Ranked lists of an artist’s best songs cannot settle which tracks are greatest. They work better as openly stated arguments, giving readers a defined order of taste to test against their own listening, particularly when a career has changed direction.
Key takeaways
- A ranked song list expresses a critic’s judgement in numerical form, but the numbers do not measure any quantity in the music.
- Putting songs in order forces a critic to make trade-offs that a general appreciation of an artist can leave unstated.
- Artists who change style or identity expose the limits of ranking because their different periods may be aiming at different things.
- Ranked lists gain more credibility when independent critics agree, so a strong consensus would weaken the view that they are only arguments.
A ranked list is a critical claim, not a measurement
The greatest-songs ranking is one of the most familiar formats in music journalism. It takes a body of work, puts it in order and usually gives each entry a short justification. The order looks exact, since a song in fifth place appears to have beaten the song in sixth. No instrument produced that result, though. It comes from a writer’s or an editorial team’s judgement, and that judgement could reasonably have gone another way.
A recent example shows the format at work. The Guardian has published a ranked guide to the songs of the French avant-pop act Christine and the Queens, timed to the new single Rendez-vous avec toi. The publication frames the catalogue around polished songwriting used to work through complicated feelings. The excerpt available for this article covers only the framing and one entry, so the full order, including the top choice, is not known here and is not discussed.
The argument here concerns the form rather than this particular list. A ranking is best understood as a compressed critical essay. Its numbers state a position and its short entries give reasons for that position. Readers get the most from it when they treat it as a case to examine, disagreeing where their own listening points elsewhere. They get less when they treat the order as a settled result, because the format’s apparent precision goes beyond what taste can support.
This position does not dismiss rankings. An argument can be well informed, carefully reasoned and useful even when it can’t be proved. Much good criticism works in this way. The issue is the kind of authority a numbered list can fairly claim, and the kind of claim a reader should take it to be making.
A forced order makes a critic’s priorities visible
The clearest point in favour of ranking is that it removes a familiar escape route. A general appreciation can praise an artist’s melodies, production, lyrics and live presence without saying which matters most. A list can’t avoid the question. If an inventive but uneven track is placed above a flawless but conventional one, the writer has shown a preference for risk over finish, whether or not the entry says so.
The order therefore holds information that the prose may not spell out. A reader who goes through the positions can begin to reconstruct the critic’s standards: whether emotional force outweighs craft, whether influence counts for more than pleasure, and whether well-known singles are favoured or held at arm’s length. Those standards can then be questioned directly. Someone who values different things can see precisely where and why their own list would differ.
The framing of the Guardian’s guide offers a small example. Describing an artist’s achievement as sleek writing applied to difficult emotion suggests one possible test for each song: how well polish and complexity work together. A list built around that idea might reward different tracks from a list built around dance-floor impact or formal experiment. Neither approach is wrong, and each would produce a different order from the same recordings.
This is how an argument behaves. It starts from premises, reaches conclusions and can be challenged at either stage. A measurement, by contrast, is meant to come out the same whoever takes it. Two capable critics with different premises can produce quite different rankings, and neither has made an error of fact. That difference is the strongest reason to read the numbers as positions in a debate.
Artistic reinvention exposes the limits of a single scale
Ranking works most smoothly when the songs being compared are trying to do roughly the same thing. It becomes harder when an artist changes direction, because the comparison may then be between different aims rather than between better and worse attempts at one aim.
The Guardian’s account illustrates this difficulty. It reports that the fifth Christine and the Queens album, Hopecore, first appeared online through a leak by the artist and came out under the name Rahim Redcar, and that the act has since returned to the earlier name. According to the publication, the album set aside the refined pop of the early years in favour of lo-fi material closer to rough sketches. Its description of the opening track highlights bouncing drum patterns that are eventually broken open by sharp synthesisers.
Any critic placing that kind of track alongside highly finished pop has to decide how the two should be compared. Judged by polish, a deliberately rough sketch will often lose, though polish may never have been its goal. Judged by immediacy or sense of risk, the result may reverse. The final position therefore depends largely on which standard the critic has chosen, and on how much weight is given to an artist’s apparent intentions.
