Tom's Year-End Music Talk Starts Now!

Well, it's that time of year again. No, not Christmas. Well, it's that too. But I'm referring to the end of December, when all the people who have nothing better to think and talk about twiddle their thumbs and compile pointless year-end reviews of what they thought the best of the year was in art, music, whatever.

And as I have done for the people couple years, I will be doing my own thing, music related, of course.

I considered not doing this at all, or in doing it in some other form than a Top-Whatever list, because I am more and more turned off by the idea of ranking art and and designating some things that I like as "better" than others. In any given year, there are usually only two or three albums that absolutely blow me away anyway, and beyond that, I have trouble designating one thing as 6th best and another as 7th best, especially since, like so many other people in the internet-driven world (there's a music writing cliche for you), I now take in such a wide variety of music that it's almost pointless to even try to do this. When the Pipettes ended up next to Scott Walker on a first draft of my list, I couldn't help but question the purpose of even trying to compare those two. It felt like looking at Tiger Woods and the 1927 Yankees and trying to decide who was better, in general, at sports.

But that's what's fun about music, isn't it? And I decided that an individual's list is probably more interesting than those compiled by websites or magazines, since any given person is more prone to weird oddities than a collective will, which tends to accentuate that which is more widely appealing, even if it's not #1 on anybody's individual list. (I'm using TV on the Radio and The Hold Steady as examples of this, even though I think they are both good.) On top of all that, people seem to enjoy when I do this sort of thing. My readership probably jumps from 5 people to 10 people. Wow!

So I'll be doing what I've done before: first some individual songs I liked (I'm trying to focus on songs from albums that didn't make my top 10 this year), then my "runners up," then my top 10, which, as always, is purely a reflection of my opinion, and not an attempt to "canonize" anything, nor an attempt to force anybody to like anything or admit something HAS to be good. If you're annoyed that I'm doing this, you're taking it way more seriously than I am (despite my own lengthy explanations of this whole thing).

Debate is encouraged. Some of my picks will certainly be easier for dissenters to tear down than others (in Joanna Newsom's case, I am disregarding any argument against her that involves her use of the word "thee"), but whatever. Let's all have fun. Feel free to leave your own top-whatever picks in the comments (anybody can post).