RM: I understand your move to appeal to a historical context with your book, to focus on chronology and the development of art as opposed to merely cataloging taste. Still, whether intentional or not, ranking the songs (or albums, baseball players, whatever) does provide a sort of built in narrative in its own right. There is a storytelling aspect present when things are ranked, and in my opinion, it's what makes your website's decade lists so worthwhile. So, would you care to elaborate as to why the songs on the Pitchfork 500 are not ranked? Or was naming "Don't Stop Believing" to the pinnacle spot viewed as a superfluous formality?

 

Ryan Schreiber: It's a funny thing because I usually feel like it's a little bit of a cop-out when other publications put together lists like this without ranking the songs. But it felt different here, since lists like that tend to work better online or in periodical form than in book form, and also because that's been our approach to list-making for so long that we felt like it'd be fun to try to a different approach for a change. The idea here was to shift the focus of discussion from which songs are considered better than other songs-- which is great to argue about online, but ultimately not a very compelling reason to drop $16. In the end, we thought it was more interesting to create a chronological narrative of the past three decades of music, to try to show how it got from point A to point B.

 

http://www.merryswankster.com/archives/2008/11/interview_ryan.html