Billboard critics’ top 10 albums of 2009 and top 20 albums of the decade
December 17, 2009 Leave a comment
This isn’t really a feature or review, but a couple weekends ago I pretty much spent four straight days writing blurbs to go with Billboard’s best-of lists, as voted on by the in-house staff and some freelancers (myself included).
Let me tell you, writing this stuff (talking more about the decade list) was not easy! I’ll go into more about this when I post my own lists, but there were several albums on there that I either had not listened to before at all, or just hadn’t listened to critically. So, I had to do a ton of research and read a bazillion reviews of every record to figure out not only why it was good but also to see the bigger picture of why it was important. Oh yeah, and I listened to pretty much everything. It was hours and hours of work since I had to play catch-up on a lot of the music (I had to call one of my editors to explain why some of the rap/R&B albums were significant—I don’t mean that in a bad way, like they shouldn’t be on there, but I just don’t listen to much of it so I was clueless), but I learned sooo much and having the opportunity to write this was really exciting.
Note: a couple of these were wayyy edited, and rightfully so—namely Jay-Z (don’t really listen to him/rap in general) and Pearl Jam (my editor has seen them 100 times…obviously she will know what to say about their music better than someone who doesn’t really know their music). Just thought I’d throw that out there :)
Billboard critics’ top 10 albums of 2009 on Billboard.com
Billboard critics’ top 20 albums of the 2000s on Billboard.com