A single vertical list hides this choice, because it places everything on one scale whether or not one scale fits. This problem is not limited to one artist. It can arise with any musician who moves between genres, adopts a new persona or abandons a recognisable sound. Careers of this kind are often the most interesting to write about and the hardest to reduce to one order.
Seen as an argument, the difficulty becomes a strength. A ranking that places a rough late track high in the list is making a claim about what matters in the artist’s work. It is saying that a change of approach should be valued on its own terms, or that its results are strong by the standards of the earlier work. Readers can assess that claim. Treated as a final score, the same placement merely looks like a puzzling result.
A new release gives the form a practical job for listeners
The occasion for a list also shapes how it should be read. The Guardian’s ranking accompanies a new single, a common moment for looking back at an artist’s work. That timing suggests a practical purpose alongside the critical one: readers who have just encountered the new track, or who have lost touch with the artist, are offered a route through the catalogue.
For this purpose, a list is often more usable than a chronological history. It provides many possible starting points, and each short entry tells a reader what to listen for. A newcomer can begin near the top, sample tracks from several periods and quickly form a view of their own. A longtime listener can use the same list as a prompt to return to songs that had slipped from memory.
Neither use requires the order to be definitive. A guide only has to be informed, clear and honest about its preferences, as a knowledgeable friend’s recommendations are. The value lies in what the reader then hears, and a list that sends someone towards a song they end up loving has done its job even if they would place that song elsewhere.
Expert consensus gives rankings a stronger claim to authority
The strongest objection is that this view undersells expertise. Critics who have listened widely and over long periods may simply be better placed than casual listeners to identify lasting achievement. Their rankings are more than personal preferences, because they draw on comparison, musical knowledge and a sense of how a song relates to what came before it. Calling the result merely an argument could suggest that every opinion carries equal weight, which is not a position most readers would accept in other fields of expertise.
Agreement matters too. When critics working independently repeatedly favour the same songs, personal taste becomes a less convincing explanation. Some shared quality may be at work, and a reader could reasonably treat that convergence as something close to a verdict. Certain tracks do seem to hold high places across many lists, and it would be strange to treat this as coincidence.
There is also a separate objection from the opposite direction, which doubts that most lists qualify as arguments at all. Entries are short, the reasoning is often impressionistic and many readers may do little more than scan for the top position. On this account, the format encourages quick reactions rather than reasoned disagreement, and calling it criticism flatters it. Publishers may also value lists partly because they are easy to share and dispute, a motive that has little to do with careful evaluation.
Both objections have force. Expertise can make one argument better than another, and a weakly reasoned list is a poor argument, whatever its intentions. The position set out here can absorb some of this, since good arguments are what expertise should produce. It cannot fully answer the point about convergence, which is why that point needs testing rather than assuming away.
Reader research and critical agreement could alter this view
Several kinds of evidence could change the conclusion. No such evidence is presented here, and the claims above rest on reasoning about the format rather than on data.
The first would be a systematic comparison of independently produced rankings. If critics from different backgrounds, countries and periods repeatedly reached very similar orders, not only similar top choices, the case for treating lists as closer to verdicts would be stronger. Wide disagreement beyond a few celebrated songs would support the view set out here.
The second would be evidence about stability over time. Rankings that held steady across generations of critics would suggest that they capture something durable. Substantial reordering as tastes and critical priorities shift would suggest that they record a particular moment’s values.
The third would be research into how readers actually use these lists. If most people ignore the reasoning and accept the order as fact, then describing rankings as arguments may be accurate about their design but not about their effect. If many readers go on to listen and form their own views, the guide function described above would have firmer support.
Finally, a close look at the full body of a given publication’s rankings could show whether writers state their criteria or leave them implicit. Lists that consistently explain their standards would fit the argument model well, while lists that do not would give it less support.
Sources and further reading
- The Guardian: the music section’s ranked guide, which supplied the reported details about the new single, the album and the changes of name.
- National newspaper music sections: their archives of ranked artist guides are a place to compare how critics state their criteria.
- Academic journals in popular music studies: scholarship in this field is a place to look for discussion of canon formation and critical value.
- Audience research bodies in journalism and media: their work is a place to look for evidence on how readers engage with list-based articles.
Surfaced from the rss:guardian_music signal “ranked pop career retrospective”. AI-assisted draft, editorially reviewed.
