Idolator

Have you recently found yourself pining for year-end lists, those neat little summaries of the year's best music that provide fodder for argument and giggling as the calendar counts down to Dec. 31? Well, then, you'll want to plant a big, wet one on The Grand Rapids Press' Troy Reimink, whose best albums of 2008 (so far) list , topped by Hot Chip's Made In The Dark, went live on his paper's Web site at 7:09 p.m. yesterday. Arguments ahoy! And if you're like me, they'll be tinged with at least a bit of despondency over whether bands featured on blogs really did produce the only good music of this year, or if we're really at a point in pop music where everything's just too fragmented to have any semblance of "coherency" or "a center." Full list after the jump, but here are some preliminary findings.

THE GOOD: Nick Cave's Dig Lazarus Dig is at No. 3; if you really wanna be nitpicky about things the album's release date in the States actually falls in the second quarter (it comes out April 8), but keep in mind that the awesomeness of Nick Cave doesn't really kowtow to such silly things as "the space-time continuum."
THE BAD: The Raconteurs' Consolers Of The Lonely had been available to the public for not even a week when the MLive.com web technicians hit publish, yet the power of Jack White resulted in it already ascending to No. 12 on Reimink's list! Imagine if it had been available two weeks before his deadline?
THE WHAAA? Troy, what if some record that's even better than the Hot Chip album leaks before midnight on Monday? What do you do then? Do you rework the list? Do you demand that it be taken down?

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What with their ability to make the young girls scream, it would be inevitable that angry teenagers have started to rail against the scourge of the Jonas Brothers. But instead of composing a ditty like "New Kids Got Run Over By A Reindeer" or graffiting "MORE LIKE N SUCK!!!" in their school's ladies' room, members of the Web 2.0 generation have taken their anti-moptop crusade to the Internet. On YouTube, for example, a video that opens with the greeting "Hello. If you are watching this and you are a Jonas Brothers fan you should kill yourself." is rising up the "Most Popular" charts, no doubt in large part because lots of kids have vacation this week. The clip lays out boilerplate anti-boy-band rhetoric while also big-upping Slipknot and ripping the JBs' bulletin board-posting fans for having "no clue of proper grammer and punctuation." (Sigh. Kids today.) And it's garnered 700-plus comments so far, which are so far evenly split between Jonas Brothers fans and their older brothers haters. But I'm pretty impressed by the rebuttals from young laurennmariexo, who composed an 18-point (!) treatise responding to the allegations laid out in the video: More »

Ah, the holidays. When the egg nog is flowing, anticipation is high, and the blind items are vague, yet laugh-out-loud delightful. From the Daily Mirror:

"Which clumsy rocker dropped a ciggie on his manhood while belting out a Beatles' song on the loo? He was left in agony and close to tears..."

"Clumsy," indeed! My first thought was one of Oasis' Gallagher brothers because, well, duh, but I surveyed my buddy list for a few other opinions. They're after the jump.

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