Spin doctor ... Norman Jay. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty
Rewind to 1995, and everyone was laughing at lists and list makers. Nick Hornby's High Fidelity had just come out and rendered a certain type of (male) music fan - those fellas who are forever compiling personal Top Tens, or fretting over polls in music magazines - ridiculous. Their tendency to reduce music - this wonderful, elusive, personal force - to a competition; their craving of consensus and self-affirmation in end-of-year charts; their need to try and impose order on a chaotic world (by deciding which was the best Smiths B-side... ever) was, Britain agreed, an absurd, psychological flaw.
Fast forward to 2008, however, and we're all at it. On a weekly basis, TV programmes, websites and magazines bombard us with lists of the best/worst pop/rock albums/singles of this year/all time. All of them definitive. Until next week. And the next poll.
Even dance music, for many years the least navel-gazing and nostalgic of scenes, can't escape this contagion. Hot on the heels of Mixmag's 25th anniversary poll (topped, tunes-wise, by Underworld's Born Slippy), comes The Most Pointless Exercise Of... sorry, The Greatest Dance Records Of All Time, a three-part Radio 2 (!) series which will unveil the top dance tunes of all time, as chosen by you from - and how stupid is this? - a shortlist of 20 selected by "a panel of experts".
The whole concept of trying to identify the "greatest" dance record of all time is always going to be idiotic - it's like trying to pick your favourite orgasm - but, in this case, the execution is uniquely hopeless, too.
Like the panel, which includes Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway and Norman Jay, the Radio 2 list reads like a mid-90s Ministry of Sound compilation. The choices may date back to 1966 (and if we're going that far back, why not a bit of Glenn Miller or a Mozart waltz?), but it's dominated by the most obvious of mainstream floorfillers: Maceo & the Macks' Cross the Tracks, Pump Up the Volume, Billie Jean, Alison Limerick's Where Love Lives, Soul II Soul's Keep on Movin'.
"What a load of old bollocks," concluded one poster on the Defected Records forum. Quite. The list is so flawed it's difficult to know where to begin. There's no hip-hop, no modern R&B, no drum'n'bass, no trip-hop, no electronica, nor - bar a handful of tracks, such as Donna Summer's I Feel Love - any of the genuinely pivotal moments from dance music history. You could fill this page with tunes, from relative obscurities such as Carl Craig's Bug in the Bass Bin to charts hits like Prodigy's Firestarter, that generated grand cycles of creativity. Almost none of them appear here.
Worst of all, there is only one selection (Jakatta's dismal American Dream) from after 1994, as if "dance music" were now some dead, historical phenomenon. In reality, it's a scene that continues to spawn vital mutations in grime, nu-rave, bassline, dubstep and minimal techno.
That's where the real action is, in the exhilarating new Benga and Booka Shade albums, not in Radio 2's reductive, lifeless poll results.
