Lists, arseholes and metaphors

Now I'm probably mistaken but I'm sure there's some old idiom that states "lists are like arseholes - everybody's got one, and everyone seems propelled to use them". But then I'm probably getting my metaphors confused, which is almost a certainty at this stage of the working week. Metaphors about arseholes and list aside, there is still a scientific equation which states that the number of lists used by any given publication is inversely related to amount of quality work said publication produces.

So it came as no surprise that after logging onto The Age this morning and clicking through to Friday's EG music section, which remains one of the only reasons The Ghost keeps logging on the The Age's website (other than Schembri's weekly diatribe) every week, I discovered The Age's sporadically readable part-time music critic, Craig Mathieson, had provided us with his list of 101 albums every music fan simply must have in their CD collection. For anyone who's suddenly decided they need a music collection, or wants to boast like a pretentious twat at parties about how much better the Flaming Lips were when they were sucking down acid, rather than Veuve Clicquot, it's the perfect list: Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, which happens to be the Ghost's favourite album of all time (speaking about hanging-out tastes like badges of honour), Telvision's Marquee Moon, Tom Wait's Blue Valentine, and a bunch of other predictables. You can check Mathieson's excuse for a story here, but, unusually, it's not his choice of music that's forced the Ghost up on his high horse today; instead today's rant is dedicated to the often used form of list-journalism, and how a once reputable publication like The Age has spawned a nascent form of baby boomer journalism - a desperate attempt to wrestle power from away from those pesky new gen xers, while at the same constantly trying to keep up with the xers, their blogs and their new media.

Mathieson's EG list feature may have actually set a new level for laziness in Australian feature writing; it just reeks of the baby-boomer rot that's been eating away at Spencer Street for a little while now. There is the requisite blend of new and old classics, a mixture of a few hip, new albums and artists most of the paper's older reader would never of heard of, and then some albums that either border on cheesy or completely obscure. It's this deperate grab for the middle of the road, to try to provide everyone of their readers with something but giving most people nothing, that's most frustrating to long-time readers of The Age. You can come to expect more lists stories that try to straddle the modern/classic dilemma facing the majority of The Age's boomer management, more culture pieces poached from an international papers or journals, and larger photo by-lines for all the dozens of the baby-boomer culture warriors and opinion writers The Age has running around its corridors these days. Because who wouldn't want to see a picture of Jim Schembri decked-out in Wu-Tang, a smug grin creeping over his face, thinking how he's just so clever as he imbues himself with another layer of irony. Jackass.