End of a Year (almost)

There's some nights when you are just generally woozy, and you have a tough time thinking of anything to talk about, let alone write about. I'll start out by mentioning Stylus' list, released this past week, of its top 50 singles of the year.

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/stylus-magazines-top-50-singles-of-2006.htm

I'll humor these guys and go through the list and count the number of tracks I would even recognize if I heard them. Ready? Go!....ok, about seven of the songs. Everything else seems to be hip hop I've never heard of, teenybopper anthems, or Swedish. Maybe their album list will be a tad less, shall we say, obscure, but there's still some things I like about this list. I was pleasantly surprised to see Camera Obscura rank so highly, as well as the Junior Boys. Also, I thought I was the only one who would wind up standing behind "When You Were Young", but apparently it was more well-loved than I thought. And "Crazy" at #1 is a no-brainer; there hasn't been a song that so defined a year since "Hey Ya!" in 2003. Pitchfork and other outlets will probably be posting their big lists in the coming week; if you're looking for a nice conglomerate of all the various lists, I've always liked Metacritic's year-end analyses. This year's link:
http://www.metacritic.com/music/bests/2006.shtml

Maybe lists, especially at this time of the year, aren't your thing. I'm definitely in the camp of people who likes lists; they give us an outlet not only to let everyone know what we like, but also to gauge what everyone else has been into.