Standard gripes:

• The shortlist is too mainstream
• The shortlist isn’t mainstream enough
• The shortlist is too major label focussed
• The shortlist doesn’t feature my favourite artist/genre
• The shortlist only features bands I don’t like

Well, let’s ignore the third one, because less than half the artists on this year’s list are signed to major labels, so anyone saying that is officially wrong. Unless you want to argue that only one artist from each major should be allowed to be nominated. Or that no major label artists should be allowed at all.

Maybe the list is a little mainstream, or maybe there are a lot of artists who you have heard of on it. The Horrors’ new album may have gone down well with critics but the droney shoegaze sound on it is unlikely to get them on the cover of whatever magazine it is that teenage girls read these days. However, the fact that La Roux and Kasabian are on there does suggest that to some extent this thing is based on sales, rather than talent.

The fact that your favourite artist or genre isn’t represented may not be down to the ignorance of the judges (though I’m not necessarily saying it isn’t). Did they even enter? Yes, you actually have to enter this competition. The judges don’t, as an alarming large number of people seem to think, just listen to every single album released by British artists in the last twelve months. It would take too long – there were quite a lot of them.

So, going back to my original request, until I have seen a list of every artist who entered this year, I’m going to assume that certain genres are under represented because very few artists and labels from those genres submit their work for consideration. Probably because they assume they won’t get nominated. And when you think you’re not going to get nominated the £200 entry fee and 25 copies of your album that you have to send over to Mercury HQ seems like a lot. Maybe that fee is more restrictive than it needs to be, but if I start talking about that we’ll be here all day.

But, hey, I’m coming at this from an underground angle. There are plenty of people complaining at the other end of the spectrum that bands are missing from the list who definitely will have entered. But anyone who thinks that Snow Patrol, Coldplay and Take That have been robbed can shut up.

In the end though, it’s just a list of twelve albums. It’s not a list of the twelve best albums, it’s a list of the twelve albums most people on the judging panel could agree that they liked, and the winner will be chosen on the same grounds. Last year Elbow won because they divided opinion less than Burial and because the judges realised they probably should have given the award to the band’s second album ‘A Cast Of Thousands’ in 2004. Plus, the overall list was pretty weak.

There are actually some albums I really like up for the prize this year – Bat For Lashes, Florence & The Machine and Friendly Fires. ‘Primary Colours’ by The Horrors is pretty good, but probably not really in with a chance (because of that whole dividing opinion thing again), and Speech Debelle is already getting written off as ‘the token urban artist’, which completely ignores the fact that she’s made some really good music. But let’s not get so worked up about it. If I made you a list of my twelve favourite albums, I bet you wouldn’t agree with it, and I hate almost everything you like.

Plus, let’s not forget that they once gave the Mercury Prize to M People. M People! Anyone who wins this award is basically the same as M People. If I was in a band, I’d be begging my label not to enter me.

Here, if you’ve somehow managed to miss it, is the full shortlist:

• Florence & The Machine – Lungs
• Kasabian – West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum
• Speech Debelle – Speech Therapy
• Friendly Fires – Friendly Fires
• La Roux – La Roux
• Bat For Lashes – Two Suns
• The Horrors – Primary Colours
• Glasvegas – Glasvegas
• Led Bib – Sensible Shoes
• Sweet Billy Pilgrim – Twice Born Men
• The Invisible – The Invisible
• Lisa Hannigan – Sea Sew

For a while I toyed with borrowing an idea from a friend, who just tells everyone she likes ‘good music.’ But the problem is that it wouldn’t be true. I like quite a lot of really awful music. And what constitutes ‘good,’ anyway? If I say that to a lot of people they’ll automatically have me down as a fan of U2. And I can’t have people thinking that.

I’ve actually adopted the phrase, “I like pretty much anything from music hall to white noise,” in the last year or so. I think it covers most bases, despite sounding quite pretentious. But a while ago I thought I might have actually stumbled across that one killer word that would sum everything up. That word, as you’ve probably already guessed, is ‘dramatic.’

