Best of 2022: Music Critic Top Ten Lists

It's shocking to me that critics seem to have completely forgotten about the Beach House album, which was absolute perfection. As well as Spoon - Lucifer. They were raved about when they first came out, and wayyy better than Big Thief.

Critics have full-blown amnesia these days.

Reuben - We have vastly different music taste. Of the list you provided, I only enjoyed 2 of those albums - Charli XCX and Vampire Weekend - and neither would have made my Top 10 of the year. In 2019 I rated Ghosteen by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Incidental Music by W. H. Lung, Titanic Rising by Weyes Blood, Ladytron, Magdalene by FKA Twigs and UFOF by Big Thief in particular.
As for Beach House, I only got into them in 2018 when they released 7. I have retrospectively explored their catalogue and love Bloom, but for me, Once Twice Melody from this year is the greatest thing they have ever done.
You do appear to favour the pop and hip-hop genres, I prefer indie, alternative, electronic, post-punk , experimental and folk. I don't mind pop, but rarely hear an album that I feel like coming back to again and again. This year only The Weeknd's album Dawn FM came close to my Top 25 of the year. The Beyoncé album was fun for a while, but I got sick of it. Bad Bunny did nothing for me.
Each to their own. Keep enjoying music!

Re: "2022 was a spectacular year - perhaps the strongest of any year I can recall - so many great albums, so many wonderful new artists."

I just released you placed that comment in the TV List, and I replied in that list as well. So I am now copy and pasting mine into the correct list with the part of your comment to which I am responding quoted above. If Metacritic wish to delete one of these duplicated comments of mine, please delete the one in the TV list.

Anyway, markjamie20, thankyou for referring to me by name, and I am now doing the same because I do agree it is respectful to do so. I am glad you feel that way as expressed above. I don't know how old you are. I am guessing old enough to like Beach House from when they were young, which would make you roughly 35 or something. But maybe I am wrong.

Anyway, I am glad to hear that for you 2022 has been "perhaps the strongest of any year I can recall". Maybe you are correct at least insofar as it is not as bad as I imagine it to be.

For me the strongest year for awhile is 2019: i.e. Ariana Grande's Thank U, Next; BLɅϽKPIИK's Kill This Love EP; BTS's Map of the Soul: Persona EP and BTS World Original Soundtrack; Camila Cabello's Romance; The Chainsmokers World War Joy; Charli XCX's S/T; Chris Brown's Indigo; Doja Cat's Hot Pink; Ed Sheeran's No.6 Collaborations Project; Harry Styles' Fine Line; J Balvin's Oasis; Julia Michaels Inner Monologue, Pt. 1 EP and collaborative single, "If the World Was Ending" featuring JP Saxe; Lana Del Rey's Norman F*****g Rockwell!; Lil Nas X's 7 EP which includes "Old Town Road" Remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus; Lizzo's Cuz I Love You; Maren Morris's Girl; Meduza & Goodboys "Piece Of Your Heart" and "Lose Control"; Megan Thee Stallion's Fever; Miley Cyrus's She Is Coming EP; Natti Natasha's IlumiNATTI; Normani's Motivation; Pop Smoke's Meet the Moo; Post Malone's Hollywood's Bleeding; Roddy Ricch's Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial; Summer Walker's Over It; Taylor Swift's Lover; Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride; and Young Thug's So Much Fun.

I honestly think that there is not a single album released in 2022 that can be compared as an equal to almost any of the above albums. Thus, 2022 is so bad a year from my perspective that the best album released this year, by Bad Bunny, would roughly be the 10th best album in 2019.

To judge from my Apple Music library -- which it is ordered both chronologically and alphabetically as smart playlists -- after a very strong year in 2019, when popular music was arguably near or at its peak, there is a clear downward trend that begins in 2020. This is presumably related to the Covid-19 lockdown, though it is plausible that it is not caused by the economic lockdown per se, and rather is caused by the BLM protests, because the decline doesn't become clearly evident until the following year, and 2022 is clearly by far the worst year in the history of popular music since roughly the 1990s.

