do you keep an active top 5/top 10 in yr head?

I actively try to avoid it because I feel like all-timing anything is a quick trip to the retirement home for the person making the list, but at the same time I can't ever suppress the urge enough to keep the list from forming

mine right now: Paul Chain Violet Theater, Mercyful Fate, Summoning, Joni Mitchell, Earth Wind and Fire and it kills me to leave Souled American off the list but it's top five not top six

Names recur, Joni Mitchell and Earth Wind and Fire among them, but the full list changes.

kinda interested in a "next five" list, the ones who get booted off most routinely with the most guilt

Stockholm Monsters, Charlie Parker, Ana Gabriel, X-Clan who really only have two albums to represent them but Christ almighty those albums, Maiden

no, x rules is good enough

Yeah I always have a kind of running constellation in my head of who is lighting me up the most that week. Right now Debussy, John Williams, Ron Jones, Boulez, Vangelis

Very different if I try to think all time though

not really into the number five

http://joeylockie.blogdrive.com

no, x rules is good enough

this is actually my general ROT but then as long as I resist the "who's #1" q I can have fun w/"who are the five you like best?" idk why 5 other than the obvious power of the number five

haha yeah i totally do, it's both all-time and always shifting

rn: blue nile, scritti politti, janet jackson, debarge, sade

a cardiacsy top 1, sure. maaaybe a top 2 if vdgg can be promoted above their peers. used to be a top 4 but that got silly when i realised ulver were still in it

no, i only have a "here's what i'm listening to this week" list. i could make a list, but duke ellington doesn't belong on a list with anybody else ever, so why?

I actively try to avoid it because I feel like all-timing anything is a quick trip to the retirement home for the person making the list

nah this is totally a youthful thing for me! before you realise you've heard so much music that narrowing it down to 5 or even 10 default all-timers makes no sense. i stopped doing this many years ago

having an active rolling top 5 of the year is as much as i can manage

i used to be able to say pretty readily that Sonic Youth was my favorite band, but half the reason for that was that they'd been around so long AND were still making new records i loved, now that the latter is no longer the case it's more of a toss-up. never had a really firmly set top 5 or 10, though, my answer would definitely vary on what day i was asked and how the question was phrased etc.

nah this is totally a youthful thing for me!

I think actually this is part of my deal w/this - like, when I was 12 years old, knowing who was The Absolute Best was so important to me, and then I outgrew that and looked down on 12-year-old me for his naivete...and now I think, nah c'mon man, there's about five who you think are the best in yr mind right now, out with it who are they

as of this post Orbital just knocked Joni out, RIP Joni

Nels Cline, "At Last I Am Free," the surprisingly high hit rate of Spotify's Discover Weekly, Grayfolded, dub

#1 has been the same since sometime in 1982 or 83: The Time. Then probably Robyn Hitchcock, Charles Mingus, and the Velvet Underground. Fifth slot rotates amongst a whole plethora of folks. Today is Willie Nelson.

I always like to hear Bill Evans and David Axelrod. Beyond that, I go through phases.

I always keep a Top 5 grudge list in my mind.

Top 5 would've been a very different movie if Chris Rock was playing Richard Nixon

I don't make coherent lists in my head, but it seems like every time I hear an album I really enjoy, I think to myself, 'this is GOAT material! this easily makes my top 20!' (without bothering to figure out what the other 19 entries would look like) — but a year later I've lost interest in it and it takes on the air of an embarrassing fad (it's already slightly painful to reread my contributions to the ILX favourite albums of all time thread). I guess it's youthful/naive optimism, taking comfort in the idea that my current favorites will continue to resonate with me as I grow old and ultimately wanting to have a stable identity as a fan/consumer...when in reality I'm a dilettante who goes through several musical phases per year without ever really accumulating a personal canon. my current obsessions are Tori Amos/Stevie Wonder/Donny Hathaway/Herbie Hancock/???, but I'll probably be over all of them within a few months, unless I dig deeper into their catalogs and discover new albums to rave about and get bored with.

http://i.imgur.com/7gI1dwk.jpg

Not really. I'd estimate there's about 200 artists or thereabouts that I'd consider to be all-time favourites that I can't imagine ever falling out of love with, and of course I have all-time favourite albums and songs like anyone else has. I'm not really interested in making lists of them or ranking them or anything, though.

unregistered's post resonates for me. if i'm feeling it in that moment i might be like "this is the best." that might change but as far as future embarrassment goes i don't care anymore, i've said elsewhere that i'm not even a good predictor at all of what i might be embarrassed to have enjoyed in the future so it really doesn't matter.

that said there is definitely a rotating top 3-5 say monthly or so, maybe a little longer, if i get in really deep into an artist than i might think of them as an "all-time" kind of thing, though even the "all-timers" aren't really all time and might rotate a little every few years. i used to think of neil young, grateful dead, and townes van zandt as "all-timers" but i haven't been in the mood as much lately so idk. they probably still are though.