Until I collected my last Twitter-recommended playlist, I hadn’t managed to come up with a way of testing this theory (okay, I hadn’t actually given it much thought at all, but stick with me). But as all those suggestions of ’achingly beautiful’ music came flooding in, I suddenly thought maybe I could use the same method to find out if ‘dramatic’ really is the catch all word for the music I like.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons why it can’t be, not least because there is a lot of completely undramatic music out there that I love. Also, there’s plenty of dramatic music around that I don’t like – Celine Dion does drama well, but I’m never going to start liking what she does and, apologies everyone, I’m not a massive fan of Queen either. Then there’s the fact that my definition of dramatic doesn’t always line up with other people’s.

That actually makes things a lot more interesting. This could have just been a list of power ballads, but because the theme means different things to different people we’ve got a massive variety of songs. There are tracks where the drama builds through the music and/or vocals in a wide variety of ways, while in others it comes through the lyrics, like on R Kelly’s hilarious musical soap opera, Trapped In The Closet. Sometimes it’s just a general vibe. And then, just to prove that we don’t all find the same things dramatic, there are songs on this playlist, admittedly only a very small number, in which I can’t hear any drama at all.

But at the same time, a lot of my favourite songs were suggested. She Spider by Mew, Bachelorette by Björk, Après Moi by Regina Spektor, Skream’s remix of La Roux’s In For The Kill, Passenger by Deftones, Hurt by Nine Inch Nails, and Touched by Vast are all songs I know and love and would probably have suggested myself. And listening to many of the songs I didn’t already know, I had a feeling I was listening to a lot of future favourites too. So maybe there is something in this after all.

There are artists who came up repeatedly; mostly Björk and Kate Bush, who I had expected, and The Chemical Brothers, who I hadn’t. I was also surprised that only one post-rock track came up, The Birth And Death Of The Day by Explosions In The Sky. Only three songs were named more than once: Jóga by Björk, Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush and Deftones’ aforementioned collaboration with Tool and A Perfect Circle frontman, Maynard James Keenan, Passenger. A Perfect Circle, incidentally, were another band who popped up several times, getting one song from each of their three albums included. And if someone hadn’t suggested Total Eclipse Of The Heart, I think I might have had to slip it in myself.

I wasn’t put in that position, though. So my contribution is the playlist’s opening track, the stripped back version of Something I Can Never Have by Nine Inch Nails from Still. I considered going in with a torrent of hardcore, but went with this because it manages to built drama and tension with just piano, guitar and voice and gets things off to a more gentle start. Also, as Mr Reznor stormed off Twitter in a huff this week, I thought it was somehow fitting.

Going back to my original question, I think it’s fairly safe to say that it’s not possible to condense my entire musical taste down into one word. So unfortunately it looks like I am going to have to continue offering slightly confused and confusing explanations. But that’s probably a good thing. Anyone who asks you what music you like expecting to get a simple answer probably doesn’t deserve an answer at all.

You can listen to almost all of the songs listed here in this handy Spotify playlist.

