Above, Ezra Koenig, lead singer of critically acclaimed, chart-topping “indie rock band” Vampire Weekend, performing a purposefully amateurish version of Dave Matthews Band’s 1996 hit, “Crash Into Me.” For those who didn’t go to Jewish summer camp in the late ’90s, DMB (also referred to as “Dave,” as in, “Are you going to see Dave tonight? I’ll bring my hacky sack.”) merged folk-rock, jazz and traditional African influences into albums custom-designed to help college bros who could sort of play guitar get laid. That these albums, at least the ’90s ones, were actually awesome has long gone unnoticed among critics and hipster-types… until now. It’s 2011, 15 years since “Crash Into Me” was a hit, which is apparently long enough for it to undergo a Hall & Oates-esque cool-status turnaround.

Koenig’s cover’s a joke, but other imitators/homage-payers are more sincere: the chunky, horn-driven arrangements of Iron & Wine’s new album sound startlingly Dave-like at a times; L.A.’s Lord Huron plays long, uplifting jams impossible without serious hours logged listening to Under the Table and Dreaming; and even Deerhunter’s “He Would Have Laughed,” a tribute to late garage would-be icon Jay Reatard, evokes the central riff of the band’s “Satellite.” Listen closely, and you’ll hear the band’s influence in plenty of bands who wouldn’t be caught dead playing frat parties. Ironically or not, Dave Matthews Band’s cool-kid time has come: let me be the first to say I liked their earlier stuff better.

A few truths I hold to be self-evident:

In defense of the word “Best”: The word “best,” when applied to art and specifically to year-end lists of pop albums, does not mean “Best of all the thousands of possible releases of the year.” It means “The best albums this particular critic was able to or chose to listen to this year.” Part of the job of being a critic, if you consider yourself one (and I do, and measure myself by that standard), is to decide what you will listen to, through what filters you will hear more and what you will avoid in the very limited time there is to listen to, absorb and pass judgment upon said releases. There will always be good albums and artists which fall through the cracks; however, if a critic does his or her job, frankly, there shouldn’t be that many. In other words: “Best,” coming from someone who gives a shit, ought to come pretty damn close.

In defense of “Best” over “Favorite”: Art contains both subjective and objective elements — some, of course, has more of one than the other. A singer’s timbre may be alternatively irritating or endearing depending on the listener. Within genre comparisons, one can approach objective judgments, but the inescapable — and necessary! — element of instinctual feeling and emotional reaction means, ultimately, no two people will ever agree on an all-encompassing hierarchy. In other words: There is no Platonic ideal for what makes a great song or a great album. (Except for maybe the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.”) This is what’s incredible about music: There are infinity ways to write and arrange and record and create it and an equally infinite amount of ways to enjoy it. My point here is that we as listeners create standards for what we enjoy based on culture, context, listening history, natural response, etc. Based on my personal standards — which are the only standards anyone can honestly have — the albums that I love the most are by default the ones I consider the best of the year. It would be nonsensical to classify them otherwise because there is no such thing as everyone’s best album of the year. Would you even want one? My favorites are my best.

Here’s where I think people get hung up:

Wanting to favor more complex or ambitious or virtuosic albums as ostensibly “better” than ones with less fanfare. This is not a question of objective superiority — it is a question of execution vs. goals and of listening priorities. For instance: Does the Radio Dept.’s remarkable execution of a more limited sonic palette trump Kanye West’s execution of a broader, more complex one? I would say yes. You may disagree. But a Kanye album, or a Radiohead album, for that matter, is not by default better than any given twee-pop record or noise cassette, no matter how obvious the equation looks on paper. For another example: What’s the most important part of a song? Melody? Guitar tone? A singer’s emotion? Lyrical quality, whatever that means? There’s no objective answer — there’s only your personal answer, and I suspect it changes depending on the song.

Also irksome here is the idea that not liking a well-reviewed or beloved album comes from not “getting it” or some personal failure, and thus that decision of the canon must be better than your own instincts. There can be a “best to the broadest amount of people,” yes, which is where names like the Beatles or Elvis come in, but what are you, the listener, judging here? The best album of all time as chosen by Western civilization? (We’ll come back to this.) Or the best album you’ve ever heard? Trust your taste — it’s the only one you’ve got.

So: When someone says “best,” everyone should be aware that they mean, or ought to mean, “best” within their personal life/taste continuum, and it is totally within their rights to say it. Otherwise, we’d have to ban the word entirely and, frankly, that’d make doing these things a lot less fun. (Which is why we’re all doing them in the first place, right?)

