That Time of Year

Pitchfork's Top 100 Tracks and Top 50 Albums of 2008.

A quick confession: I am nowhere near as alterna hipster beatnik hippie great as you or I think I am. I have neither the insider access nor the teenage patience to mine the album bins or the late night clubs across this fine nation to find the latest greatest. I need a filter, and Pitchfork provides it nicely. The website routinely gets ridiculed because of their easy susceptibility to accusations of horn-rimmed snobbery; admittedly, sometimes their reviews spectacularly say nothing and seem to have no connection to the pretentious 10 point-scale rating the album receives. A skewering of the PF sensibility, something I've linked to before, is an Onion article that cites Pitchfork as reviewing the entire human history of music and giving it a 6.8. That more or less sarcastically sums it up.

Still, it's a nice place to seek out music and music news, and even if they are a little too indie powerful for their own good, you can at least start there when trying to figure out what the hey is going on in indie music. So I love it when these end-of-year lists come out; just a great place to start digging through the mess. I temper it with other sources - MetaCritic, AllMusic, and Dan's living room are other great places to start. This approach pretty much guarantees that you will be a few months behind the times, but hey, there's no way you could ever really keep up anyways. Really, it's the same reason I like older music and older films - they've been run through a theoretical cultural filter already, and I don't have to waste time with the chaff. You miss a lot of gems that way, obviously, and your whole access to the pop cultural universe is being quietly controlled by list-makers, but hey, gotta start somewhere, and the list-first mentality has taken me places so far. (I should also give a shoutout to nudeasthenews and their "most compelling albums of the nineties" list, something that decidedly shaped my initial forays into list-based music collection. Without that, I wouldn't even know what an "Elephant Six Music Collective" was or that "No one wants to hear what [I] dreamt about unless [I] dreamt about theeeeeeem [sic]," and wow would I not be able to show my face in certain publics in that case²). (Not that I do show my face in those publics, as I could probably count the number of non-Phish non-GPGDS shows I've attended in the past five years on a shop-class-accident-mangled hand¹).

Anyways, trek on over to Pitchfork; they've got mp3s embedded of the bulk of the top 100 songs, and it might be interesting to you to hear what the indie kids who think they're cool but are actually Pitchfork sheep are listening to these days. And don't forget that your musical, literary and other pop cultural experiences are highly sculpted, controlled, and fantastically arbitrary. Embrace the list.

¹ The New Pornographers and Flaming Lips in Boston, Vampire Weekend in Tempe. I mean, I saw Crisis Bureau a few times at the Middle East, Jon's band Sigma, Liz's friends King Wilkie, so i should qualify that I mean non friend-supporting concerts. But really, wow, I am even less cool than I thought at the beginning of this post.

² In fact, CONTEST: if you can name the first album that I copied to iTunes, knowing that it comes from the top ten of that natn list, I will do something spajo for you.