Music Bloggers’ Best of 2008

By Chuck

As long as people continue to make music, other people will make year end lists chronicling it. Artist of the year? Song of the year? Album of the year? Depending on how much you care about these things, there are literally dozens of different places for you to find out who and what, in very esteemed professionals’ opinions, have taken these top honors (Spin, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork being the most notable).

But have you ever wondered what other people who care lots about music but don’t necessarily make their livings criticizing it think the best music of the year is? Hype Machine, the indispensable music blog aggregation portal, is sure hoping that you have, and they’ve decided to make yet another list of the top 50 artists, songs and albums of 2008. This list, which they’re calling Blog Music Zeitgeist, is compiled by the people, for the people. Instead of lame old professional music critics calling the shots, they’ve reached out to some of the coolest, most prominent music bloggers on the net and asked them to capture the defining musical spirit of ’08 in list form.

The results are… well, they’re kind of the same as all the other lists. Santogold, Wolf Parade, No Age, Deerhunter, Girl Talk, Hot Chip, Lil Wayne and Coldplay are there, just like every other list. However, their 50 songs of the year, which lists songs in order of release date instead of best-ness, has very little in common with the other lists, and has lots of excellent, easy to download tunes and remixes.