Pajiba

Beirut - The Rip Tide
Drive OST
Wolfgang Garner - Weekend in America
Holy Ghost! - Holy Ghost!
Childish Gambino - Camp

Seconded Adele and Childish Gambino
The Decemberists-Long Live the King and The King is Dead
Sarah Bareilles-Kaleidiscope
Boy and Bear-Moonfire
William Elliot Whitmore-Animals in the Dark and Field Songs
Frank Turner-England Keep My Bones

Fans of The Civil Wars should check out Milo Greene, a band that opened for them. They don't have a proper album out till next year, though you can get an ep on their site. They are really good. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUazz0gML00

Also, a band I just discovered today, Yellow Ostrich. They make some pretty original sounding stuff. New album, The Misttres, out now. Free music here: http://yellowostrich.bandcamp.com

Dawes, Dawes, and Dawes. I listened to Dawes, a surprising amount of old Motown, the Drive and The Social Network soundtracks, and rehashed a shitload of REM based on a pre-nostalgic nostalgicalypse.

Here goes...

Bon Iver - Bon Iver
Nicolas Jaar - Space Is Only Noise
The National - The Boxer
The Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt
Fucked Up - David Comes to Life
System of a Down...lots of System of a Down
Neutral Milk Hotel - In An Aeroplane Over The Sea
Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can
Surfer Blood - Astro Coast
Mogwai - Young Team
Battles - Gloss Drop
Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues
Bonobo - Black Sands
liturgy - Aesthethica
Bob Dylan - Freewheelin'
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92
Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica
Loops Haunt - Ark
Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma
Daft Punk - Tron:Legacy OST
Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning
Vampire Weekend - Contra
Hot Horizons - October
The Roots - Undun
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing
Little Dragon - Ritual Union
Death Grips - Exmilitary
Tycho - Dive
Dan le Sac V.S Scroobius Pip - Angles
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - The Social Network OST
Jon Hopkins - Insides
Dead Man's Bones - Dead Man's Bones
Chelsea Wolfe - Apokalypsis
Sun Kil Moon - April
Some other stuff...

Drive soundtrack, yo.

I never do this, but I've listened to Goodbye Horses about fifty times in the last month. That, and Edge of Seventeen. I usually listen to albums and usually then not the same one for more than a week. I'm in a strange place...

GL, I am a card-carrying member of the fan club! It's nice to see I'm not the only fan in the Pajibaverse.

A-schaef's top 5 albums of the year (in no particular order):

1. Andrew Jackson Jihad - Knife Man
2. Childish Gambino - Camp
3. The Horrible Crowes - Elsie
4. Frank Turner - England Keep My Bones
5. Bon Iver - Bon Iver

Beirut- The Rip Tide
tUnE-yArDs- w h o k i l l
Jay-Z and Kanye- Watch the Throne
Gils- Father, Son, Holy Ghost
Beyonce- 4
Lykke Li- Wounded Rhymes

Mumford & Sons, "The Cave"
and my new favorite Christmas/wintertime song "Too Much Snow" from El Cento.

Well, both Mastodon and Machine Head released new albums this year. Both very good, although Mastodon's is a bit light for my taste. And I tried to find good Irish folk music, but that's pretty hard to do.

OBCR: The Book of Mormon
Kyarypamyupamyu: Moshimoshiharajuku
OBCR: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Kate Bush: Director's Cut
The Chemical Brothers: Hanna OST
Nicki Minaj: Pink Friday
Jill Scott: The Light of the Sun

Destroyer won out for me*

This is why WhiskeyClown lurks. Damn you Templeton.

I didn't even know there was a Pajiba Music!

It's like getting to a party late and finding out Mindy Erickson was drunk and making out with everyone. Sure she may have been a slightly incoherent, whisky soaked mess with the faintest hint of vomit in her mouth, but dammit, I still would have enjoyed it.

Pajiba Music: The saddest lost section of the site that wasn't pulled by the government.

M83
Lykki Li
Friendly Fires
Skrillex
Deadmau5
+ Bob Sinclar and Martin Solveig because you can never have enough French DJs in your Spotify queue.

