Sometimes it’s fun to argue about lists. These rankings tackle novels, albums, and artists with both seriousness and play—countdowns that spark conversation as much as they offer perspective.
Ranking Elton John is fun for exactly the same reason it’s difficult: there isn’t just one Elton John. There’s the absurdly gifted early-70s Elton who seemed capable of tossing off masterpieces before lunch. There’s the country-and-Americana dreamer of Tumbleweed Connection. There’s the maximal pop star. The bruised, sprawling auteur. The 80s survivor. The late-career craftsman…
Dev Hynes does not make the kind of catalog where one album is obviously broken, another is obviously overpraised, and the whole thing can be stacked neatly by “quality” as if we were ranking kitchen appliances. Blood Orange records tend to arrive more slyly than that. They drift in. They stain the room. They leave…
Ranking Joan Didion sounds easy. At first, you think: fine, put the famous essay collections near the top, place Play It as It Lays somewhere high because it’s obviously too cold and brilliant not to be, make room for the grief memoirs, and try not to start a small civil war over whether The White…
Ranking Cocteau Twins is difficult for a slightly strange reason. It’s not because the catalog is huge, and it’s not because there are embarrassing late-career detours to sort through. The hard part is that Cocteau Twins albums don’t divide neatly into masterpieces and misfires. They divide into different kinds of sonic weather. One record is…
Ranking Dostoevsky is not an especially sensible exercise. You are not just ranking “good novels” in the usual way. You are ranking breakdowns, confessions, guilt spirals, ideological meltdowns, spiritual crises, and several hundred pages of people talking themselves into and out of catastrophe. Even his smaller books tend to contain at least one idea, monologue,…
Ranking David Bowie albums is ridiculous. It is a bad idea. It is an impossible idea. It is the kind of thing that seems fun until you are suddenly staring at Hunky Dory, “Heroes”, Scary Monsters, Station to Station, Low, and Aladdin Sane like you’ve been asked to choose a favorite nerve ending. And yet…
Miles Davis did not treat live albums like souvenirs. He used them to prove the music was still changing. The studio records are the monuments, obviously. Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, Miles Smiles, Bitches Brew. Those are the albums people reach for when they talk about how jazz changed in the second half of…
Ranking Octavia E. Butler is a risky little exercise. Not because she wrote a giant shelf of books. She didn’t. It’s risky because even the Butler novels that land lower on the list still contain ideas most writers would build an entire career around. She wrote about power with unusual sharpness. About dependency, hierarchy, survival,…
Few artists inspire the kind of fascination that surrounds Kate Bush. Her music occupies a strange and wonderful place in pop history—simultaneously accessible and mysterious, theatrical yet deeply emotional. From the gothic drama of “Wuthering Heights” to the widescreen atmosphere of Hounds of Love, Bush built one of the most distinctive catalogs in modern music….
Os Mutantes are often framed as proof that Brazilian music could absorb rock, psychedelia, and avant-garde experimentation without losing its identity. That framing is true, but it can also flatten the band into an idea rather than a listening experience. What actually makes Os Mutantes remarkable is that at their best, the music feels conversational….