Ricky Bobby: I did just like you told me: "If you ain’t first, you’re last!"
Reese Bobby: What the hell are you talking about?
Ricky Bobby: What you told me that day at school for Career Day! You came in and said, "If you ain’t first, you’re last!"
Reese Bobby: Aw hell Ricky, I was high when I said that! Well that doesn’t make any sense at all! You can be second, third, fourth... hell, you can even be fifth!
"Talladega Nights" explains it best — with the end of 2015 slowly but surely creeping near, we’ve reached the time of year when critics and the Internet at large trample over one another to declare what was the "best" of the year. This annual rush to declare someone or something a "winner" of an artistic medium has always been particularly pronounced with regards to music. In the last week alone, several online publications have run some permutation of a "Best Songs/Albums/What-have-you of 2015" piece.
Ignoring that there are 29 days left in the calendar year, apparently the surprise last-minute release of "Black Messiah" by D’Angelo (shameless plug No. 1) last year failed to teach critics a vital lesson about rushing to conclusions. In any case, most of these lists don’t hold Father John Misty’s February release "I Love You, Honeybear" at No. 1, so they’re invalid in our eyes anyway (shameless plug No. 2).
But we digress. Beyond the impossible race for critical authority and respectability, we as a culture are all too quick to react or make moves if it means we will be the "first" at something, even if it’s as trite as releasing an end-of-the-year list. Hell, we’ll hustle if it means we can consider ourselves to be, at the least, "among the first" to do something, such as participating in a collective outpouring of emotions. For reference, look no further than the stampede to see who can praise *insert hot new Netflix show and/or blockbuster film here* the most, or who can compose the most expressive way of saying how much the new Adele record made them cry. In a more somber light, consider the rush to adopt a profile picture in France’s colors in light of the recent attacks.
We’ll be the first to admit we’ve been guilty of this, too, both in our personal lives and in this very paper. Contrary to what some would believe, we are only human. Even so, the rush to be at the vanguard of society’s ever-fickle emotions, priorities and passing interests is not only mostly disingenuous, but it can be dangerous. Try as we may to put it behind us, the "you’re either with us, or against us" mob mentality that emerged at the time the Iraq War was gearing up helped create a violent quagmire of our own design.
The fast-paced nature of American society has meant sacrificing sincere emotion in the name of collective artifice. We’ve written before on the pratfalls of behaving in a reactionary manner, and the rush to be in on something or "first" (in quotations because hell, no one is ever really first in the Information Age) isn’t far removed from reacting in a hasty fashion. It would do everyone a bit of good to sit down and ponder: "How does this (whether it be a piece of knowledge, politics or art) REALLY make me feel?"
We know finals don’t really allow time for self-contemplation or introspection, but we’re confident it’ll prove more productive than dashing to tweet about the inevitable "surprise" end-of-the-year Drake release in all caps.