I'm also still listening to Lush, My Bloody Valentine, The Boo Radleys, Pale Saints, St Etienne, Primal Scream, Nick Cave and The Smiths because they still own all the awesome.

Beirut - Rip Tide
Arctic Monkeys - Suck it and See
Gogol Bordello - Trans-Continental Hustle
Grouplove - Never Trust a Happy Song
Drive - OST
Black Keys - El Camino
Radiohead - King of Limbs
Tom Waits - Bad As Me
M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
Bon Iver - Bon Iver

i don't think anything got as many plays as Bright Eyes, the people's key at my place this year. The Drive soundtrack was pretty amazing as well.

Arcade Fire- The Suburbs

Even though Sublime broke up years ago, I found myself listening to them the most this year.

The Blurries
Fucked Up - David Comes to Lif
M83 - Hurry Up We're Dreaming
Mind Spiders.

Do it.

I second Adele, The Black Keys, and Frank Turner, Gogol Bordello! ....and feel the need to add Florence + The Machine - Ceremonials.

New The Black Keys album is kickass. Fucking love it.

Otherwise, I rocked out to the new Bombay Bicycle Club album all summer.

Also it will never fail to make me chuckle when I see people chirping about The Civil Wars. Bitch please, I've been listening to Joy Williams since her good 'ol Christian princess days.

Oh, and kirby, you are kind of right. Luckily white people are picking up the slack in the blues department...

.....Wow. Apparently I had Things To Say.

Thanks, Christopher. Am listening to Nicolas Jaar right now; great offering. Since you opened the door to ambient, I'll throw in:

Pete Namlook - The Fires of Ork 2
Trentemoller - The Last Resort
Mauxuam - pretty much anything

lots of other, far more ambiguous stuff pulled from the web.

Remember those dark days before technology when there was no choice in music?

I second The Head and the Heart. Love love that album.

Christian H.... While you are entitled to your bombast, I did not claim to represent anybody, especially men since I'm not one. My opinion is that rap and reality shows represent the dumbing down of America, that an awful lot of no-talent thugs found an easy way to get rich quick because gullible white teens with disposable cash will buy anything if it's supposed to be cool, and none of your music theory 101 and $20 words are gonna change that.

Aretha Franklin, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, The Temptations, Sam Cooke, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, etc..... This is talent, and rap is an insult to them.

Let's take a look at Kanye West's lyrics, shall we?

I need a slow motion video right now
Cause I’m moving in slow motion, slow motion
Feelin’ like Hype Williams shooting a nigga
Shooting a nigga, hey hey hey
I need a slow motion video right now ay ay

Damn baby, pussy can’t be your only hustle
Unless you bad as Naomi Russell
I mean a lot of niggas got money
So basically, Russell ain’t the only Russell
Russell Brand, Russell Crowe

yeah, that's genius.

To be fair, Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, I did say that Watch the Throne was thrown away, and the song you've pulled from was a thrown-away song from said throw-away, so we're in agreement that the verse in question was bad.

But you're missing the larger overall point, and insulting an entire culture in the process, by ignoring the fact that while all the older performers you listed are talented, legendarily so, theirs was an entirely different form of talent. Sure, there are titans of jazz and blues and soul that can never be outdone, who stand the test of time. But then, Kanye West and Jay-Z (since we've apparently singled them out here) aren't trying to be the best jazz musician or blues player or soul singer; it's a different game, with different skill sets which are extremely difficult to master.

And keep in mind, for every person you listed, there are dozens of knock-offs, posers, failures, and lazy songwriters that made just as much money, if not more; you're culling from half a century of material and singling out the greats in their fields. But popular music has always been based in money and overloaded with artists and songs that are, by all rights, embarrassing to the concept of art. Should I say that all old jazz songs are terrible because of "How Much is That Doggy in the Window"? Should I disregard The Beatles because of Bobby V?

It's an age-old trap, wherein the older generation dismisses the advancing popular sound by saying, "It'll never be as good as ______," because it's still fresh, it still has room to grow and change. Look at how primitive most early rock bands were; is all rock and roll automatically devoid of merit because of hair metal?