right now i can fairly easily say miles davis. i can throw on a miles record any time. i'm always in the mood. any miles really. "get up with it" and "live evil" and the "complete on the corner sessions" have been the go-to ones but anything is great. if you took all my records away except for miles i could last a long time. i feel pretty confident that feeling will be the case for a long time for me.

dylan & joni are definitely up there. joni especially because there is a lot i haven't gone deep into yet, anything post-mingus i am intrigued by but haven't yet gone totally in, so that excitement about music of hers i have yet to explore is quite present.

scratch perry is probably up there too, as a producer-artist there is so much variety to listen in terms of people he worked with but his stamp is always there.

maybe bill callahan. if i'm in the mood then i might consider will oldham, the good stuff at least.

of the past few months top 5-ish would probably include d'angelo, erykah, shabazz palaces, popcaan, miguel, future, young thug. of the past week probably freddie gibbs and earl sweatshirt.

emerging is big youth too, i picked up a TON of reggae in 2014 and still listen to it all the time, lately on shuffle a lot, anytime a big youth tune pops i feel like saying "big youth is probably my favorite vocal presence in reggae"

I have a weekly Top 40 tracks chart, confined to current music, and updated every Monday. All-time favourites, no. Once something is consciously elevated to all-time favourite status, it tends to lose some of its power.

mostly i just listen to bitches brew and also things that are not bitches brew

haha otm

I keep an active gif of my wife rolling her eyes in my head to remind me not to make lists

i do this, esp when im like, do i like this or do i LIKE like this
rn: kendrick, kraftwerk, bjork, jorge ben, steve reich

Not even slightly.

There are only 2 good records

I could never ever do that

there's 'all time' and 'right now' and they're always quite different. the 'right now' is more interesting and the 'all time' is always being debated because it might have been years since i last enjoyed a whole album by them. generally i go by acts i've been obsessed with for over at least a year and found myself buying-up a lot of their stuff and going out of my way to read-up about etc... so let's try this:

ALL TIME
the Beach Boys
Tom Waits
Autechre
the Boo Radleys
Talking Heads

RIGHT NOW
Joni Mitchell
Future
Scott Walker (creeping into all-time for me now)
Miles Davis
Pere Ubu

Listing things in this way is a bit unfair on styles that tend to be best appreciated pan-genre, like reggae or afrobeats. Even jazz, I added Miles to my list but it implicitly includes Mingus, Coltrane and others.

I keep an active gif of my wife rolling her eyes in my head to remind me not to make lists

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Sunday, January 10, 2016 10:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how long do you have to be married before your spouse will roll their eyes in your head

i need to know when to get divorced

:)

I think Led Zeppelin, Cocteau Twins, and Royal Trux (but maybe Hagerty more broadly) are perpetually in my top three. The other two slots are perpetually in flux. I'll have a Bowie-thon today and he might sit up there for a while.

BTW, Jon not Jon, just figured out who you were based on your list. Glad to know you're still around!

Sly might be a fourth perma-GOAT.

^_^

If I have a perma-GOAT, it's probably Trane, Miles, Monk, Bach, Beethoven, Zeppelin, Beatles, Fugazi, James Brown, Joni Mitchell; too hard to distill to five. Twenty would add Neil Young, Bill Evans, Shostakovich, Steve Reich, Roy Orbison, Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Wu-Tang, Pink Floyd, and having trouble settling on one more -- maybe Sly Stone, or Milton Nascimento, or Dan Snaith/Caribou.

It's actually a difficult exercise for me to do this without trying to "curate" to make my answer sound less prosaic, because I think my honest answer is pretty prosaic.

Could also have easily included Ornette Coleman or Herbie Hancock.

i don't even think i do this with filmmakers anymore

this week: Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, Brahms

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xat1/v/t1.0-9/10577059_10154453033657137_6866736603066064858_n.jpg?oh=0e73ccdcbe1e76722e54640879d63e76&oe=574630DD

^man who has figured out how to live

Love that lupu album

Like, I can accept and admit that she isn't technically good, but Basia sometimes creeps into my personal top 5. I honestly couldn't tell you why. I find her guileless banality soothing, I guess?

If there is a record I could listen to endlessly, it's probably Glenn Gould playing the Bach English Suites.

I keep a running playlist of stuff I've heard that I like and have bought/plan to buy; I don't rank it, though.

but does anybody have goat on their GOAT list

I keep a running list of the greatest goats, and a grating list of the runningest goats

easy for me - Underworld, Cardiacs, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Susumu Hirasawa, Denki Groove

as a radio DJ who frequently trains much younger DJs, I get asked the "so what are your favorite bands" question a lot. I usually rattle off something like

"The Fall, Sun City Girls, Boredoms, The Ex, Nurse With Wound, etc."

and then they look at me with this blank look on their faces

but my answers would be the same if some record geek asked me, so there ya go, I guess my answer is "yes"

I guess I have an informal set of 5-10 contemporary artists who I

oops

I guess I have an informal set of 5-10 contemporary artists who I have special feelings for above and beyond the other 99.99%