Best-of-the-year lists are built around the fallacy that the "year" still matters. YEARS ARE FOR OLD FARTS WHO LACK THE TECHNOLOGY TO TRACK THINGS MINUTE-BY-MINUTE ON TWITTER. I'll tell you this right now: I do not wish to see your Best Albums of 2010 list, because I know you will have spent lots of time on it, and thus you will be self-conscious about your decisions. It will be boring. And, really, I don't want to be told in December about the obscure-but-shitkicking mixtape that you heard 12 months ago but forgot to write about back then. You are a total slacker, and your concentrating oh-so-hard on a little list during Christmas vacation cannot hide this fact. Trust me, I've done it, and I am ashamed.

But your Best Albums of 2010 So Far? Hellz yeah, I'll read that, because I know you probably had fun writing it. How can I be assured of its fun-ness? Because there's nothing at stake for you. If you dork-out and overrate something, nobody's gonna call you on it in December. YOU ARE FREE TO BE YOU. You can be complicated and interesting or no-nonsense or kinda charming.

You can create a bunch of categories. You can limit the task to people who have the word "Editor" in their titles. Or, similarly, you can let a rabid pack of psychopaths choose the list for you. And if you're a jerk, you can require your readers to click on a gajillion fucking links.

Anyway, yay! It's possible that I actually read one or two of those lists, maybe even the one by the guy who has "Web Editor" in his title. A lot of people like that Flying Lotus album! I am supposed to like Big K.R.I.T.!

In summation, if you believe in what I have said to you in this blog post, consider these options:

1. Next year, only do a Best Albums of 2011 So Far. It does not matter when you do it: March, July, whatever. Do not do a Best Albums of 2011.

2. Base your "Best Whatever of Whatever" on the federal fiscal year. Or create your own fiscal year. Labor Day to Labor Day? Yeah, that would probably work. If you write about metal, base it on some sort of pagan calendar. Call it the Equinox II Equinox List. BETTER YET: Name your band Equinox II Equinox and only perform awesome songs from the previous 12 months.

3. Post your Best Albums of the Year So Far list in the Comments section below, because we probably won't delete it or make fun of it. I'm not making any promises, though.

*Elizabeth Berkley plans to write a self-help book to help boost young girls' self-esteem. Presumably it'll skip the whole section about doing a movie where you snort coke, have sex in a pool, and push the lead showgirl down the stairs so you can take her place in a topless Vegas extravaganza. Though hopefully it will reference this little "live and learn" nugget from the greatest moment in the best series that ever aired on television:

*Joss Whedon is almost probably pretty close to maybe definitely directing Marvel's latest superheroes flick, The Avengers.

*Nicki Minaj announces she's pulling out of Rihanna's summer tour to work on her own debut album. Ke$ha remains on the bill. (If the three of them recorded a song together, it'd be the best worst catchy song ever.)

*A blog called Stupid Fight determines which celebrity followers are more... well, stupid. Qualifiers for the less astute include calculating the number of excess exclamation points, "OMG"s and the like. According to some recent battles, Lady Gaga fans are dumber than followers of Justin Bieber, Insane Clown Posse's fans are more intelligent than those who tweet Green Day, and Slayer and Metallica fans are pretty evenly matched. (Rachel Maddow fans come out on top when up against Glenn Beck, and Stephen Fry's fans are pretty smart when compared to Kim Kardashian's "dumb as a bag of hammers" crowd.)

*HBO announces its newest drama Treme has already been renewed for a second season. Is anyone truly surprised this new series is also awesome?

*Producer DJ Premier says Kanye West is ditching electro and going back to pure hip-hop for his fifth album.

*Scissor Sisters announce via Twitter that they'll have a new album out at the end of June.

*That TV show about awkward singers with the high ratings and a cast of continually skyrocketing popularity came back from its hiatus last night. So if you don't want to read about Glee, I suggest you steer away from your Facebook feed.

Valentine's Day is the cruelest of holidays among those both bitter and alone. Some use this day to express their love for their friends and family, but others—the more normal among us—typically find ourselves spending Feb. 14 with a box of tissues and zero company, watching romantically depressing movies that spin us even deeper into disconsolation. After the jump, suggestions for fun films from the past two decades to watch while downing, alone, in chocolate and wine.

