December 23, 2009
2009 Year-End Summary
I always look forward to year-end (or decade-end) lists every December. It's a great way to catch up on some great albums I missed throughout the year. But inevitably I encounter the annoying tendency for many of the participants to whine about how they think lists are stupid but they're forced to feed their vampiric readers' list-lust. Or the self-deprecating, "shucks, I'm not qualified to tell you what the best albums are, I haven't heard enough, and it's all subjective anyway." Of course it's subjective, FFS. But the least you could do is do your job and listen to as large of a sampling as you can.
You're not going to get that crap here. I'm uniquely qualified to make lists. I started listing the best records that belong to my family as soon as I could learn to write, and haven't stopped since. I listen to more new music (usually over 500 albums a year) than all but a small handful of people on this planet. Most of them are disqualified because they are either not sane, or do not use their powers for lists. I am the king of lists. Pump me with enough whiskey and you might see me stand on the table and proclaim myself your patron saint of lists. Switch to tequlia and I'm your Fucking Bastard God Of Lists. You might not agree with all of my list, but I could make your own personal list better than you could, because you probably only listened to a half-assed baker's dozen of new albums this year. Didn't you. Shame on you. While you probably don't deserve it, I could do it for you. All I'd need is a glance at your music collection, or your pathetic iTunes catalog, and you'd have to voluntarily take a roofie to reveal your guilty pleasures. If that makes you nervous, you could opt for the alternate brain probe. I take cash, money order and PayPal. Continue...
Top 100 Albums of 2009 | 2009 Breakdown: Top 13 Genre Lists | Singles, Shows, Movies & Books
Best of the 00s
It's been a blur of stolen elections, downspiraling economies, mounting debt, and a paranoid entertainment industry relentlessly jerking their customers around, yadda yadda. I'll skip the futility of trying to encapsulate what it all meant. Despite everything, some great albums were written, recorded, released, sold, bought, consumed, ripped, and re-consumed. Despite alarmist reports to the contrary, the album is not dead. Nothing has effectively replaced it, and every album of this list can still be found on CD. There are certainly some people who stopped buying or even listening to whole albums, but they don't really like music all that much anyway and don't count. The era of blockbusters of course is over, because the industry no longer has a stranglehold on bottlenecking the variety of what we choose to listen to. As much as they'd like twenty million people to all buy the same ten albums at Walmart, we have a far wider variety of choices than ever before. The era of consensus is over, and canons are always questionable. That may sound strange coming from a compulsive listmaker, but I'm all for supporting a variety of opinions. Lists aren't very interesting if they're all alike. Just because lists can be challenged doesn't mean they aren't valuable. When I first started working on my decade list in 2007, I used critic's polls and books like the MOJO Collection and 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die to find albums I've overlooked, reconsidered ones I've dismissed, and get a different perspective on ones I'm familiar with. Whether I agree or not, I often hear things I didn't notice before. Continue...
Top 200 Albums of the 00s | Top 60 Artists | 00s Breakdown: Top 13 Genre Lists | Top 100 Movies | Top 60 Shows | Top 13 Books - Fiction; Music & Rock 'n' Roll Fiction; Graphic Novels & ComicsBetween The Cracks
Great bands that slipped between the cracks of glam, prog, art rock, metal and punk, 1973-1978
The 1970s ended nearly thirty years ago. In the 80s, perception of that decade seemed to be that it was a long hangover from the 60s party where rock became a bloated parody of itself only to be redeemed by punk. The truth was that there was so much great music it took this long just to digest all of it. Thanks to reassesment and reissues, your average blogger is well aware that there are hundreds of great albums in genres like Krautrock and reggae that most people didn't even know exist. By now one would think the revised canon would be pretty much settled. Think again.
There will always be obscure albums that fly under the radar. But the interesting thing is that there is plenty of quality music that was quite commercial, but still escaped much notice. Their problem was that they were not easily pigeonholed into singular genres. They created music that didn't quite fit perfectly into genres like glam, prog, art rock, metal and punk, and slipped between the cracks. Whether their labels weren't sure how to market them, radio didn't know where to program them, or they just broke up too soon to become famous, these bands left behind some gems well worth revisiting. Continue...
Magnet Magazine: Fast 'n' Bulbous was reviewed in the Nov/Dec 2003 issue of Magnet, the best music magazine in North America (I'm not just saying that cuz they reviewed me, really. I've been a subscriber since issue 3).
The Wire Magazine: Adventures In Modern Music. Fast 'n' Bulbous was reviewed in the February 2001 issue of The Wire, a British magazine that covers "electronica, avant rock, breakbeat, jazz, modern classical, global and sounds from the outer limits."