Re: what lists are supposed to do and what they have become: For the last few decades or so, critics have historically had access to and time to listen to more music than the average person. Thus, when a magazine released its top 50, a casual reader would open it, find a list of albums that the average reader of that magazine would consider worthwhile, go buy a bunch of them and maybe even re-evaluate his or her feelings about the ones he or she’d already heard. This sounds like generally a good thing, right? In 2010, if you read blogs or message boards or even do a cursory skim of Pitchfork regularly, you’ve already heard nearly everything that was considered worth talking about this year. Lists by Rolling Stone or SPIN or any print product still hold value because they are not being made for you: they are being made for people with subscriptions to those magazines, who are presumably not downloading five albums a week on Mediafire. So take that into consideration before pointing and laughing.

What lists from major publications do is serve as 1) Cred-building — we like these cool things! We’re cool, too, cool people (and cool advertisers)! 2) Valiant attempts to create an approximation of a canonical, objective best-of list and 3) The simple act of telling you what they like and whether or not you should thus consider them worth paying attention to based on, yes, what you like. The list of, say, Paste magazine is only predictable because they have a specific taste and that, in and of itself, is basically a good thing. With this in mind now, I read lists — preferably from individuals — looking for some through-line, some fully formed aesthetic, so I can learn something about why someone likes certain things and why I might like them.

Re: Consensus lists and mass voting: The goal of this, by bringing together multiple people with different but ostensibly “good” — by which I really mean “knowledgable” and “socially acceptable” — taste, is that you wind up at a list approximating what the most generally important albums of the year is for the common listener and for the historical record. Typically, though, the less interesting, most widely liked albums rise to the top by virtue of voting math, which is why you have a record like, for example, Arcade Fire’s or LCD Soundsystem’s — that everybody generally liked but fewer people were passionate about — in a lot of top tens. (The Awl’s 2010 No. 1s list, which I contributed to, is pretty fascinating for an attempt at the opposite of a consensus list.), These lists become Albums of the Year 101 — a survey course. With exceptions (YEEZY), the really good stuff’s up in the upper-division classes. Criticizing these lists for being, well, what they pretty much set out to be, much like pissing on the  Grammys, is a pointless endeavor, though we should reserve the right to point out the most ridiculous choices by both. (Hi, Katy Perry!)

“Good” taste vs. “bad” taste: To go into a bigger issue here for a moment: “Good” taste really means “taste I agree with” or “extensive.” “Bad” really means “taste I disagree with” or “someone who doesn’t care as much as I do about music.” We use judgmental terms such as “good” and “bad” to create connections or divides betweens ourselves and others to bolster our self-images or cultivate social status. And because they’re easy, and it’s easier to pretend that music and art appreciation is basically black and white, awful or 10.0, than grapple with grey areas and minor flaws. (Nobody wants to talk about a 3-star album.) Social status is indelibly linked to our music listening habits: we tend to connect with people who like what we like for obvious reasons, and the communal experience has a value of its own. (The people at the Gathering of the Juggalos, whatever you may think of them, are almost certainly having more fun than you are listening to Deerhunter on headphones.) This is why 16-year-olds on Tumblr are arguing over whether or not Green Day is still cool — why it matters if, in fact, they are.

While group fandom does tend to inflate a performer’s value, the most rewarding listening requires separating music from its fans and sometimes even its creators: I wouldn’t go to a Paramore fan’s house party or shop with them at Hot Topic, but that doesn’t decrease my enjoyment of the band’s albums. On this note, it’s important to realize that we like different things for different reasons — i.e., ice cream cones and salmon tempura each have different but positive values — and liking something because it does one perhaps unhip thing well does not delegitimize the rest of one’s affections. Ke$ha and Warpaint have different goals — why should they be compared by the same artificially raised standards? The insufferable pose of indie elitism basically says, “I want to have fewer life experiences and do not have an open mind; somehow, I believe this will improve my quality of life.” It’s easy, and generally accurate, to draw broad generalizations by genre or artist — nobody’s saying Nickelback doesn’t really suck — but to entirely ignore the possibility that music you might enjoy might spring from unexpected sources means you care less about music than about conforming to your chosen society. (One could make similar arguments about the limiting factors of any dogmatic, all-encompassing school of thought, from Communism to Christianity.)

Long story short: If Kanye West (or Lady Gaga) showing up next to a band of white males playing guitars on a list really offends you, it might be time to re-examine your life decisions.

Finally, a note to readers: It is not my job to know what you like. It is your job to know what you like and find people who also like what you like, whether via blog, message board, Twitter, iPad, whatever, and use your collective listening power to find more things you will like. Hopefully, that’s where us list-makers can help you out. I blog, and am posting best-of lists, because music matters to me more than pretty much anything and these will be the songs and albums and bands mattered to me the most this year. I hope some of them matter to you, too — whatever your reasons.

