List-en to this

So what's the point of this page? What do all these lists mean? Paul Morley, of The Observer, and Lloyd Hook, of The Daily Telegraph, shrug off their anoraks and attempt to explain the purpose of such an undertaking...

Lists. Don't you just hate them. And yet, don't you just love them. Hate them because they're all wrong, they're biased, they're fixed, they miss too much out, they're in the wrong order, they're utterly arbitrary, they try to cage beasts that should be allowed to run free in our imaginations without the indignity of being branded with numbers. And whatever comes top is usually going to knock you speechless.

You also love them because whatever comes top is going to knock you speechless. And because without them we wouldn't really know where the hell we were. They're not complete maps of anything, they're the edge of a map that features the entrance to a universe that is so vast and complicated that in the end you have to make your own way through it. The list helps you begin. It's not the Complete Book of Anything, it's like the contents page. It's the start of something, in the ridiculous but necessary disguise of being definitive.

It is the definitive nature of the list that is always unnerving. The idea that the list is stating once and for all, this is it. But lists keep coming, ordering the cherished pieces of our lives in specialist sections, in time, in genre, in space, lists that sometimes support previous lists, lists that often undermine previous lists. The story is always changing.

Lists in one sense, the boring sense, try and make things safe and organised. Ultimately, in a good sense, they keep breaking things up, they keep reminding us that behind and beyond the obvious, the regulars, the usual suspects, there is more and more to discover.

It is in a way what is outside the list, those names that are just beginning to make their way into the list, and indeed up the list, as well as those that are slipping away, that makes them so fascinating.

In these lists, guaranteed, as the best lists are, to send you bananas, to get you reworking them in your own image, Slayer breathe the same rarified air as, err, Air; Nevermind is universally acclaimed, Reuben Thorne is condemned by the same margin. Elsewhere, new faces (Joe Rokocoko, Franz Ferdinand) drift in from the outside, inscrutably representing all that which is yet to be discovered.

You shouldn't read anything into lists but you can't help yourself. They end up as a combination of great things that get you worked up because they come in an order that makes a kind of sense, but which lacks statistical, historical and aesthetic integrity. It's just a snapshot developed out of the tastes of the people asked, but somehow it contains grains of truth about the shape of things. The classics will endure, however much these lists get revamped and assaulted by new generations of fans and critics. It's also interesting to use these lists to see when patterns and trends set in motion by these new generations become grains of truth.

We list not just for comfort and because it's a nice parlour game. We list to remember great albums such as Dinosaur Jr's You're Living All Over Me, and forgotten footballers such as Andy Earl; to remember that such brilliance might have disappeared without lists like this. We list to remember that for every album like You're Living All Over Me, there are others as worthy of our attention. Albums waiting to be listed because, like it or not, the list goes on for ever.