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interview
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| Best Albums of 2001 |
| Forget the Grammys -- Choler points you to 20 albums from 2001 that should never stray far from your stereo. |
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By Sean Flinn and Joseph McCombs | February 28, 2002
It's the same thing every year -- around x-mas and New Year's, the world's music crticis flush their brains, put pen to paper and generate ponderous lists of the best recordings of the year. And then, right between Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day, the music industry completely ignores said critics and doles out awards to the "artists" (and we use that term lightly) who sold the most records. Oh, sure. They'll tell you otherwise -- they'll tell you that the winners are selected by their peers, that the Grammys really and truly are meant to recognize the towering artistic achievement of the artists nominated. But the big winners are almost always the biggest sellers. That's because the jury of "peers" aren't in the business of deciding what does and what doesn't have critical or artistic merit. They're generally producers, suits and other musicians, people whose job it is to sell records. It's only natural that they have ears that respond more readily to the ca-ching! of a cash register than actual notes of music. Yeah, occasionally one of the worthy nominees -- Lauryn Hill, Tom Waits -- scores a surprise victory. But for the most part, it's all crap. Maybe that's why the record biz is slowly sliding into the pooper, chalking up a 5% -- some speculate 10% -- drop in sales last quarter. They've been able to get away with it for years, thanks to the stranglehold they've had on distrbution and promotional outlets like major retail stores and radio. But the 'Net has changed all that, hasn't it? If people vote with their wallets, and if we're to believe the unending torrent of anti-piracy diatribes that the copyright industry has been spewing lately, music fans have just elected the major labels and most of their artist rosters to face Madame Guillotine. Shhhhhhhhhomp!
Not to worry though. Choler's here to dispell the hype with a few lists of its own. We chained editor Sean Flinn and senior staff writer Joseph McCombs (our resident anti-Futurist) to their PCs, and refused them food, water and the love of all decent people until they could crank out lists of their 10 picks of albums that actually mattered in 2001. Once they'd screamed themselves hoarse and realized we weren't fooling around, they bent to the task, and produced some acceptable prose, which we present to you here.
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