NME Best Singles of 2008 List All About 2007

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


mojo-photo-bestof20087.jpgWe know it’s hard. Singles get released in one year, then the album’s released the next; UK release dates come months before we get them here; or maybe you got a promo copy (or—gasp!—a leak) in December, and it didn’t go on sale until January. Then there’s human error: what if you just didn’t get around to checking out that Amadou and Mariam album until 2006? Keeping your year-end best-of list to the actual calendar year can be tough, but you’d think British music mag NME would at least try to stick to the rules. The magazine released their “tracks of the year” last week, but amusingly enough, fully half of them came out in 2007. Check out their list and my bitter commentary after the jump.

10. Vampire Weekend – “A Punk”
While the album was officially released on January 29, 2008, an early version called the “Blue CD-R” had been circulating for months.

9. Kings of Leon – “Sex On Fire”
September of this year: good job.

8. MIA – “Paper Planes”
No excuse. Kala was released on August 8, 2007. The single (complete with awesome DFA remix) wasn’t released until 2008, sure, and of course, its chart domination didn’t come until late summer. But you could buy the song last year.

7. Friendly Fires – “Paris”
The single was released on Moshi Moshi records on December 10th, 2007, although the album didn’t come out until September.

6. Metronomy – “Heartbreaker”
Another September release, checks out as pure 2008 material.

5. MGMT – “Electric Feel”
The Brooklyn band have the most confusing situation. Their album, Oracular Spectacular, was given a digital release in October of 2007, and “Electric Feel” even popped up in a Riff Top Ten in that very month (look how smart we are). The physical CD, however, came out in January of this year, and Wikipedia says it got a “UK hard re-release” (?) in March.

4. MGMT – “Time to Pretend”
Even more ridiculous is the fact that an early version of “Time to Pretend” was released as a single way back in 2005.

3. Mystery Jets – “Two Doors Down”
The London band released their album in March.

2. Glasvegas – “Geraldine”
Released in June of this year.

1. MGMT – “Kids”
2007!

So, Riff readers who care about this sort of thing: should year-end lists hew strictly to release dates, or should they be personal expressions of favorite things you stumbled across in the last 8-15 months, no matter if they came out in the 1700s? Cause if that’s the case, Mozart is heading straight in at #1.

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 canā€™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 wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”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 canā€™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 wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”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