Hits are for squares?

It’s around this time each year that journalists, bloggers and any one else similarly obsessed with letting everyone know their bloody opinions get rather excited.

This has nothing to do with the imminent gifts or feasts of meat and alcohol that xmas inevitably brings.

No, this time of year means one thing for these people. Lists.

Yes, they have already started flooding in. Furthermore, this year, while not quite as salivatingly-big an opportunity as the Millennium, we have the prospect of a ‘greatest album of the decade’-a-thon!

The NME has this week been the most prolific perpetrator of this culture with their 100 Greatest Albums of the Decade.

On first inspection, and considering the usual standards of the aforementioned publication, their list seems surprisingly good. The Strokes don’t seem a bad shout for number one seeing as whatever is chosen will make people who believe too much in their own opinions cry. The album also sounds fairly relevant nine years on.

The inclusion of the obligatory Radiohead, Interpol and The Holdsteady also tick the seemingly ‘given’ boxes needed to appease their blinkered readership. And although I wouldn’t argue with any of these, how they figure In Rainbows is better than Kid A is bewildering. Even for the NME.

Arcade Fire’s Funeral and Relationship of Command by At the Drive In are nice surprises, as are The Rapture, Bright Eyes and The Walkmen. All excellent albums.

But, and this is rather large interjection, when you look at the detritus filling out the other spaces on the list, and think about it for marginally more time than it takes to flick through the New Musical Express’ fickle pages, the list loses rather a lot of credibility.

I know this debate is essentially down to taste so I wont deride choices such as Green Day’s American Idiot or Klaxons’ Myths of the Near Future; no one is forcing us to read this. However, I feel the list is characterised by its frankly puzzling omissions: worthy albums; albums which I would expect the NME to include.

Where was Phoenix’s amazing Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix? Where was Burial’s Untrue? Where the bloody hell was Madvillainy?!

These are not the esoteric choices of a bitter music snob. These are merely the most surprising and obvious absentees from an NME list. Is Kasabian’s Empire a not better — if not, more obvious — choice than the detestable and shallow ‘band’ Hard Fi?

Are the NME being purposefully pugnacious by not including anything by Daft Punk? How can one recognise Bright Eyes and Sujan Steves yet ignore Iron and Wine?

My point is to ask if NME are taking the piss or if they really are as inept as we have long suspected?

Lists are controversial; that’s why they are published. But to show that when making a list there’s no need to be so firmly camped inside a bubble of shit, here are some far more considered alternatives.

Paste Magazine’s top 50 albums of the decade.

and

Pitchfork’s 20 greatest albums of the ’00s.

Opinions etc?