Seapony – “Dreaming.” Fitting in so well with this Best Coast-y, 60′s lo-fi surf music era we’re in right now…

Seapony makes the same type of angular beach indie that’s been at the bleeding edge of music…

EXCEPT THAT THEY DON’T! But it’s easy to see why the mistake’s been made: lo-fi. The band’s songs and performances are no different (and, while good, generally less memorable) than their oft-ignored peers, but like Pains of Being Pure at Heart, they chose to play with a thick layer of distortion (not, crucially, the genre’s typical jangle) amid the soft-focus reverb favored by garage-pop revivalists from Tennis to early Best Coast. Personally, I hate this sound: Production is a tool just like any other, and unless it adds some new/great flavor to your music, it’s a wasteful one — except as a cynical, careerist means of getting yourself written about on blogs that favor it.

Best Coast, it should be noted, has transcended her roots and made a medium-fi grunge record; there is nothing particularly lo-fi or garage-y or surf-y or mock-girl-group about it. It’s a Hole album. “Boyfriend” sounds like “Malibu.” And that’s awesome!

However, for bands like Tennis (or the Vivian Girls before them), who write nice but insubstantial songs, all that matters is the presence of signifiers: “Girl-group,” “’50s,” “garage.” This is generally enough for blogosphere/Fader/P4k buzz, quality be damned; but these influences, as en vogue as they may be, have very little to do with Seapony or 2010 twee, despite the band’s insistence on a trendy sonic wardrobe. This may not be true for long: the thin walls between underground pop genres, though, seem to be breaking apart, distressed by the endless onslaught of shitty-sounding guitar amps. Let’s evacuate the building.

1) Present a sort of Rawkblog taste state of the union: These are bands I don’t like. I’m not going to be writing about them on Rawkblog. As a Rawkblog reader, I’d like you to be aware of this, in case you were expecting paragraphs of gushing about Teen Inc. or whatever. Consider it a full disclosure.

2) As a response to the orgasmic heights of drunken, Twitter-driven CMJ coverage. These bands may sound great in a tiny club at 2 a.m. after a day of free booze, but try listening to them on headphones.

3) To point out the obvious ridiculousness of multiple bands having “Teen” in their names. (Or “Sun” in their names.) This, to me, is funny — stringing them together is a joke, though the fact that none of them are very good is not. I also used the word special (in italics!) and mentioned the bands’ moms as a joke, to take some of the edge off of me listing a bunch of bands and saying they suck.

4) To cut through some of the general “Every new band is a buzz band!” bullshit of 2010. You don’t need to listen to everything. Most of these bands just don’t have much to offer: Even the best of them, which is probably Sun Airway, sound like pale imitations of better bands, and probably imitations of bands with records out this year! I’m not against imitation — I’m for quality. It doesn’t matter what recipe you use if you’ve baked a delicious meal; the bands I’ve listed are burnt vegan cupcakes.

5) Did I want to piss people off and get “mad hits?” Of course. Am I entitled to do this once a year after spending the other 250+ weekdays writing about bands nobody cares about that generate literally a couple of dozen Hype Machine hits? Of course.

That all said:

Re: not writing descriptions of every band: The whole point is that these are bands I think you can safely ignore. I’m asking the reader to trust me as a critic here. If you disagree with any of these selections, you already have your mind made up and don’t need me to explain to you how your taste is “wrong” or “bad.” This is the thing that, insanely, seems to have offended people the most — when I did the opposite, posting a list of nine great free albums the other day, nobody said, “Jesus Christ, Dave, why don’t you tell us why these are good?! This is so reckless!”

I think this points to a larger cultural issue in 2010, which is: bloggers are always looking for content. If you post a song every day, or five songs every day, some of those are going to be better than others and inevitably, some of them are just not going to be very good. There is almost no negative writing on blogs, because it’s generally not very productive — I’d rather spend my time writing about why I think a band is great and worthy of your time than doing the opposite, which seems pointless, and why I chose to do a list like this rather than write something on every single one of these bands — so its very existence, almost regardless of what bands I chose, inspires backlash. Why? I guess it’s seen as a threat — to taste, to other blogs, to something.

So there it is. Send back more deep thoughts.

I think it’s logical to make a correlation between obscurity of taste and volume of music piracy; in 2003 or so, I would’ve made a link to intelligence/nerdiness as well, but those days are over. Which is not to say that indie kids don’t buy albums, but here’s the thing: record sales, at least on the chart level, tell us about the mainstream. The Arcade Fire, more so than any quote-unquote indie band of the last half-decade, resonate with that mainstream. When Funeral came out, they got what turned out to be the most important Pitchfork review of all time and regular airplay on KROQ. That was unprecedented. They’ve only gone upwards in popularity from there.

