Music coverage has been rather light in the post-David Browne era at Entertainment Weekly, to say the least. To be frank, their non-celebrity music coverage is moribund at best, usually gathering as much print space as the stage section does. It almost feels like an afterthought. Heck, I wasn’t even sure who they’d tap to come up with the mag’s 2008 year-end lists, but Leah Greenblatt and Chris Willman answered the call with Ten Best Albums and Five Worst Albums lists, and the mag threw in a list of singles for good measure. (I’ve always liked the fact that EW publishes worst lists, even though the criteria for “worst” often seems more ephemeral, cross-referencing expectations with actual quality. I think that’s an OK measure of “worst” as far as it goes, but I’ve never as intrigued by the music worsts as I am by the movie or book picks.) TV On The Radio’s Dear Science tops Greenblatt’s list, while The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive tops Willman’s; complete rundowns after the jump.
THE GOOD: These are easily some of the most diverse lists you’ll see out there. Why, Greenblatt’s best and worst lists are almost half female and half African-American! I love “Live Your Life,” and I’m glad to see it on here. Also good to see Q-Tip and Erykah Badu representing, although I won’t hold my breath for the hat-tips to translate into sales.
THE BAD: About that No. 1 single. Does anybody really think that “Love in This Club” was the No. 1 song of the year, chart prowess aside? I sure don’t. Also, I’m not a Fleet Foxes hater like some around here, but “White Winter Hymnal” has never struck me as much of a “single.” And speaking of singles, I think that MGMT record is a good pair of them. Overall, I’m not one to really say someone should or shouldn’t be on these lists, but I do think it’s funny that Dave Sitek appears in the best (Dear Science tops Greenblatt’s list) and worst (Scarlett Johansson’s Anywhere I Lay My Head tops Willman’s list) sections.
THE WHAAA?: This has more to do with EW.com than anything. I get so tired of them burying their content in gallisticles [tm], those slow-operating gallery-based listicles that bring them crazy page views but bring me nothing but endless frustration. I hate them so much and it seems like they make up half of EW.com’s content these days. Gross.
Here are some top 10 lists I can get behind, if only because they are based on something slightly empirical: AOL has posted its lists of 2008’s most-searched-for musicians, songs, and music videos. The results are not completely surprising, with the Jonas Brothers taking the top slot and American Idol-bolstered David Cook coming in at No. 2. I imagine that Jonas Brothers fans are the types who comb the internet for any new morsel of information. I know I do! The top 10:
The music video channel that could Fuse had been running its “Top 40 of 2008” special over the last few days, but I just couldn’t bring myself to watch—Katy Perry wasn’t just performing two songs, she was co-hosting the whole thing. The premise was amusing, matching the year’s “best” videos against each other head-to-head, tournament style, but in the end, it just turned into a battle of who could mobilize their fan club to the greatest effect. Guess what? Even through it all, the followers of Britney can come through in the clutch.
THE GOOD: Paramore defeating the Offspring, Staind and Linkin Park before running into a train called “Womanizer” (and losing by four million votes in the finale)? Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” and Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” losing in the first round? That’s about all the good news I have, really.
THE BAD: Disturbed won two rounds of voting. Disturbed. In 2008. Two rounds.
THE WHAAA? While the video for “Vida La Vida” is not something Hype Williams should add to his demo reel, losing to Secondhand Serenade isn’t a fate Coldplay should be forced to suffer.
Pitchfork’s big pile of lists continues to grow with today’s unveiling of how its readers poll turned out. While there was some grumbling about the site limiting the number of options for each category (largely to Pitchforky type acts and albums, understandably), in the end, things likely would have come out the same way. The biggish indie-type albums in a year without a agreed-upon album of the year—TV On The Radio, Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend, Bon Iver, Deerhunter—rose to the top. I imagine the lists assembled by the staff will be a little more surprising in their diversity, but all in all, the results of this poll may top the 2008 list of Year-End Lists Least Likely To Expose You To Anything You Haven’t Already Heard Or Chosen To Ignore.
THE GOOD: Hmmm, each of the 150 albums chosen by the ‘fork received at least one first-place vote. Yay for diversity?
THE BAD: Nine Inch Nails’ The Slip at No. 18 is hardly a crisis of any sort, or even anything to get worked up over, but it may very well be evidence that Trent’s fanbase engaged in a bit of Terry Steinbach-level ballot stuffing.
THE WHAAA? In the current overheated age, is the idea of an “underrated” album even possible? I feel like I heard plenty hyping nearly all the albums that made that list’s top ten, especially the efforts put forth by Wolf Parade and Of Montreal. I guess there might be a woefully under-promoted and examined disc out there, but it’s definitely not going to be one on a list decided by the power of democracy.
