Locusts

(being a further semantic mutation, the way I initially read the title of "Leasts")

Lists are important to me.  I have a lot to say about the topic, so much that it makes it difficult to write about.  This is one reason I appreciate having Sedric as co-blogger on this.  "Leasts" is an anchor, a starting point.

A list is... how should I put this... a framework.  For me the important thing about a published list is not that it is fixed, but that it is bounded in some fashion.  A list serves to differentiate those things which are on the list from those things that are not on the list, in some fashion.

Some lists are further differentiated within the list itself - ranked lists.  Some lists, such as the NWW List, are unranked, simple aggregations.  All that matters is what is included and, implicitly, what is excluded.

I much prefer the latter type.  Ranked lists emphasize difference rather than similarity, emphasize strict hierarchy.  The #1 record is better than the #2 record, which is better than the #3 record, and so on and so forth.  This is not only ludicrous but it is necessarily adversarial - music, seen in this way, is the War of All Against All.

In contrast, the artists on the NWW list - and they are _artists_, not works of art, but creative forces with personalities and agendas of their own - are chosen for theoretically having something in common.

In practice I would argue their differences are not so easily smoothed over.  A list that contains both the fascist Boyd Rice and any number of eurocommunist musical insurrections is hard to consider as anything more than a granfalloon (although at least one member of this granfalloon, who shall not be named here, objects enough to his presence in it that he has made a number of threats about anybody and everybody so much as mentions his name.  Yes of course this says more about him than it says about this list or lists in general.)

But then, all lists are in some sense artificial, no?  Perhaps it is that the IDEA of the NWW list transcends any mundane realities of the artists involved.

I don't think lists being fixed in place the moment they're published is a problem.  I think this is one of their strengths, their rootedness in a specific context.  The NWW List doesn't really tell us _that_ much about experimental music of the 1970s.  We know things now that they wouldn't or couldn't have known then; were they to redo this list it would probably look much different.  It has limits that become increasingly obvious the more experimental music of the 1970s one hears.  What it does tell us, though, is how NWW viewed the music of the 1970s at the time they made the list, and further how this music was seen, thought of, grouped, at a particular point in time.

I think that is a good stopping point for now!