Must Own Monday

Compiling a list of Best Albums is actually a lot easier that deciding on the Best Songs. So much comes in to play with individually released tracks because they are essentially short-form advertisements for artists. A single has to create a lot of buzz before it has any serious impact. There’s also the One Hit Wonder effect. A song may perfectly represent a given year even when it comes from an artist or band with no real staying power (remember Soul Asylum? Yeah, neither does anybody else).

Full albums, on the other hand, are a much better representation of an artist’s actual talent. Critics can conveniently ignore the One Hit Wonders and concentrate on the albums that actually made you stop and listen. More importantly, those of us who are hopelessly addicted to music actually prefer listening to full albums. Rather than playlists with a lot of great singles, we throw whole albums onto our iPods.

By the end of the year, you generate a pretty clear idea of which albums made the biggest impact. Typically, it’s the albums that you could listen to without skipping a single track. In Must Own Monday tradition, the ten albums below the fold provide the best and most complete albums of 2006.

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It’s not about being the best played, most accurately sung, or having the tightest production. Truly great songs do two very important things: They create an emotional reaction in a broad range of listeners and they have a tendency to change the landscape of the music industry. That’s a tall order and not easy to pull off.

Picking a song of the year is very tricky business. Some songs like the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1963) and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991) are the kind of rarities that had an immediate and sustained impact. But those are the exception rather than the rule. Other songs like Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” (1983) and the Romones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” (1975) were essentially cult hits in their time, but have come to be regarded as truly great and industry-changing songs. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess (for example, none of these songs won a Grammy, but then again, when have the Grammys ever been an accurate reflection of great music? I digress…), so picking a “song of the year” in the same year the songs are released is a little silly. Can we really predict the impact a song will have before that song has a chance to make an impact? I wonder.

This year we’re lucky (or unlucky depending on your taste and temperament). You may not realize it, but we were all party to one of those rare few that actually changed everything. It hit like train, spread like wildfire, and will have a permanent effect on the music industry. The trouble this year is organizing #2 through #10.

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