Good Will Hunting: Sure, Valentine's is a weird time for a movie that's essentially about 1) how Matt Damon's a genius and 2) the wonders of therapy, but there's also a strong subplot about how much Robin William's character loves his deceased wife—his understated tale about missing his wife's gas is one of the most heartfelt, genuine, and quote-worthy romantic parables in recent memory.

Best Valentine's-y quote: "Those are the things I miss the most, the little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about. That's what made her my wife...people call those imperfections, oh, but they're not—that's the good stuff."

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Forgetting Sarah Marshall: Arguably the best movie to come out of the Apatow coterie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall hits a note of realism that eludes many romantic comedies. Here, no character is the outright villain; they're multidimensional human beings falling apart and coming together. The film, at its best, captures the vulnerability we feel following a breakup but before we've regained our sanity. Or, if that's not your thing, it contains the puppet Dracula musical to end all puppet Dracula musicals.

Best Valentine's-y quote: "You don't need to put your P in a V right now." "No, I need to B my L on someone's Ts."

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While You Were Sleeping:  This movie has never gotten the recognition it deserves, point blank. It's a Sandra Bullock romantic comedy from before there were "Sandra Bullock romantic comedies." Though it's essentially about a woman who falls for the brother of the man whom she thinks she loves (who is in a coma; it's complicated), it's also about making a family of your own out of the people who grow to love you. Though it's about a complicated love story with a man, it's also about finding home again, even with a family crazier than your own.

Best Valentine's-y quote: "I'd say that she gets under your skin as soon as you meet her. She drives you so nuts you don't know whether to hug her or, or just really arm wrestle her. She would go all the way to Europe just to get a stamp in her passport. I don't know if that amounts to insanity, or just being really, really... likable."

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He's Just Not That Into You: Watching this movie on Valentine's Day is slightly akin to sadomasochism (though some would argue that watching this movie on any day of the year is sadomasochism). The truth is, as much as this is an all-star vehicle based on a best-selling book that essentially has "cash cow" stamped all over it, it does have its high points. While the film's message is contrived and retrograde—it essentially says, "Hang in there, he'll propose to you eventually"—it also contains parts that suggest sometimes you need to be alone before you can let someone else into your life, a lesson that seems all too real halfway into your second bottle of red wine.

Best Valentine's-y quote: "And maybe a happy ending doesn't include a guy, maybe it's you, on your own, picking up the pieces and starting over, freeing yourself up for something better in the future. Maybe the happy ending is just moving on."

Unfortunately, along with Oscar nominations comes the usual pretentiousness—"If you haven't seen An Education, then you're missing out on one of the best films of 2010," or "If you've seen and enjoyed Avatar, you're just going along with the masses." What most seem to forget is that even our favorite actors, in the most complex, artistic Oscar-nominated films, have had dark movie pasts. To get to the top, most have to start at the bottom.

Take Anna Kendrick, one of this year's nominees for best actress in a supporting role. Director Jason Reitman said that Kendrick was "so witty and smart and sharp, and I needed a girl who could go toe-to-toe with George Clooney, and she was the one." Another movie that Kendrick was the one for? The teen (and arguably, creepy mom) sensation Twilight, in the bit part of Jessica, one of Bella's best friends. Kendrick's few lines in the vampire series are arguably the most well-acted and memorable of the bunch, but most audiences and critics seem to claim that she got the role for Up in the Air in spite of the multimillion-dollar-grossing films. Even Kendrick herself seems conflicted about the Twilight saga: "I feel a certain affection for the films so if they ask me [to be in the fourth one], I would love to. I don't have my fingers crossed either way. I've been really lucky not to be defined completely by that series."

Already an Oscar winner for best original screenplay for the 1997 hit Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon is nominated this year for best actor in a supporting role for his turn in Invictus. Damon's had a stream of hits in the past few years, including the Bourne series, the Ocean's movies, and The Departed. Also included on his résumé are the decidedly less successful (and critically panned) Jersey Girl, Stuck on You, All the Pretty Horses, and The Legend of Bagger Vance—to name a few.

