Just because music coverage on The Factual Opinion was sparse this year doesn’t mean we haven’t been paying attention. Nope! This year at Factual Headquarters, in preparation for our 2010 year-end music wrap-up, we’ve logged more man-hours listening to more music than every year before this combined (and there were four of them, suckas). Honestly, the year warranted it. 2010 was the caliber of music year that only comes along once a decade, if we’re lucky. 90% of the capital-M Major artists that released material this year brought their capital A-games, while the quality of the newbies’ material kept the old guard on their toes. It was as if everybody all at once figured out that the way to deal with the ever-failing music industry was simply to put out the highest quality product. For the last couple of years, it seemed to be going the other way: since nobody’s buying records anyway, it was like they thought they might as well phone it in and save energy for the concerts. But there’s been such a rebirth of musical creativity this year that it actually, literally gives me hope for the future of music itself.
Over the next ten days*, Tucker Stone and I are going to count down our favorite thirty albums of the year. We got together in person to hash out this list—so there’s some blood in these choices. There was little overall consensus. Most of us had to fight like wildebeests for our favorites, and the result is a deeply personal mix of overlooked gems and world-beating, monster albums. As usual, we’re going to wax poetic about each one, to see if we can convert you to some of our opinions.
Additionally, for the second year in a row, we’ve rounded up the TFO extended family—which includes Nina Stone, David Brothers, Matthew J. Brady, Tim O’Neil, Andre Harris, Sarah Engelman, and Josh Woodbeck, as well as the never-before-seen-in-these-pages Frankie Alvarez—and devised a list of our 50 favorite singles and tracks of 2010. As a whole, this crew isn’t quite as nerdy as Tucker and I (at least, not when it comes to music! Boom!) So, in the songs list, you’re getting songs that have resonated with a group that has had the good fortune of not having to keep up with blogs and shit. Together, we’ve come with a batch of songs that’s as far-reaching and accurate as any other year-end list I’ve seen so far.
Plus, there will be some surprises along the way—some sidebar explorations of genres and artists that had particularly notable 2010s. It’s going to be an extravaganza! It’s almost too much! And yet, 2010 has been a rich enough year to support it all.
Finally, for the last couple of years, I’ve posted a year-encapsulating, 100 song playlist in the intro to give a sense of the wide-ranging year. But it has always been in text form. This year, I’ve thrown up some links to a downloadable version of my 100 song mp3 mix, along with the track list on my tumblr. There’s a lot of overlap between it and our albums and songs lists, so feel free to use it to follow along and check out some of the stuff you might be interested in. In the meantime, we’re going to kick off the albums countdown in a hot minute with number 30. Please enjoy.
*perhaps
-Marty Brown, 2010
I hope to see a lot of electronic music on this list-I feel like that was the genre to be at in 2010.
Posted by: Chris Jones | 2010.12.13 at 17:14