About the List

by Patrick Rapa

There was this moment on Seinfeld when Elaine thinks she's dating a black guy and he thinks he's dating a Hispanic girl and then they come to a disappointing revelation. "So ... we're just a couple of white people?" he asks. "I guess so," says Elaine. "Wanna go to the Gap?"

That's kind of where I'm at right now, seeing Vampire Weekend take the cake in City Paper's annual Top 21. (Another vanilla bean existential moment? Quoting Seinfeld.) Vampire Weekend seems like the easy choice for an alt-weekly, the indie pop album all the indie kids can agree on. But it's not our job to be cunning. When it comes to meaningless music-ranking exercises like this one, to be clever is to be dishonest.

The truth of it is that we polled 40-plus CP critics, staffers, hangers-on and satellites whose tastes we either respect or accept, and Vampire Weekend ran away with the trophy. On our list — heck, on my personal list — the Brooklyn band ended up with way more points than ex-Philly soul sister Santogold.

What's all this about points? We asked our constituency to upload their 10 favorite albums into our online Listamatron Data Aggravator (designed by CP webslinger Marc Steel). The info was then spit out into a monstrous spreadsheet, with a column called "points." Number 1 albums got 11 points, twos got 9, threes got 8, and blah blah blah. Then I messed around with the points a little, weighting my own choices higher than they should be. Penalizing the choices of people who pick on me. Dropping Fleet Foxes down just because. Dealing out random justice left and right. The results were then written on a napkin and handed to our clumsiest intern. He lost it and tried to re-create it from memory over the phone. Then the line went dead and we never heard from the guy again. Interns are expendable, but pointless, self-pleasing end-of-year lists are important. I sure hope we got it right. If not, direct all complaints to gap.com.

(pat@citypaper.net)