It's rare in this day and age to encounter a story like Gabourey Sidibe's, nominated for best actress in a leading role for her first and only film part, in Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire. Most actors and actresses come with storied pasts, starring as leads (and extras) in films that have been both ignored or heavily criticized. Even Oscar favorites like Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep have doozies on their CVs. (Mirren was the titular character in the teen suspense movie Teaching Mrs. Tingle, while Streep still gets barbs for starring in She-Devil.)

When you watch the Oscars this year to see your favorites pick up their golden statuettes, remember that the big steps leading to the stage aren't the only ones they've taken—we all have a Twilight in our past.

Despite her continual success on the charts and ever-growing fan base with songs like "In For The Kill" and "Bulletproof," Jackson is known for speaking out of turn and straying from politically correct statements. The Quietus reported that she "blast[ed] what she sees as America's ignorance of electronic music." In the same article, while attempting to defend her feminist beliefs, she suggested that women who prefer to dress in a more sexual manner — in contrast to her own androgynous style — probably deserve whatever bad things men do to them. "That's what a real woman is, when you've got the sex eyes. I think you attract a certain kind of man by dressing [provocatively]. Women wonder why they get beaten up, or having relationships with arsehole men. Because you attracted one, you twat."

Jackson, though, is just one of many stars who rail against, you know, the people who pay for their music. Prince, however beloved by his rabid and faithful fans, has taken legal action against his online followers in the past. Back in 2007, lawyers for the Purple Rain star sent warnings to three of his fan-built Web sites, demanding these sites remove all lyrics or likenesses of his image — even those photographed by fans personally at concerts or images of tattoos that devotees had inked of the Purple One. In an unusual turn, fans of the three sites united together in order to protest in defense of the man they loved — despite the fact that he was the one taking legal action against them.

Perhaps the most temperamental of music stars is the ever-evolving man himself, Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses. To be fair, fans aren't Axl's only choice targets for physical or verbal attack — security guards, other musicians, photographers, and technical engineers are also in his repertoire. Perhaps his most famous incident was at a concert in St. Louis when, after noticing a fan taking pictures, Axl leaped into the crowd and took matters into his own hands. Shortly afterward, he left the stage in a huff before his set was up, blaming security for the infraction.

Despite these musicians' sometimes-heated interactions with their critics and fans, their popularity abides. Perhaps the La Roux frontwoman put it best herself: "You're not buying their personality, you're buying their music. Of course it's never nice when you're into an artist and you discover they're horrible, and, yes, it would be disappointing if I suddenly found out that Annie Lennox was racist. But you'd still love the music. It wouldn't matter what I heard about Michael Jackson or Prince — you can't just stop liking a song."

Holding up the 48th second of the Beatles' "Rain" as an example, Wolk claims that, "if some band of 25-year-olds with radio aspirations wrote and recorded 'Rain' today...that take would probably be thrown out, or at least digitally edited to fix the screw-up."

With respect to Wolk, this strikes me as a hollow, distinctly codger-y argument. (And one that cites exactly zero contemporary acts by way of illustration.) Couple points here:

1. "[The Beatles'] recording [of "Rain"] is a mess." Not perforce true. Sure, it's loose, and there's a soupy-psychedelic lag to the arrangement, but the Beatles were always in tireless pursuit of shit like that. (As when John instructed George Martin to make "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" smell like "sawdust on the floor.")

2. "It's full of mistakes, accidents and inconsistencies that would be utterly unacceptable by the pop-music standards of 2009." What "pop music" are we discussing here—the Jonas Bros., or indie rock's more mainstream extrusions? 'Cuz it seems to me we're still in an era where authenticity, even salable authenticity, gets stored in the garage. manifested in tape hiss, &c. &c. The White Stripes were massive in spite and because of the over-discussed sloppiness of Meg White. And I'm no expert in the whole Jay Reatard thing, but doesn't he tend to drop eighth notes here and there?

3. The Beatles is an odd band to tout as an example of studio imperfectionism. It's true, their obsessions geared toward invention rather than toward metronomics, but after 1964, this was no garage band. These are the guys who lugged 40-piece orchestras into Abbey Road and spent over 30 hours recording this song.

4. Studio perfectionism isn't a product of Pro Tools. And it's not a phenomenon unique to rock, either—think Glenn Gould, whose OCD approach to studio work infuriated sound engineers and entailed unprecedented (and literal) cutting and pasting in order to effect a synthetic perfection that live performances couldn't approach. (Christ, imagine what a pain he would've been in the Pro Tools era!)

