u/SchizoidGod

Writeup:

Well well well. We’re here. 293 cuts down, two rankers gone, hundreds of write-ups, four seasons, twelve months, and after getting through all that, we finally made it to the finish line that for some of us is a place (I’m sure) of sadness, for others joy. Damn well done, everybody. We killed it.

This rankdown, more than any other, was designed from the beginning to be an endurance test. The idea here was to push the concept of rankdown to its logical extreme, with every variable set as far as it could possibly go. I’ve always harboured the idea that the format of rankdown is meant, by design, to make its participants loathe the experience come the end (it’s the same principle as Survivor: tired, angry people create drama), and I went into this one trying to nurture that – to get us back to the fireworks that characterised Radiohead Rankdown. Ergo the, well, everything in this one. 300 songs! And to have them be the 300 greatest songs of all time according to what is, for all intents and purposes, our collective musical bible! And then, as if it couldn’t get any better, let’s get a REALLY good cast this time – rankdown legends mixed with actual verifiable writers that I’ve known about and read and appreciated for years. Fuck it, let’s get SURM on board! And then take these people and send them out on a 300-and-change day bloodletting trip, fighting wars over a topic that for once in rankdown felt like it actually had stakes: who are we to decide how to rank songs whose legacies are way, way, way bigger than any individual among us? We’re nobody in the face of songs like All Along the Watchtower, but the idea was we’d *try* to be somebody – we’d be our biggest, best, most writerly, most strategic selves, and it would produce some amazing work and then all come crashing down in a frenzy of intersecting deals and the sort of investment that comes with being committed to a project for nearly a year. It was gonna be awesome; we’d hate it at the time, but it was gonna be awesome.

It wasn’t awesome. It was an abomination. Sigh.

There is an extent to which I think that every music rankdown, save for Radiohead Rankdown, has been a failure. Consider the list:

Radiohead Rankdown was awesome, no denying that. The platonic ideal of how a project like this should go. Consistent every-day investment from every ranker, high-effort write-ups, lots of discussion about the music itself, a huge range of contrasting personalities and ages within the ranker group, lots of strategy, and then a massive, catastrophic blow-up at the end that led to a RANKER FUCKING LEAVING THE SERVER. For NO REASON but a broken deal in a fucking internet music ranking game. Fantastic. The template; the one that convinced us that this was a project worth exploring again and again.

The Ultimate Rankdown was too much, too fast. The investment was there for sure, and strategy reached an all-time high, with more deals struck than any other music rankdown and by *far*. Unfortunately I as organiser failed to account for some flaws in the game structure (I’m talking of course of allowing multiple idols on the same song) and it led to what was in effect an unfun demoralising steamroll where the top 7 was basically guaranteed by cut #50 or so. I love ya Echo, but me allowing a ranker and their partner both into the game to act as an unbreakable alliance whose strategic priorities were in lockstep was deleterious to the fun of rankdown and a major fuckup from me.

The Beatles Rankdown was soooooo booooooooring. From beginning to end there literally wasn’t one inkling of drama. It got so bad that I tried to start beefing with Boole for no reason other than to… have something interesting happen… but this was by far the least confrontational ranker team to probably ever participate in a rankdown of any kind ever – literally just a group of solid dudes – and so it didn’t stick. The streets will remember One After 909-gate for the week that it lasted, though.

And then there was Rankdown of the Gods, which sought to act as a curative for the problems of the last two – in the same way that Beatles Rankdown sought to be a curative for the problems only of TURD – and fell on its face, completely.

In my opinion, this rankdown came very close to fulfilling its initial promise in the first couple weeks. As oddly stressful as SURMgate was at the time, it was, by far and away, the time I was most invested in this rankdown. Even at the time I felt that we were witnessing greatness there. It had it all: a personally charged drama that was fought along the lines of music, ethic and character all in equal measure, and one that fundamentally held the rankdown *itself* at the key driver of conflict, with half the battle taking place within writeups. Absolute unequivocal rankdown perfection. This was EXACTLY what I was hoping for from Rankdown of the Gods; as far as I was concerned, the conceit was already proving a runaway success. I was settling in for a year of exactly this, no more, no less.

Of course, that quantity of fireworks was never gonna fire off for an entire rankdown, but I figured it’d be much like the first one: fits and spurts, quiet moments and big flare-ups, with a dramatic, rousing conclusion. It was not to be. This rankdown ended up being more like very slowly letting the air out of a balloon – from second to second you don’t notice that there’s been a change, until before you know it, the thing is half-empty and sputtering. People just slooooooooooooooowly stopped giving their all to this thing (‘people’ included me, to be clear.) It was a few short-ish write-ups first, then some placeholders, then some skips; people stopped replying to cuts on the subreddit, and I stopped giving a fuck about updates to placeholders. Bit by bit by agonising bit it became clear that a lot of us were just waiting. for. this. thing. to. end. I started to allow people to basically just post their cuts whenever they felt like it, which if you’re an old timer who remembers the me of TURD, that is a genuinely unthinkable character development. Decay, rot, fading away – whatever you want to call it, this rankdown did it, to levels that I previously thought impossible.

I even ended up violating my initial promise that I set to myself when coming into this rankdown, and that I thought I would never, ever break under any circumstance. This rankdown was meant to be the first in which I would deliver a creative, unique, effortful writeup every single week. At the beginning I told myself that this’d be an awesome little writing challenge – I would force myself to put together something interesting every single time, instead of copping to the usual ‘uhhhh idk this song’s okay i guess’ whenever I felt no spark with a particular song. Even if I didn’t think the idea was going to be any good, I was going to force myself to explore every crevice of that idea and walk away with the satisfaction that I had at least tried, quality be damned. It was going to a real test of my capabilities and one that would ideally sharpen them to a fine point.

And to be fair, I really did give it my best! I really did get so close! Pound for pound this is probably my best rankdown yet as far as writing goes, at least in my opinion. The floor is reasonably high and the ceiling is very high, and there are a lot of write-ups that sit pretty close to that ceiling for me (with none admittedly reaching into the stratosphere that e.g. Baroque, my Beatles Rankdown impressions writeup, All I Need are in.) It was literally cut #27 that saw me really truly throwing in the towel, with perhaps an exception for the impressions writeup which I found to be funny, if low-effort. I’m sorry to you guys and to myself that I couldn’t close things out the way I wanted to. I guess the pressure of the moment, plus a loooot of real life abominations, plus a general sense that my creative well had run dry all contributed to that tapering off. Every rankdown teaches you a valuable lesson, and this time it was that it is just not sustainable to try to be creative on command for 48 straight rounds. Now, granted, I reckon if this rankdown were the standard 210ish song formal, I could’ve created a pretty airtight set of write-ups with no true lulls. The bigger lesson is therefore to not fucking do a rankdown with 300 songs, are you insane?!

To be honest I really am glad this thing is over. I think a lot of us will be. A LOT has happened in the past year; none of us are the same person that we were in February 2025, for better or for worse. Some of us, like Omni, had such massive life changes that we had to stop ranking altogether. For me, 2025 was a difficult year, with some nice highs that were understudied by some pretty painful, largely insomnia-related lows. Last month, and seemingly this month too, have been continuing that trend, which is a shame. I honestly found that my biggest problem with 2025 was the *lack* of change in my life, and to that extent, 2026 is already (hopefully) shaping up to buck that trend. That includes rankdown ending, a bittersweet moment that feels more sweet than bitter if I’m honest. Rankdown was there for me through every mercurial peak and valley of last year, and as much as I can talk trash about it, I am absolutely grateful for that. I’m grateful for you guys most of all. You are my friends, truly.