If the decline was caused by the economic lockdown, then popular music should have recovered this year as it takes about a year to produce an album. But instead the charts seem so dominated by "gangsta" rap -- by which I mean rap artists who mostly have been in prison at some point in their lives, whose music has no "mainstream" appeal because of the use of expletives including the "N" word to describe themselves and the "B" and H" word to describe their partners -- that "mainstream" pop such as was clearly dominant in 2019 has to a large extent collapsed in a heap, and might not recover for several years or more, and might never recover.

Reuben - I placed Beach House on top of the list because they released the best album of the year in my opinion - no other reason. Music evolves, bands come and go, but 2022 was a spectacular year - perhaps the strongest of any year I can recall - so many great albums, so many wonderful new artists.

Returning to the subject of the "inorganic" nature of K-Pop, and whether this is a "legitimate" argument to be made to explain why their music is not rated highly by music critics, I found an interesting relevant article via doing a Google Search:

"Why East and West Don't See Eye-to-Eye

Years of research (and culture clashes) have shown that East Asians are more collectivistic than their individualistic Western counterparts. Now, new research argues that this cultural gulf may stem from what those peoples' ancestors farmed."

I found this article via Google because I had made the same point, that Asian people are less individualistic, and that was what I had in the search terms. The hypothesis is explained as follows:

"Rice farming is labor-intensive and requires irrigation, which forces a community to work together, [Thomas] Talhelm said. Wheat farming, on the other hand, is a more individualistic pursuit. Thus, he wondered if the cultures that evolved out of these two methods of farming might still persist."

An original aspect of his hypothesis is that he focuses on "the Yangtze River acting as a dividing line. The Yangtze... is... the point at which rice farming in the South transitions to wheat farming in the North."

It occurred to me that Korea might be classified as being in the "wheat farming" region of "the North", so I did another Google search. I didn't find a clear answer to that question, but did find the following on Wikipedia: "Anjeunbaengi wheat, also known as Jinju native wheat, is a variety of wheat originating in southern South Korea. The wheat has been noted for its durability and relatively quick growing time."

On this basis, it might be that Korean culture historically has been much more individualistic compared to the Chinese in the rice-growing region. Obviously, any such cultural difference has been exacerbated by communism, but the hypothesis is that there is an instinctive difference. That would be consistent with Koreans being very good at developing a style of pop music that is similar to music in the English-speaking world, but also being more collectivist when compared to those of European descent.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna55133152

I like this album art for Beach House's Bloom LP, https://www.npr.org/2012/05/06/151227631/first-listen-beach-house-bloom
Though it is NOT the abstract cover for that album. It might be a scene from a music video. But anyway, the version I had included the lights of the car, it was cropped by me to be a perfect square, and I spent several hours editing it in Photoshop to eliminate much of the distortion in the light. I was just learning Photoshop at the time, so it was simply some creative playing around. I imagine you might have included Beach House at the top of your list because that was when Metacritic Music was more "cool" than it is now? You can get a sense of that time from this playlist: https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-200-best-albums-of-the-2010s/
Beach House's Teen Dream is at #21. It is mostly worthwhile to scroll up from that point. I certainly do miss artists like them, Vampire Weekend, #7, Grimes, #11, and Joanna Newsome at #16. Those are the sort of Indie artists that seem no longer around nowadays. Grimes has good music videos for her songs that are available on Apple Music. Joanna Newsome sadly only has one music video for "Sprout and the Bean". It certainly captures her well and so it would be great if there was more. I highly recommend the live music videos of The Gossip 2006 album, Standing in the Way of Control. I personally have only streamed two: "Standing In the Way of Control (Short Version)"; and "Yr Mangled Heart", which I recommend you listen to in that order. That live performance captures the Metacritic music community of the time coming together to see live the sort of artist that only they know about.

But a good example of an artist that the Metacritic community at the time had missed is Paramore. In retrospect it seems amazing that they were not on the radar of Metacritic, at least not that I can recall.

