Assorted thoughts in the lead up to the last critics poll in the last full decade before everything melts and we have to forage for stuff!

Decided to count Taylor (#4) and Kutiman (#6) on my year-end list after all, unfortunately knocking out UGK and more-fortunately knocking out Ida, who feels like an "11" to me. (I miiiiight still knock off one of the two I added for UGK anyway.)

Finally listened to "Black Diamond" -- quite enjoyed it, but it will need more time to soak in and probably won't crack the top ten. Gucci's last "official" album was better than his most recent one, but I still think I'd prefer a fairly inchoate mixtape of random tracks to any album OR mixtape he's put out. Will give a listen to Robin Thicke's new one (is it technically a '10 release? Wow, that felt weird to write...) since I underrated Something Else, though I did call it my #1 album of the year to listen to on a yacht. I'M ON A YACHT MOTHERFUCKER DON'T YOU EVER FORGET.

R. Kelly...ehhhh, will listen, I s'pose. "Double Up" was a close as I got to considering him for a Top Ten, and that was a belated acknowledgment of basically his entire career -- "12 Play Fourth Quarter" was for the most part a rubberneck experience, though I think Anthony Easton was right about the magnificence of "Son of a Bitch."

Adam Lambert put up a good fight, but then I remembered that I usually don't like all the stuff I compared him to and there's also more mainstream pop cast-off in his sound than I was willing to hear on the first two or three listens. Will return to it some other time.

Alison Iraheta...I mean, wow. There's gotta be at least one gem I'm overlooking on her, but talk about a wall of sound! She's cranked up to twelve. I kind of hate it! (Odd feature: she mentions text messaging in the first line of two songs in a row. This pissed me off for some reason -- I thought about the lyrics to "Better Off" and realized something about Ashlee: almost all of her songs [on her first album, anyway, and many on her second 'n' third] could have been written in any decade this century. TIMELESSNESS.)

Favorite new listen of the moment is the Nirvana Live at Reading album. For one thing, the lyrics are clearer on this live album than they are on their records! This is not in and of itself a good thing, but there's something about this observation that points to what I like about it, somehow raw and slick simultaneously, a bit of a mess that still seems to have a pretty clear set structure, energy-wise. As well-paced as any of their studio albums and some lovely sarcastic guitar lines thrown in to fuck up the intros to famous songs (before playing the rest flawlessly).

Fuuuuuck, I'm still underrating Otis Taylor's Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs, tasteful blues with real grit, but it just isn't "me," y'know?

Listened to more than many 2009 albums -- the Sesame Street disco albums! They're quite good, and provide evidence to Ned Raggett's assertion that Disco Tex sounds like the Muppets band doing disco. Latest obsession: finding a Muppets performance covering or featuring Minnie Riperton.

Why do people like the Knife?

Why do I like VV Brown so much?