I'm the Problem (With Your Year-End Lists)...and a sale!!

First off, we are having a rare holiday sale, for the meaningless day of Cyber Monday! In what I think is our biggest discount ever, we are offering 40% off annual subscriptions so you can gift yourself or your friends! New York magazine just put us in their holiday gift guide for music lovers, so don't just take it just from us (thanks, Dylan!).

Anyway, it's the holiday season. While normal beings have fun decorating the tree, spinning dreidels, shopping for presents or partaking in whatever kind of festive pursuits you enjoy, those of us who write about music for a living are making lists: best albums, best songs and so on and so forth. Though it is an extremely time consuming pursuit, I am a list apologist - I enjoy the practice of thinking about this past year's art from an arial view, and I think they are helpful to listeners who want to see what they missed in a very packed musical landscape. I like lists and think they are important, and you won't convince me otherwise (though I can go either way on the value of actually doing a number rank, but tomato tomato).

However, in addition to re-listening to what feels like zillions of albums and writing as many blurbs, I also view December List Season as a time when I am massively frustrated, because country music is generally forgotten or misrepresented on these lists, or peppered in for cutesie intellectual purposes - to make some kind of point - rather than for the actual weight of the music. I won't say this is the case everywhere of course: Rolling Stone (where, full disclosure, I am a contributor), does the definitive job of country list making when it comes to music pubs, and Stereogum (with whom, full disclosure, we do an year-end collab) also gets country coverage - so does NPR and the New York Times, though none of their lists are out yet this year, and New York, but I expect fair representation there. Our awesome alt-weekly, the Nashville Scene, also does a great job. But beyond that, it gets rough: either country is super-siloed, misrepresented or missing completely. And after what I have seen today, I'm getting nervous in general.

I didn't think this was something I'd be writing about on - gasp - December 1st. But as the lists have already started to roll in, things aren't looking good. First, I noticed that Paste - usually a decent source of country music coverage - omitted any country short of C.M.A.T from their Best Albums list (I think C.M.A.T is awesome, but very on the edge of what I would consider country). What the fuck, Paste? Then, I saw that the only country album on New Yorker's list is Morgan Wallen's I'm the Problem, with Wallen and Post Malone's collab the only country song (again, other than C.M.A.T) on Pitchfork's year end list.

Sigh. I usually have low expectations for country representation on Pitchfork's list, so this was not much of a surprise, but I was a bit shocked by the New Yorker. Let me just say I have immense respect for the work of Amanda Petrusich, the critic who wrote this list, and I think is someone who enjoys the healthy debate that comes with this endeavor, so she would support my airing of grievances here I think, if not encourage it! But listing in Wallen there, and on Pitchfork, as the lone Nashville country album and song, is essentially saying that Wallen made the best country album and song of the year. And I have a, uh, problem with that.

Whether or not that is the goal of the critic is moot - the reader, looking at these lists, is not there for an intellectual exercise. When you only pick one country album, or one song, it feels like a statement: this is the only worthy country album of the year. And in a place like Pitchfork or elsewhere, where country is so rare, it's all the more important. I am sure some critics would argue that a choice like this is meant to show influence or cultural relevance, but that is different from best, and, again, that is a critical debate rather than a list for readers to simply read and use. And perhaps because I am an advocate for the usefulness of these lists - to highlight missed albums, to boost deserving art that didn't get a chance, to applaud great work even if it is mainstream or whatnot - I reject the idea of them as a brain exercise.

Morgan Wallen did not make the best country album of the year, nor the best song. Not even close. Did he have massive influence, and massive sales? Of course. Is he important to talk about in the overall cultural conversation about country music - and pop - this year, and should we be able to do that as critics? Of course. But aside from the content itself, I reject the idea that an album engineered to flood the market with songs should even be considered for such a category. Longer than both The White Album and The Wall, I don't even consider I'm the Problem to be a double album. It's a bunch of songs. And it is not the best country album of the year, not by a mile, and none of the songs stand out to me as best - though certainly not that Post Malone collab.

We'll get into what we think the actual best songs and albums are are later, here and elsewhere. But in a year that saw incredible work from Tyler Childers, Carter Faith, Kelsey Waldon, Eric Church, Margo Price, Kristina Murray, Madeline Edwards, Caylee Hammack and so many more terrific records both within and well outside of the mainstream, I find this Wallen hero tour to be not just incorrect but also a huge bummer. We're the first people to tell you to reconsider a mainstream artist you may have dismissed, so we're not purists - but this ain't it. Approaching the rest of list season with a cocktail in hand, I suppose.