Just because you don't enjoy a genre doesn't mean it's worthless, cheap, or dumb. I don't like heavy metal, and I would never participate in a mosh pit, but I would never claim that it's a stupid genre, simply because there's so much technical skill in the instruments. So there are plenty of lazy and/or morally bankrupt rappers out there; there are plenty of terrible blues players too. There are plenty of big band albums that all sound the same. There are plenty of gospel singers that try and fail every day to sound like Aretha Franklin. But we don't dismiss the style for the failures of its perpetrators.

Rap is going through a coming-of-age at the moment. It's technically existed for roughly three decades, but only in the last ten years has it truly dominated the industry. So pop rap has gone through a period of glitz and questionable choices, thrust into the spotlight from where they started out; there are still several rap-based awards that aren't announced at the Grammys, but given out a week in advance. It's a young genre, and what's popular now won't always be.

The aughts were to rap what the 50s were to rock; a bunch of money-making dreck punctuated by moments which showed where the genre could go, the positive influences it could have. The best artistic work in a given genre is usually ignored in its time; Miles Davis invented bebop, which nearly killed jazz because the white people who'd bought big band couldn't stand the improvisation. The Kinks were the first band to use distorted guitars in rock. Read the reviews on their early work, you'd think they were Nickelback.

All this is to say that you should be more open minded about rap music. But the more essential argument, about the merits of rap, has more to do with the technical powers that you have seemingly refused to acknowledge. Every part of a great rap song, and I'm talking truly great, from "All of the Lights" to "99 Problems" all the way back to "Fight the Power," is extremely tightly crafted, from the first nuggets of the beat through every second of the production. There are plenty of rappers who write their beats before they write their lyrics, Kanye among them, and when the beat is as stellar as, say, "Monster," they have to bring their absolute best work to the lyrics or it falls apart, and sometimes it does.

"Monster" is a great example of how rap and bebop intersect; much like a five-piece jazz collective taking turns showing off their talents, "Monster" consists of a handful of rappers trying to one-up one another in the cleverness of their wordplay. It's the sign of a great rap song when a line like "I'm living in the future, so the present is my past, my presence is a present, kiss my ass" is overshadowed by a woman screaming about her hair and her shoes. And what makes it work is that the materialism is met with a subtext of terror, of degradation. That song, in particular, is about how being the sort of "big pimpin'" lyricist you seem to hate so much can make a person into a monster, can bring them to, as Jay says, "Rape and pillage and village, women, and children."

Kirby Super Star Saying that all rap is "dumb" or that it's all about money, cars, and misogyny is reductionist, obviously, but more importantly it denies that any sort of higher thought is possible in these pieces of music; focusing on surface-level examinations of lyrics without absorbing their context, while also fixating on an admittedly popular but artistically irrelevant stream of what is, ultimately, an artistic evolution of the same master performers you have mentioned. Rap almost is entirely different in performance from jazz and blues and soul, but, like those venerated genres, rap has a purpose, rap has a conscience, and rap has an aesthetic and artistic value that should be weighed not by the worst of its perpetuating artists but by its best who, like the greats you list above, will be sifted out by time and remembered for how they advanced their art when it truly needed advancement.

Christian H.

The name calling is not cool. I am done conversing with you.

Fucking hipster doofus ( I owed you one)

This is going to deviate sharply but of the 2011 releases I listened to Frank Turner - England Keep My Bones the most. Other favorites were the new Five Finger Death Punch, Airborne Toxic Event, Anthrax, Noel Gallagher, Fountains of Wayne, Blue October, and The Decemberists.

But regardless of release year the bands I spun the most were probably The Gaslight Anthem, Against Me, and Frank Turner all things considered.

Kirby, I meant it colloquially, trying to keep things friendly. I apologize if it offended. I am still interested in your thoughts should you change your mind.

M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
Efrim Manuel Menuck - Plays "High Gospel"
Tom Waits - Bad As Me
EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints
Mastodon - The Hunter
Washed Out - Within And Without
TV On The Radio - NIne Types Of Light
Urge Overkill - Rock & Roll Submarine
Atlas Sound - Parallax
Destroyer - Kaputt
J. Mascis - Several Shades of Why
Explosions in the Sky - Take Care, Take Care, Take Care
Black Lips - Arabia Mountain
The Black Keys - El Camino