November 21, 2008

First “Best of 2008” Album List Very Wrong, Very White

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


paste_logo2.gifKids, this right here is more proof that sometimes it’s better to take it slow than rush to be first. Stereogum points out that Paste Magazine is the first major publication to drop their “Best Albums of 2008” list, and while there are some good and interesting albums all up and down it, the order (and the omissions) are kind of head-slapping. Here’s their Top 10:

10 Deerhunter – Microcastle (Kranky)
09 Lucinda Williams – Little Honey (Lost Highway)
08 Sun Kil Moon – April (Caldo Verde)
07 Girl Talk – Feed the Animals (Illegal Art)
06 Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop)
05. Okkervil River – The Stand Ins (Jagjaguwar)
04. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar)
03. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend (XL)
02. Sigur Rós – Med sud i eyrum vid spilum endalaust (XL)
01. She & Him – Volume One (Merge)

You read that right: She & Him, #1 album of the year. My current top two faves, TV on the Radio and Portishead, landed at #50 and nowhere, respectively. And we all know how I feel about Sigur Ros. But there’s something even more nefarious about this list, and that’s its blinding whiteness.

Out of all the Top 50, I count only five albums with non-white contributors: two by Santogold, and one each from Lil Wayne, Thao Nguyen, and the TV on the Radio guys. Of course, one could note that three of those had major involvement from white people as well. Musical taste, and lists of this sort, are, obviously, subjective, and I don’t mean to levy any charges of racism at the fine folks at Paste. But I will levy charges of closed-minded stupidity. If they had named this the Top 50 Folk Albums of the Year, I might be more sympathetic, but clearly they’re making a half-hearted attempt to be musically inclusive. It’s symbolic that Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals landed at #7: while it’s a fine album of attention-deficit mashup ridiculousness, capturing some of the euphoria of his live shows, it mostly features hip-hop vocals, so it’s by far the highest placement of any non-white contributors on their list, if you want to think of it that way. I guess Paste likes their hip-hop well enough, but only if it’s scrubbed clean of its original thumpiness and layered over some classic rock?

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate