Year-end listmaking (again)

I'm back in California for New Year's this year. Pictures at left are from Point Lobos on a foggy day, at the southern end of Monterey Bay. Doesn't look that much like California, which is why I like it.

Here's the real 2011 year-end list, which is of course not limited to music, since in my opinion 2011 was a terrible music year. Exceptions to that would include City of Ships' Minor World and the new Decapitated and Blindead records, but I wouldn't even attempt to put together a top ten list for the year, since I can't think of ten records I liked that came out this year.


Best of 2011:
-Populist uprising in general (don't care what you think of Occupy, this was important and needed)
-China (this has nothing to do with "tourism")
-Europe/Russia tour (finally did Europe right)
-Building
-Kitty Hawk
-(Re)discovering Thomas Köner's entire catalog, all of which is fantastic
-Rosetta's friends and fans (the Kickstarter, FB-bombing Air Canada, feeding us, housing us, playing with us, etc.)
-Marisa in Madrid-Barajas Airport
-Battlestar Galactica
-Having a home and enough to eat


Worst of 2011:
-Vansetta
-The music industry
-The airline industry
-Being away from home for 122 days, apart from wife for ~135 days
-American politics
-A world ruled by incompetent plutocrats

Year-end best-of list

Because of the internet, everyone's an artist, and everyone's a critic. So there's an imperative for every self-respecting consumer of the at-least-middlebrow to have the codified top-ten list every December. It never works for me because I rarely discover truly great things at the time they're released. Besides which, who can think of fully ten things in a single year that deserve to be on such a list?

This speaks to a wider question I've been thinking over for a while now -- why have we stopped making new things? Maybe because we're too busy making "NEW THINGS!" Vanity Fair, which as a publication I don't respect much, ran an article that talks about this issue. It's interesting.

Concurrently, I've found that as I approach 30, I have my first wave of actual nostalgia for a past decade: the 90s. But lest this be attributed to the same guilt-tinged sickness that seems to affect many baby boomers, let's think about this rationally. The 90s were a superior decade. The end of the Cold War, peace in the Middle East, budget surplus in the USA, prosperity, nuclear disarmament, raised environmental consciousness, the birth of the Web, Star Trek's heyday, alternative rock. Accidentally or not, it was a fantastic time to grow up.

In that spirit, here's my best-of list for 2011: my top ten records from the 90s. Criterion: personal importance. No order.

Swervedriver - Mezcal Head
Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile
Botch - We Are the Romans
Rage Against the Machine - self-titled
Failure - Fantastic Planet
Thomas Koner - Teimo
Cave In - Until Your Heart Stops
Fugazi - Red Medicine
Sunny Day Real Estate - LP2 (Pink Album)
Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come

Honorable mentions:
Coalesce - Functioning on Impatience
Radiohead - OK Computer
Stars of the Lid - The Ballasted Orchestra

In reference to music -- 2011, please go die.