5. "The lead singer's wobbly notes, and the not-quite-in-tune bass guitar, would get fixed with AutoTune." Sorry, how many current rock acts actually use AutoTune on a consistent basis?

What I'm wondering, I guess, is why we have to discuss this exclusively in terms of songs from the mid-'60s. "The high-tech ideal of popular music means no botched rhythms, no sour notes, no shaky dynamics, but also no 'Sex Machine,' no 'Louie Louie,' no 'Rain.'" These are the only three songs Wolk even mentions in the post. I'd love for Fischer to chime in on the lo-fi implications of all this, and mebbe Riggs has something to say re: Emo or something like that. But this whole thing strikes me as a pretty straw-man mode of obituary.

Wow, Barack Obama—what an inspiring figure. Do you remember how, against all odds, he got elected President way back in 2008? And then, despite an about-face in conventional wisdom re: the viability of Obamacare, how he jammed health-care reform (with a public option) through a groaning Congress in late 2009?

But 2010 was really unbelievable—after consolidating his political capital in an unlikely mid-term expansion of the Democratic Congressional majority, Obama made good on his promises to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and close Guantanamo. Then—who could have thought this was possible in the face of flagging support for the Afghan war—do you remember how he established a lasting peace agreement with Iran and North Korea before beating Sarah Palin in 2012 by a remarkable 20 points? I bet that, by 2016, he'll even figure out a way to get Israel to accept a future Palestinian state and withdraw from settlements in the Golan Heights. I mean, anything can happen—who, in 2014, thought that a workable immigration bill and a marijuana legalization plan would happen a year later? It's just like that original campaign slogan: "Yes, we can!"

Oh, right—none of this shit happened yet, but we're celebrating anyway.

Somewhere between stellastarr*'s self-titled semibreakthrough and Civilized, its latest, self-released effort, the New York band went from benign and enjoyable indie bubblegum to disposable Guitar Hero rock. That much was clear, anyway, at the group's packed show at Rock & Roll Hotel Friday with Wild Light and The Postmarks. Here is a band that long has inspired easy dismissal, and after three albums seems to have ironed out all idiosyncrasy. The crowd—rollicking, fist-pumping, high-fiving—couldn't have asked for anything more.

I don't mean to sound flip. In 2003, stellastarr*'s debut was derivative, sometimes involving stuff that—with its blatant debt to Talking Heads and Pixies—arrived during exactly the right moment of post-punk and college-rock revival. That album's singles, "Jenny" and "My Coco," were mainstays of my iPod for months. So I was somewhat nonplussed when stellastarr*'s hour-plus set Friday produced no Proustian flashback to younger days.

In older numbers, frontman Shawn Christensen resurrected the yodeled take on Frank Black's barking by which stellastarr* first made its bones, but he slipped comfortably into a nasal, pop-punk whine for the group's recent material. Civilized was a perfect descriptor. Bland, power-pop hyperbole—the stuff of soaring choruses, bah-bah refrains and meaningless couplets—proved the order of the night.

In other words: I should have taken my own advice and seen Lovvers.

II. I Saw Rock 'N' Roll's Future And It Is Fucked

If the headliner inspired few deep thoughts, then Wild Light, the groomed New Hampshire band who played second but took nearly as much time arranging its gear, was infuriating. On record, a shimmering California vibe dominates proceedings (although one song repeats "fuck California" with grating self-congratulation), but live it was a more bicoastal affair: the pleadingness of latter-day emo; New Romantic Killers-style synthscapes; the E-Street Band's large sound/salt-of-the-earth dichotomy. "Earnest and ambitious" reads the group's promotional material, which, in a pejorative sense, is exactly on point. Vocals reverberated; synths swooped; glasses clanged; girls screamed (already the young band has groupies). By my count, only one song didn't end in an arena-ready cadenza.

(Reverb obfuscated most of the lyrics; those that penetrated were postcard aphorisms and milquetoast ramblings about small towns and The Road.)

