One person’s reckoning of the best music of the year ought to exist without needing to prove itself as better or wiser or more correct or more underground or more progressive or more extreme or more slamming or more heartfelt than anyone else’s, but it nonetheless feels like the more fervently so many of us bleat our individual tastes out into the senseless void we’re secretly hoping will answer us, the more ardently we profess not to care about taste-making consensus, the more floridly we bat around certainties about the desires and intentions and failings of the creators of the art we judge and dismiss and forget so easily, the more we actually broadcast our own insecurities and bone-deep need for community. I suppose that’s a strange lead-in to a list in which I share a whole bunch of albums in which a whole bunch of folks yell awfully loudly. What’s the point here? Mostly this: the louder you yell, the less likely I’ll listen to you. If I was some kind of hopeless doofus I might call it “epistemic closure,” but instead I’ll call it “being an asshole.” Again, this makes sense, but it also makes for abundant foolishness. With so little of the world around us actually under our control, we often crave mastery in the paltry fiefdoms we carve out to call our own. That desire for reassurance rears its head everywhere – not only in how we experience music and other art forms, but also in politics, religion, the economy, our interpersonal relationships, and so on. But yes, the fact remains that certainty – or, if you like: absolutism, dogmatism, overconfidence – seems like both a wholly understandable and wholly misguided way to respond to feeling anchorless in the world. I suppose that’s a strange lead-in to an article in which I share my ostensibly well-reasoned opinions as to which albums released this year are the best.
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