Indie digital music vendor eMusic has released its year-end list, and I gotta say…wow! This is the deepest and most balanced list I’ve seen so far, and it throws consensus out the window for a broad analysis of the year in music. Sure, there are a Santogold and Deerhunter and She & Him here and there, but I don’t recognize half the stuff on here, and that’s a good thing. There are tens of thousands of records released every year, so I find attempts to quantify the best of anything—and the ensuing “this list sucks” arguments—downright futile. Some might grouse about two reissues occupying two of the top five positions (Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-76 at No. 4 and Rodriguez’s Cold Fact at No. 3), but I don’t see a problem with highlighting superior reissues, particularly from artists and themes that aren’t mainstream enough to feel like redundancies. Though the list is rank-ordered, it feels less like a competition and more of a celebration. It’s true that eMusic’s indie-swung catalog will necessarily make it more inventive than most, but still could have made Vampire Weekend No. 1 like everybody else. I guess I need to hear this Gaslight Anthem (their No. 1), huh?
THE GOOD: The list’s enthusiastic write-ups make me want to buy everything, which I guess is sorta their job, as they are a music store. Still, it doesn’t feel that way. The little summative taglines for each release are nice, too. I’m happy to see Swedes like Fredrik from The LK (No. 78) and Studio (No. 58) on there. Macca rolls in with his surprisingly good Fireman album at No. 52.
THE BAD:Well, I guess some people think that Vampire Weekend sucks or that Titus Andronicus sucks or that She & Him sucks or whatever. I’ll leave that up to the commentariat to decide. Any list is gonna have some things on it I don’t like and you don’t like. If forced to say one, mine would have to be British Sea Power. At SXSW, their viola player was so out of tune it hurt me. I couldn’t believe the crowd didn’t hear it! I looked over at this one guy and he was plugging his ears, too, and he looked at me and mouthed “What the hell?” and pointed at the woman sawing away at the viola. He and I were like Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live, the only ones in on the truth. I had to leave! This has nothing to do with that record. I haven’t heard it much. It was okay, kinda bland. I just wanted to tell y’all about that bad string player.
THE WHAAAA? This is a good Whaaaa? There are actual classical and opera records and records made by actual non-white people and actual jazz and world records (Miles of India at No. 5!) and records made by actual women represented here. That’s not something I’m used to seeing! But why is the list only a top 88?
Rolling Stone‘s year-end lists went online today, and its album rundown is topped by a relatively new band! The No. 1 record of the year in the boomer bible’s estimation is TV On The Radio’s Dear Science—although order is restored at No. 2, which is given over to the latest edition of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series collection. (Whew!) The full 50 after the jump, but first, a few thoughts.
THE GOOD: Santogold at No. 6; Ne-Yo at No. 33; The Academy Is… at No. 46. There are other surprisingly in-touch-with-the-times inclusions, but those three pleased me the most on first read.
THE BAD: Carp about the list’s high quotient of people flying the Real Rock Flag as much as you want; the real tragedy here is that a list announcing the biggest music magazine’s favorite records of the year is nestled inside an issue that has on its cover an actor who has yet to release a vanity-project album. As if we needed more evidence that music doesn’t really sell, well, much of anything these days.
THE WHAAAA? You guys, no one is believing the “Chinese Democracy (No. 12) is actually good” storyline. I understand this went to press way before the album’s anemic first-week sales—and the even grimmer second-week numbers—but really, putting it on any 2008 list that doesn’t have a caveat for “albums that actually exist out of time, but at least gave our reporters lots of news fodder leading up to its release” is sort of a cheat.
Today sees the release of year-end lists from Time, New York magazine, and the Observer Music Monthly. Instead of our usual single-list appraisal, these three seem to offer an opportunity to try and locate some sort of consensus, since they represent (respectively) the mainstream, the middlebrow, and the muso. Compare and contrast:
THE CONSENSUS: Everybody loves Weezy! After weighting and combining the three publications’ rankings of any album mentioned more than once, the overall top 7 would run like so: Lil Wayne just edging out TV On The Radio, followed closely by Bon Iver, then Portishead, Vampire Weekend, Santogold, and Kanye. Also mentioned on more than one list, weirdly: Duffy’s Rockferry. But what made the lists different?
