Slate Music Club 2009

Thanks to Patrick Rossmann and Jeff Moran for getting the 2009 Paulies going today -- good stuff as always. And while the rest of you reflect on the year, another useful resource is the Slate Music Club's year end listserv (a total rip-off of the Paulies, mind you):

Slate Music Club

Though I do love Jody Rosen's opening paragaph -- a perfectly apt, meta- approach to the end of this decade in music:

"Let's get the pressing question out of the way. Which Lady Gaga look do you prefer: Cubist Baton Twirler, Naked Boulevardier, or Bubbletard?

I'm not exactly joking. This year, much of the action in pop music was extra-musical: Gaga's fashion-forward exploits; the death of Michael Jackson; the Chris Brown-Rihanna affair; the Taylor Swift-Kanye West imbroglio; the rise of those TV talent show sexual-button-pushers, Adam Lambert and, uh, Susan Boyle. Ms. Gaga's multiplatform, pan-media, post-everything meta-stardom is just one of many current pop phenomena we scarcely could have envisioned at the beginning of this decade, and I hope we'll expand the scope of our conversation this week to reflect not just on 2009, but on 2000-09—the noughts, or aughts, or, as I prefer to call them, the Beyoncés, about which more below."