[The Soup Nazi]

Mercifully, Robert Christgau kept it to 25 albums. That's how you do a fuckin' list.

Dean's List: The 2010s
The 25 best albums of the last 10 years

For me, constructing a best-of-decade list isn’t just a matter of boiling down my annual Dean’s Lists. It’s serious work—done thoroughly, more work than any fulltime critic has time for. Recalling music that came out eight or nine years ago doesn’t come naturally to anyone. And more than with year-enders, striking the right balance between pleasure and gravitas is a challenge, because gravitas counts for more in stabs at provisional canonization. One reason the Roots’ How I Got Over began atop my provisional top 25 and stayed there was that, yes, my most-played 2010s album had a theme even if black middle-class angst proved so specialized the band would leave it behind for true-crime tales on their two-and-counting later albums. I note sadly that it made neither Rolling Stone’s 100-album countdown or Pitchfork’s 200-album monster—a distinction it shares with 14 of my other selections, most obtusely Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog and M.I.A.’s Maya. Check those out, kids.

I could go on for paragraphs, pages, but damn it I won’t. Instead I will note that when you review 200 albums a year the older stuff has a way of shuffling off to Buffalo—my collection of sound recordings includes 4000 A minus or better albums. So while longterm playability has to figure prominently in deciding how much I truly like what I like, it can’t be the definitive criterion. Sometime in the past 10 days, for instance, I concluded that I probably hadn’t put on Neil Young’s Dean’s List-topping 2012 Americana since 2013 because it’s filed on the floor next to the rear file cabinet along with some 30 other Young CDs I didn’t even alphabetize until a few years ago. In the past week I’ve played it four times as I whoo-hooed over its conceptual brass. It had also been a while since I pulled out that dickhead Kanye’s perversely superb 2010 album and even Paul Simon’s So Beautiful or So What, one of three also-rans I finished my labors by comparison-playing alongside Wussy’s Strawberry and Das Racist’s Relax, which made the cut, and the Pistol Annies’ Interstate Gospel and Yo La Tengo’s Stuff Like That There, which didn’t.

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