelevant undertaking.

A few weeks ago, various City Paper critics and writers were asked to submit Top 10 lists. Forty of them came through. These lists were compiled into a master spreadsheet, but that was just for organizational purposes. All math was done by hand. This is not advised. Points were assigned to each album based on its rank in the lists: 11 points each time it came in first, nine points for second place, eight points for third, on down to one point for 10th place. A point was added each time an album appeared on more than one Top 10. (This scoring method was developed by ex-music editor Brian Howard in the last century.)

Then the list was stared at for a while, kinda cockeyed, in the manner of a small, curious dog. Some adjustments were made in the interest of breaking ties, righting wrongs and keeping a few rogue elements from ruining everything with poor taste. We were really happy, but we forgot to hit "save." Always hit "save." A new list was painstakingly dictated to an intern noteworthy for his unreliability and general distaste for common sense. "Run, intern," we said. "Run all the way home and e-mail us the list which we have just told to you." He has not been heard from since. We think he went to Swarthmore. Or Haverford. Anyway, he's gone. A third list was forged, kind of on the fly, and that's pretty much the one you see here, except we took Beirut off it because we were all getting a bit sick of him by that point.

Some of the above is true. The part about the numbers, for instance. The Hold Steady got 87 points. The Decemberists, last year's list-toppers, got 37. Do these numbers mean anything? No, they do not. But perhaps you'll find some meaning online, where our Webmaster, Marc Steel, has set it up so you can look things up by critic, by artist, by albums — you can even pull up a list of each critic's seventh-favorite album of 2006. Pointless, maybe, but what can we say, the dude loves data.

(pat@citypaper.net)