What were the 80 most important musical recordings, artists, trends, events, and performances of 2008? What were the eight things this year that broke our hearts—or, at least, our ears? We’re happy to announce 80 ’08 (and Heartbreak), Idolator’s year-end overview. The list is below the jump.
There was a whole lot of ’90s nostalgia this year (no, this is not the last time 80 ’08 (and Heartbreak) will be addressing it), and it’s fair to say that the recent spate of one-hit ’90s alt-rockers penning memoirs of their times in the major-label alternative trenches (almost called this one “Indie-Rock Memoirs” until I remembered my own modest proposal from a while back) isn’t exactly new. In fact, Jacob Slichter, drummer for Semisonic (“Closing Time,” No. 1 Modern Rock, 1998), kicked it off in 2005 with his wry So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star.
Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards is a very readable memoir that may ironically accrue a larger audience than his bands Galaxie 500 and Luna, whose careers the book chronicles. It’s both touching and amusing, but one thing I didn’t find it was melodramatic, possibly because I kept hearing the words spoken lackadaisically over Velvets-like guitar. Not so for Liz Phair, who hypes the rock’n’roll angle pretty strongly in her NYT book report review, opening with a late-’80s Queen lyric and focusing on more rough-and-tumble than you’d expect in a piece about an indie rocker with “an elective reading list to rival Art Garfunkel’s.”