I’ve often ragged on the cop-out principle of throwing together lists of dubious validity. You see this happen a lot with travel, in magazines (expired Travel Savvy), books (Lonely Planet’s BlueList), and on the Travel Channel (“Top 10 Destinations for Romance”).
Here’s one from the music world: “Oasis Debut Named Greatest Album of All Time.” Ummmm…is Definitely, Maybe even the best Oasis album? Is it better than any album from the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, or Nirvana? Not even maybe. Definitely not definitely.
This was a UK poll, which is obvious when you look at the rest of the list. Remember the Stone Roses? About 50 Americans have that album on their shelves and the rest of the copies are all for sale in the used bin at your local store. But the Stone Roses are in the top-20. So are The Libertines. There are only two non-UK acts in the top-20: Nirvana and The Strokes. “The list is dominated by guitar-based acts,” says a spokesperson. (Code for “almost everyone who completed the poll was a NME-reading young British white male.) Only two women and one black artist appear anywhere in the top-50.
Kind of reminds me of the poll a few years ago where Atlas Shrugged was named the best book of all time. Interesting book, yes, but pretty insufferable and redundant much of the way through. (There’s a 45-page monologue at one point, for starters.) A bit of ballot-stuffing by the fan club perhaps?
The point of all this rambling is to say this: take every list you see as suspect. Who says the little B&B by the lake one town over from you isn’t one of the “10 Most Romantic Destinations?” The “World’s 10 Greatest Beaches” are probably the ones that smart people keep secret, the hidden beaches with no timeshares on them. Forget the lists. They make you mentally lazy. Go explore and decide for yourself what’s great and what’s not.
