So (as you might imagine) I've gotten interested in some of the many things people said yesterday about lists, and I've been thinking more about my little off-the-cuff "20 Greatest Male Guitarists" list from yesterday.
Grant said "perhaps you would better understand your affection for lists if you just made a list of things that you like about lists." A good joke, but actually it made me feel tempted to do just that!
I won't, though. Too much work.
False hierarchy and other headaches
Thinking about it more, if I were really making a list of notable guitarists, I think it would have to include about 50 people. Twenty is just the wrong number. Too limited.
These things suggest the scale they need...for instance, I think a list of the Greatest NBA Basketball Players of All Time should be a group of about 15. That's the point at which I start to be comfortable leaving people out. With only 20 guitarists, there are musicians not mentioned who we're simply not comfortable leaving out.
A list of 50 would naturally include female guitarists. (And then, not only could I have Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell, I could at least try to finagle a place for Ana Vidović.)
In fact it would have room for representing many things that people mentioned and that need to be represented, such as: a historical figure from before the age of recording; pure virtuosos like Guthrie Govan whose playing is purely about dexterity and speed; and at least one token studio musician. You might consider "token" to be a pejorative, but in fact it's a highly useful concept to a listmaker. In a list of 50, many people could be tokens—each of them representing whole genres, periods, instruments, regions, or styles and approaches that really should be represented. Of course this is only useful if every list item is discussed.
Next, it would be much better if it wasn't titled "Greatest" or "Best." That makes it instantly about status, which opens a Pandora's box. Humans love competition, and our attention is instantly engaged when we make anything into a contest. But art isn't really a contest, cutting contests and "battles of the bands" notwithstanding. So I'd be much more comfortable with a title like "50 Fascinating Guitarists," or "50 Guitarists You Should Know." That takes away not only the Greatest/Best aspect, but also the false-hierarchy aspect, avoiding the absurdity of a list on which the person ranked at number 12, say, is implied to be "better" than the person in the 13th position, which is nothing but false precision.
This is the reason I put my list yesterday in order of birth year: it was a way to abolish ranking.
Balance imbalances
Of course then I ran into another problem...I had inadvertently highlighted the fact that many people considered "great guitarists" were born in the 1940s. Which in turn led me to include Kurt Cobain because I realized late in the process that I needed at least one person born in the 1960s.
This is the "balance" problem you run into in any such list. Balance problems open lists to criticism based on ideas of inclusiveness—as when, for example, Victor Bloomfield criticized my list for not including enough classical guitarists (my list only had one, as a token). And didn't somebody mention that I had shortchanged Spanish and Portuguese guitarists?
You might think there are only a limited number of inclusiveness factors to balance, and that therefore it should be possible to consider all of them, but actually there is an unlimited supply. It all depends on which criteria you highlight. What if a list didn't have a single Latinx guitarist? Or a single left-handed guitarist—what are you, biased toward righties? Or a single blind guitarist—don't you know that there are a number of famous blind guitarists, such as José Feliciano, Jeff Healey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson (whose first name, by the way, really was Lemon)? This "balance problem" goes on and on. No matter how the listmaker struggles for balance, there are still going to be openings for criticism to sneak in.
In this case, I highlighted year of birth, which in turn obligated me to make sure not too many of the guitarists I mentioned were people born in the '40s. Many of the musicians who were most active in the peak decades of "classic rock," the '60s and '70s, were naturally born in the '40s. But as I (and, ahem, several critics) mentioned, my attempt at balance in that regard ended up distorting my list, because I made a stab at balance by going out of my way to find a guitarist born in the '60s. You might call this "overbalancing"...bending too far over backwards to preserve an appearance of fairness.
It's related to quotas, as in, "on a list of 50, at least ten must be women, 20 must be acoustic guitarists, and at least one must have sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads."
Impossible
Reader robert e said it nicely: "I think lists are most useful for one's own delectation and education, and possibly to fuel edifying geeky debate if they're not taken too seriously. They're also decent starting points to get into a new topic, again as long as they're not taken too seriously."
That's getting into "a list of the reasons we like lists," and it's a nice starting point. For me, listmaking is a way of engaging with a subject, a reason to get into the kind of research I enjoy doing, which in turn helps me learn. Mostly, I suppose, it's just a way of focusing on something I want to focus on. I do get a bit "obsessive" sometimes. I had fun on Saturday night listening to dozens of guitarists.
Probably the most important thing Robert said, he said twice: don't take it too seriously! That's crucial. Only if a list can stay lighthearted, flexible, and fun does it serve its real functions, which are and ought to be modest.
Finally, Zyni Moë put it succintly (she said it twice too): "lists are impossible."
As the characters in The Wire all say, "true dat."
Mike
Lens of Interest this week:
If you should happen to be looking for an all-purpose zoom for the Sony APS-C cameras I've been discussing lately, here it is. The Sony E 16–55mm ƒ/2.8 G is a high-quality, constant aperture APS-C zoom of manageable weight and appropriate size that covers the true wide-angle to short telephoto range. Its built-in stabilization makes it a perfect match for the unstabilized A6xxx models, but it's good enough to be matched with Sony's best.
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