Nine Inch Nails – Something I Can Never Have (Still version) (Spotify|Last.fm)
Mew – She Spider (Spotify|Last.fm)
Divine Comedy – Through A Long And Sleepless Night (Spotify)
Beyoncé – Ring The Alarm (Spotify|Last.fm)
Spandau Ballet – To Cut A Long Story Short (Spotify|Last.fm)
Celine Dion – It’s All Coming Back To Me Now (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Veronicas – Untouched (Spotify)
Ladytron – Destroy Everything You Touch (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Chameleons – A Person Isn’t Safe Anywhere These Days (Spotify|Last.fm)
Magazine – Motorcade (Spotify|Last.fm)
My Life Story – 12 Reasons Why I Love Her (Spotify|Last.fm)
Björk – Jóga (Spotify)
Bauhaus – She’s In Parties (Spotify)
Bright Eyes – Arienette
Deftones – Passenger (Spotify|Last.fm)
Devotchka – Comrade Z (Spotify)
Final Fantasy – Please Please Please (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Germs – Media Blitz (Spotify|Last.fm)
Heart – Alone (Spotify|Last.fm)
Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights (Spotify)
Clint Mansell – Death Is The Road To Awe (Spotify)
The One AM Radio – Fires
Patrick Wolf – This Weather (Last.fm)
A Perfect Circle – Magdalena (Spotify|Last.fm)
Björk – Bachelorette (Spotify)
Fat Boy Slim – Right Here Right Now
Fionn Regan – Snowy Atlas Mountains (Spotify|Last.fm)
Andrew Bird – Fake Palindromes (Spotify|Last.fm)
Andrew Bird – Imitosis (Spotify|Last.fm)
Regina Spektor – Après Moi (Spotify|Last.fm)
Elbow – The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver (Spotify|Last.fm)
Biffy Clyro – Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies (Spotify)
A-ha – The Sun Always Shines On TV (Spotify|Last.fm)
Arctic Monkeys – The View From The Afternoon (Spotify)
Bloc Party – Helicopter (Spotify)
Cake – The Distance (Spotify)
The Chemical Brothers – Leave Home (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Chemical Brothers – Setting Sun (feat. Noel Gallagher) (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Chemical Brothers – The Test (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Diamonds – The Stroll (Spotify|Last.fm)
Eels – Souljacker Part 1 (Spotify)
La Roux – In For The Kill (Skream’s Let’s Get Ravey Remix) (Spotify|Last.fm)
Johnny Foreigner – Salt, Pepa And Spindarella (Spotify|Last.fm)
Besnard Lakes – And You Lied To Me (Spotify|Last.fm)
Led Zeppelin – Since I’ve Been Loving You
Sparks – This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us (Spotify|Last.fm)
Kate Bush – Babooshka (Spotify|Last.fm
Explosions In The Sky – The Birth And Death Of The Day (Spotify|Last.fm)
Reparata & The Delrons – I’m Nobody’s Baby Now
Glenda Collins – Something I’ve Got To Tell You
Puccini – Nessum Dorma (Spotify)
Puccini – O Mio Bambino Caro (Spotify)
Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms (Spotify|Last.fm)
Queen – Innuendo (Spotify|Last.fm)
Alanis Morissette – Uninvited (Spotify)
Sub6 – 7th Son (Ticon Remix) (Spotify)
Deftones – Minerva (Spotify)
A Perfect Circle – Imagine (Spotify)
The Pink Mountaintops – Vampire (Spotify)
Fever Ray – Concrete Walls (Spotify|Last.fm)
Xiu Xiu – I Luv The Valley, OH! (Last.fm)
Foals – Titan Arum (Spotify)
Modest Mouse – Satin In A Coffin (Spotify|Last.fm)
Radiohead – Exit Music (For A Film) (Spotify|Last.fm)
Elbow – Mexican Standoff (Spotify|Last.fm)
Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip – Waiting For The Beat To Kick In (Spotify|Last.fm)
R Kelly – Trapped In The Closet 1-13 (Spotify)
The Chemical Brothers – Saturate (Spotify|Last.fm)
Sia – Breathe Me (Spotify)
Lorraine Ellison – Stay With Me (Baby) (Spotify|Last.fm)
Scott Walker – The Cockfighter (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Monkees – Porpoise Song (Spotify|Last.fm)
Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse Of The Heart (Spotify|Last.fm)
Nine Inch Nails – Hurt (Spotify|Last.fm)
My Dying Bride – The Cry Of Mankind (Spotify|Last.fm)
Faith No More – Caffeine (Spotify)
A Perfect Circle – Pet (Spotify)
Vast – Touched (Spotify|Last.fm)

Thanks to all of the following, who recommended the music on this playlist and all have impeccable taste: @radioedit, @trixie, @nickpeters, @MyChemToilet, @mrstealeaves, @marshamusic, @jaimemcc, @sesp, @CaroUnLimited, @davidriley, @DanReballato, @mariusvandyk, @sus_ond, @benedit, @rebekahwalker, @KRamness, @beristwicke, @joeparry, @venpedro