I'm not sure that Wild Light has the hooks to land it on, say, Grey's Anatomy (though Rolling Stone begs to differ), but its members certainly have the Abercrombie looks. Guitarist Jordan Alexander The Rebel Heartthrob was all tattoo sleeves, skinny jeans and earnestness-with-an-attitude; his warbling, plaintive vocals by turns suggested All-American Rejects' emo-pop and Bon Jovi's heartland-derived pinup rock. For his songs, multi-instrumentalist Timothy Kyle The Blue-Collar Auteur was serious in black, and affected a crooning Brandon Flowers baritone. Drummer Seth Kasper The Drummer was the least photogenic, though there was much to admire in his Spectorian (or Max Weinberg-ish?) flourishes. And Seth Pitman The Blond One, also a multi-instrumentalist, telegraphed condescension with each banter. At one point, he thanked The Postmarks—whom he said he "had never heard of" before the tour—for opening, and encouraged the crowd to "get their CD or something." Well, thanks, dude.

III. A Farewell To Barbs

Miami's The Postmarks didn't match the crowd-bating energy of their tourmates, but for all their sophistipop iciness, they had the most heart. Often, the five-piece complemented chanteuse Tim Yehezkely's girly deadpan with a chunky, robotic post-shoegaze; softer songs balanced finicky tweeness with infectious, Motownesque bass hooks. It's no surprise or accident that Ivy's Andy Chase gave The Postmarks their first career boost; Yehezkely & Co. share Ivy's polish, understatement and erudition.

Then again, The Postmarks' set closer, a cover of The Jesus and Mary Chain's "Nine Million Rainy Days," was anything but polite: In it, Yehezkely was less Liz Phair than Bilinda Butcher, an ambient angel amid the violent, echoing maelstrom.

Photo by Benjamin R. Freed

So I finally got around to listening to Ben Folds' new a cappella album, and I had some thoughts I wanted to append to last week's post. Those of you who are still in the process of forgiving me for bringing Ben Folds and a cappella in to this space to begin with will probably want to skip this one. (Also, full disclosure: I belonged to an a cappella group in college that was denied a spot on the album. I can now confirm that the singers who made the cut turned out to be much more talented than I am.)

I have always thought a cappella music was a lot more fun to perform than to listen to, but I can appreciate a well-realized arrangement when I hear one. This album has more than a few of those; that's not the problem. The problem is that the portion of Folds's oeuvre that lends itself to the a cappella adaptation is the sort of soft-edged superpop that been his general tack ever since Ben Folds Five disbanded in 2000. No vocalists, however talented, can imitate the frenetic piano runs and heedless mashing that made Folds so fun in the '90s, and few would dare attempt his jazzier arrangements ("Sports and Wine," "Uncle Walter," etc.), which are more suited to piano than voice anyway.

Yes, Ben Folds wrote pop ballads in his days with Five, but they were always carefully nestled among those rawer uptempo tracks as ballast. Here, these songs are adrift in a homogeneous sea of melancholy. The album has no arc; just ultra-smooth crooning above triad chords, song after song, with only a handful of exceptions. (Two are worth noting: "Selfless, Cold, and Composed," by the Sacramento State Jazz Singers, was an ambitious rendering of one of the best breakup songs of the past two decades, and the only track from this album that made it on my iPod; and "Magic," by the University of Chicago Voices in Your Head. The latter unquestionably falls in to the emo-pop category, but the arrangement is so different from the original that the song is a completely unique artifact–which should be the goal of any group, a cappella or otherwise, when attempting a cover.)

This is not to knock the groups. My point is that Folds's best music–the stuff he wrote when he was a pissed-off kid in North Carolina who probably wouldn't be caught dead in a white turtleneck sweater and beret–cannot be imitated by human voices, no matter how talented. Meanwhile, choral adaptations of his latter-day work, even if objectively pleasant, are likely to wind up as inferior facsimiles of unremarkable pop songs.

From the Cleveland Park listserv. Writer "Don" begs for vinyl:

"I have decided to go retro in my music listening and am trying to rebuild a collection of good old vinyl record albums. If you'd like to give a loving home to those lonely albums sitting around your house, I'd be happy to take them off your hands. I am mostly looking for rock from the 60's through 80's, but would also consider jazz, folk and other popular music."

Dude needs to hit the used-record bins at Red Onion and Crooked Beat. If he lives in Cleveland Park, I think he could afford their prices.