About the List

We Did the Math

by Patrick Rapa

Oh man. Look at that list. Not a single purebred hip-hop album on there. You may choose to blame it on the sheer volume of Spoon humpin' indie rockers in our ranks and that's fine, but I'm pretty sure it's because Ghostface and Wu Tang both dropped their albums like two weeks ago. See, the LPs in this year's Top 21 have all had sufficient opportunity to cook. Feist, it may be argued, has been left on the stove too long. Next year, our music critics will probably try to slip Ghostface onto their lists and I will say no. No! I had to say no to Lily Allen and Jarvis Cocker this year. Know why? Cause those same albums were on last year's list. With imports, you gotta make a call. You're not gonna know what call everybody else will make. There's no summit where everybody is all OK, what should we do about B.C. Camplight? Do we vote for it now, on import status? Or do we wait till next year when actual Americans can buy it in a WaWa? (Most of us opted for the latter.) And what about the Hold Steady? They didn't have an album this year, but if we don't vote for them, will they know we still love them? There are no easy answers.

But where did this list come from? And from whom? Music critics, fans and music experts of some repute. Not a lot of repute. We're not going to overdo it. As with every year, these people were asked to submit top-10 lists, which we then dictated to interns we never saw again. We think they were interns. One might have been a TimeCycle guy. As we'd already deleted the original lists, we asked our critics to resubmit, and most of them said no. So we faked it. This time we took the top-10 lists to a computer lab at Drexel University and yelled, "Make us a spreadsheet!" They sent us a typo-laden Excel file and we started adding points to everything. CDs that were somebody's No. 1 got 11 points. No. 2s got 9, 3s got 8 and blah blah blah. Then we tabulated or whatever it's called and found that the Hold Steady had won, which didn't make sense. So we looked everything over again, did some tweaking, moved Grinderman further and further down in the rankings until we weren't embarrassed, and finally came up with a definitive list based on science and facts.

Please enjoy this year's Top 21.

(pat@citypaper.net)