The social-music site Last.fm—which allows users to track the music they listen to on their computers via a process called “scrobbling,” and also has full-song streaming capabilities for certain tracks—released its “most listened to” list earlier this week. The artists list was topped by MGMT; the most-listened-to album was Coldplay’s Viva La Vida; and perhaps owing directly to the previous two factors, the “best tracks” list had one surprise on it, and that was the fact that Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” snuck in between repeated spins of “Electric Feel,” “Viva La Vida,” and other MGMT and Coldplay songs.
THE GOOD: I forgot that Foals (No. 7 on artists) existed. I liked that album!
THE BAD: Raise your hands if you thought Does It Offend You, Yeah? would wind up on any year-end lists, even ones that probably overweigh albums that came out early in the year.
THE WHAAA? So yeah, it’s kind of hilarious that last.fm chose to do an unweighted track list, because the repeated listens to both Viva and MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular were so intense, the top 10 tracks list looks like this: Coldplay-Coldplay-MGMT-MGMT-Coldplay-Coldplay-Katy Perry-Coldplay-Coldplay-MGMT. (Actually, you could probably write some sort of song based around that structure, where “Coldplay” = a verse, “MGMT” = a chorus, and “Katy Perry” = a shrilly annoying bridge.) So how does a writer do up a kinda-boring list in a punchy enough way to make people continually click through its attached gallsticle? After the jump, we put Last.fm’s writeups through the text-matrix site Wordle to see just what words stuck in writers’ and editors’ minds. (“WTF can’t people just listen to something else” not included.)
Yesterday the iTunes Store released its year-end lists, and while its “best of” lists are somewhat intriguing (the albums rundown is topped by Raphael Saadiq, while the “Best Songs” list has both Motley Crue’s “Saints Of Los Angeles” and Hercules & Love Affair’s “Blind” in its top 10), it’s the sales charts, of course, that allow us to place our collective finger somewhere near the pulse of those people who buy albums from the comfort of their cubicles/drunken late-night outings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida—which was promoted heavily by an ad for the iTunes Store—is the top-selling album of the year. Top 50 is after the jump, but first, a few impressions.
THE GOOD: I don’t know why, but there’s something hilarious about Disturbed’s Indestructible (No. 28) being nestled between Paramore and the soundtrack for Sex And The City.
THE BAD: The overall MOR-ness of the chart—Leona, Amy, Duffy, Colbie, even Counting Crows all the way down at No. 43—shouldn’t be all that surprising, although I did raise my eyebrows at the notion that enough people bought the OneRepublic album that it landed in the top 10. I know digital sales are a fraction of overall album sales even now, but really? Is the power of Timbaland’s “ay”-ing that profound?
THE WHAAA? For all its power as a singles-sales force, there sure were a lot of soundtracks that flew off iTunes’ virtual shelves—10 in the top 50 alone, including the Juno soundtrack, which placed third overall. Also in the upper reaches of the year-end chart: The Across The Universe soundtrack, probably because it brought together Bono and Evan Rachel Wood; and the unkillable Alvin & The Chipmunks soundtrack (No. 24—right ahead of Duffy!). Although if you click through you’ll see that its most popular track by a far, far margin is whatever version of “The Christmas Song” has been included on the disc. For some reason, this comforts me a lot.
London’s Fact Magazine—which runs one of the sharpest-witted, up-to-the-minute music blogs around—has been doling out year-end lists for a few weeks now, the newest of which is its Top 20 albums, preceded in recent weeks by Top 20s of reissues and DJ mixes. These lists are thankfully different than the ones you’ll find in the big U.K. mags, which we’re thankful for even when their logic escapes us. The albums, reissues, and mixes lists are after the jump, but first, a few impressions.
THE GOOD: Sorry, Fleet Foxes: Fact‘s got other priorities. The Top 20 albums is the strongest publication list so far this year—nearly all of the titles I’ve heard on it (Gang Gang Dance, No Age, Zomby, Portishead, Jay Reatard, Flying Lotus, H&LA, 2563, Vampire Weekend, the Bug, Claro Intelecto) are good-to-great by my ears.
THE BAD: That Kelley Polar album (No. 17) is pretty weak sauce, guys.
THE WHAAA? Surely 2008’s giant pile-up of African vault finds deserves a heftier representation in the reissues Top 20 than Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo de Cotonou at No. 18? (At the very least, the majordomos at the mag need to give Franco’s Francophonic Vol. 1, just out on Sterns, a spin.) And grateful as I am to Fact to linking to that Prins Thomas Resident Advisor podcast (I’d tried to find it to no avail earlier in the year), surely the fact that it was posted October 15, 2007, counts against it as a 2008 mix, shouldn’t it?
