Best Albums 2008 (16-20)

20. Lil Wayne — Tha Carter III (Deluxe Edition) His day job finances his mixtape hobby — that’s how I excused this initially disappointing official product. But with the hype since faded, I can hear the wiseass tweaking a post-millennial pop sound he can’t be bothered to redefine. As a single, “Lollipop” sucked (heh), but [...]

Ne-Yo — “Closer”

Released: 4.15.08 Peak:#7 Nobody sings quite like Michael Jackson. I don’t mean he’s can’t be imitated — the sobs and catches that his drippier performances overtaxed are grist for even the weakest parodists. I mean he is, for the most part, not imitated. His most prominent soundalikes, sister Janet and El DeBarge, are neither of [...]

Jason Mraz — “I’m Yours”

Released: 4.15.08 Peak: #6 Worst things first. I officially lost patience for Lil Wayne’s ET-phoned-in 16-bars around the time I heard him not just biting but misquoting 50 frickin’ Cent on a remix of this very song. I doubt that Mraz, Weezy and third-party Jah Cure (who at least has the decency to sing as [...]

Estelle feat. Kanye West — “American Boy”

Released: 4.15.08 Peak: #9 Enthusiasm is corny. More than a decade since Dre made “Been There, Done That” gangsta rap’s very own “Where’s the beef?,” blasé indifference remains a core hip-hop sentiment. Rappers and R&B singers know to survey the glitzy worlds that their newly attained wealth has opened to them with the jaded eye [...]

Black Kids — “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You”

Released: 4.7.08 Peak: Did not chart One upside of returning to amateur rockcrit status in late 2006 was that I no longer had to track those convolutions of taste that the internet had accelerated. “Official” mixtapes, mp3 leaks, and widely circulated demos made everybody a potential insider, democratizing the sour one-upsmanship that’s always poisoned pop [...]

Lil Wayne — “A Milli”

Released: 3.11.08 Peak: #6 Their careers overlap so closely you can forget that Jay-Z (born 1969) and Eminem (born 1972) spring from a much different generation than Lil Wayne (born 1982). The first MCs to become undeniable pop superstars, Gen-Xers Jay and Em shouldered their pioneers’ burdens about as adroitly as we could reasonably ask. [...]

MGMT — “Time to Pretend”

Released: 3.3.08 Peak: #109 “Synth-pop” must have been too easy a tag, because MGMT’s debut, Oracular Spectacular, trailed fancy adjectives in its wake like “prog” and “psych” instead. But classifying a sound, that’s just marketing. Classifying a sensibility, on the other hand, that’s a matter of aesthetics, and Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser are indie [...]

Vampire Weekend — “A-Punk”

Released: 2.28.08 Peak: #106 Ezra Koenig has one of those bright voices that compel critics to describe a songwriter’s work as “literate” when they think they mean literary but really mean middlebrow. The most common recent recipient of that shorthand praise is the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy, whose lyrics reincarnate Sting as the most annoying kid [...]

M.I.A. — “Paper Planes”

Released: 2.12.08 Peak: #4 M.I.A.’s big hit wasn’t meant to be like “Paper Planes.” A Def Jam acquisition committed to a Timbaland studio date, Maya certainly owed the capitalist maw some more immediately digestible morsel — even if she wasn’t being groomed as the Indian subcontinent’s answer to Nelly Furtado, as Robert Christgau gloomily divined, [...]

Best Albums 2008 (21-25)

25. Ne-Yo — The Year of the Gentleman All R&B cats pander. If Ne-Yo’s more shameless than most, his compulsive flattery pays aesthetic dividends: The more precisely he describes the targets of his adoration, the sharper his songwriting. On “Miss Independent,” a professional lady’s ability to pay her bills on time gets him hot, while [...]