My Top 25

1 Once Twice Melody BEACH HOUSE
2 Natural Born Prom Queen SUDAN ARCHIVES
3 LP.8 KELLY LEE OWENS
4 Preacher’s Daughter ETHEL CAIN
5 Fossora BJÖRK
6 Ugly Season PERFUME GENIUS
7 In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow WEYES BLOOD
8 Formentera METRIC
9 Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You BIG THIEF
10 ¡Ay! LUCRECIA DALT
11 Wet Leg WET LEG
12 Blue Rev ALVVAYS
13 Autofiction SUEDE
14 Labyrinthitis DESTROYER
15 I Love You Jennifer B JOCKSTRAP
16 Garden Gaia PANTHA DU PRINCE
17 Edge Of Innocence ROZA TERENZI & D. TIFFANY
18 Two DUBSTAR
19 Glitch Princess YEULE
20 KALAK SARATHY KORWAR
21 Nymph SHYGIRL
22 Two Ribbons LET'S EAT GRANDMA
23 I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You QUADECA
24 Never Let Me Go PLACEBO
25 Fear Fear WORKING MEN'S CLUB

Apologies to Sam Prekop & John McEntire, Dry Cleaning, Ariel Zetina, Belle & Sebastian, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Just Mustard, Djo, Rina Sawayama, The Weeknd, Sylvan Esso, Ravyn Lenae, HAAi and Tourist

Thanks, hawkeye766.

Re: "I like a lot of David Guetta's stuff." Yes, sorry if I was insensitive in my reply to you earlier. I do appreciate what you have written to me. I was interested to learn from this your latest comment that A.G. Cook came into the public eye as Charli XCX's creative director. I remember when I first heard her music, I borrowed her debut LP, True Romance (2013) from a public library as I was without the internet at the time. That is embarrassing to admit as it makes me seem like I must have been living in the dark age. But anyway, Icona Pop's "I Love It" featuring Charli XCX that was released in 2012 was also excellent, as was the Australian artist, Iggy Azalea's "Fancy" featuring Charli XCX in 2014, and she was featured on another Australian artist, Troye Sivan's "1999" in 2018. But Charli XCX has lost her creative inspiration since then, and maybe that is because she and A.G. Cook had parted ways?

It wouldn't surprise me, as that often happens with pop singers. Once a pop artist gains control of their own artistic direction they often lose the plot. I think that has clearly happened with Taylor Swift, though she has been very successful on the charts with her last few albums. Reputation in late 2017 was Swift's last album with Big Machine. In November 2018, she signed a new deal with the Universal Music Group and has since then released Lover, Folklore and Evermore. Lover was well produced, but displayed some early signs of self-indulgence, and that became much more apparent in the next two produced during the covid-19 lockdown and now Midnights. It was while promoting Lover that Swift became embroiled in a public dispute with talent manager Scooter Braun and Big Machine over the purchase of the masters of her back catalog. So that seems to be the beginning of the downward spiral. The blame is probably not so much with the producers, Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, but rather that she no longer has someone like the talent manager Scooter Braun to organize the production process. Of course, most people won't agree with me and believe that there isn't any issue at all, Taylor Swift is simply doing her own thing and she is doing so successfully, from their viewpoint. But I am a contrarian at heart, and being a non-conformist and not someone employed in the music industry, I do believe that it would be much better if they could figure out a way to keep artists like Taylor Swift and Harry Styles on track. Artists like Taylor Swift build up a huge fan base when their music is being well-produced and their fans remain loyal to them when they lose their way, and that drags down the standard of pop music more generally. in my opinion it is an issue because Taylor Swift and Harry Styles are clearly the most popular solo artists at present, and so we need them being guided in the right direction. At present they are being self-indulgent, as was Taylor Swift interrupting the music video for her best song, "Anti-Hero".

https://www.newsweek.com/some-taylor-swift-fans-really-hate-jack-antonoff-collaboration-1753997

https://people.com/music/taylor-swift-and-jack-antonoff-friendship-timeline/