Mass consensus is a weird phenomenon. It suggests that what people share is more valuable than what each of us keeps close; it’s a Campbellian reflex that we haven’t shaken out of what we do here (primarily, tell you what we like and what we don’t.)
Three years ago, I was tasked with writing the introduction to our year-end Favorite Labels feature. I lamented the fact that trustworthy (and SANE) music curation had basically ceased to exist in an era where notoriety had become a confusing amalgam of happenstance, advertising algorithms, and cheap-as-fuck digital recording and distribution technology.