By contrast, look at the sales for Wavves. Or Ariel Pink. Or any number of weirdo noiseniks who received the same level of blog buzz and P4k propulsion. The Arcade Fire, whatever one might think of them, write accessible rock anthems; so do most of the indie bands who’ve really crossed over. (Or dance anthems, etc.) The majority of people still interested in paying for music (or who don’t know any better, frankly) want something that speaks simply and broadly on at least one level to them, even if it speaks to the underground in more difficult, innovative ways. (Or even if it doesn’t, as in the case of the just-pretty-good Suburbs.)

My point here is that it all matters: touring (mostly, this), marketing, radio, videos, blog buzz, social networking, Amazon $3.99 sales (also, seriously, this — make every album $4 all the time and I guarantee profits would go up across the board), word of mouth and, of course, the music itself. Us writers would do well to remember the limits of our influence as we gluttonously beg for concert tickets and vinyl promos and claim we can lead a horse to water and make it drink. (Cross-posted from RawkTumblr)

Previously: First Look: Paramore – Brand New Eyes

The nerdier among us (which, OK, hand raised) may remember the months and years of waiting for The Dark Knight — and the viral campaign which helped fill the lonely hours at home, alone, laptop a-glow, wondering what Heath Ledger would look like as the Joker. It was worthwhile for a number of reasons: the gestation time of films is long enough for Octomom to pump out another litter; the mystery dovetailed perfectly with Batman’s own role as the world’s greatest detective, and its intelligence only (deservedly!) increased confidence in the prospects of the film itself.

Applying these same smoke screens to music, however, has been less effective. Before giving away promo MP3s, playing a number of late shows and generally promoting High Violet with gusto (and electronic billboards), The National launched HighViolet.com — a sloppy looking Web site that stayed blank for under 24 hours before giving up the secret and generally served as a gratuitous fluffing to the coterie of journalists and bloggers who were in the know for an afternoon. Joanna Newsom’s label, Drag City, kept dead quiet about Have One On Me even as fashion magazines reported the album’s completion, world tours were booked, and hours of new songs were debuted. Finally, the news arrived in the form of a weirdo comic strip and leaked details from foreign labels; the album then debuted to first week sales of 7,000, falling well short of comparable (and more traditionally marketed) NPR-friendly acts such as Andrew Bird. Meanwhile, YouTube secret-keepers IamamIwhoamI are still releasing clip after anonymous clip of increasingly less interesting music and visuals weeks after the thrill of guessing has passed.

On Saturday, Arcade Fire — a band that’s been quick to sic its representatives on the abundant rumors that’ve sprouted since the 2007 release of sophomore fumble Neon Bible — called a June 1 Amazon listing for an alleged new single, “Suburbs/Month of May,” incorrect, despite the fact that, per Pitchfork and Joel’s Arcade Fire Blog (authoritative sources, I know), the band’s site recently added and removed a banner titled “Arcade Fire presents ‘The Suburbs.’” And then responded by putting a hand-written postcard on their own Web site saying that a single would, er, ahem, be out in “a couple of weeks.” So… June 1? Something’s up, of course, and — spoiler! — that something is going to be a new album. Probably one about suburbs. It will have guitars and anthemic choruses and maybe an organ; it will sell several tens of thousands of copies in its first week; it will sound great on tour and less great about two weeks after it leaks.

In fairness, the Arcade Fire’s actions may just be the obsessed-over band’s struggles to keep their projects under wraps until they’re ready, but if Sandra Bullock can hide a damn baby for three months through Oscar season and a national tabloid maelstrom, you’d think dudes could handle their probable lead single. My point here should be obvious: indie rockers, please, enough bullshit. What are you going to surprise us with next? “Inaccurate” album tracklists? Post-Ben Folds fake leaks?! Lady Gaga’s cast-off cigarette sunglasses? To put on my Lefsetz hat for a minute: you’re musicians: the surprises should be in the music. If you want to get people excited, tell us you are making it and then let us hear it. After all, the most successful viral campaign yet did just that. Radiohead’s In Rainbows announcement was as plain as can be: We made a record. You can have it in a week. Pay what you want. With a paragraph, they earned worldwide headlines. Then again, as the Arcade Fire surely know, not every band can be Radiohead — and as Radiohead fans learned themselves just two years later, for every In Rainbows, there’s a Wall of Ice looming, infuriatingly, around the corner. It’s enough to make you sick.

***

Critical Backlash is a column where I complain about things.

Or is it just really endearing? Comments are open, you tell me. Wish dude has chosen a song for this that didn’t sound like a Sister Hazel b-side, though.