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.

-Since he's legally forbidden to perform comedy on television, Conan O'Brien is hitting the road this spring. He'll be in D.C. at Constitution Hall on June 8th.

-The Washington Post's Dave Malitz profiles four up-and-coming bands that will be visiting D.C. on tour. He shines some light on a few locals, too.

Baltimore City Paper profiles cosmic-voyager Dam Funk, who will be performing tomorrow at 411 New York Ave. NE.

-SPIN has made all of its back-issues available via google books. I particularly enjoyed this article, where critic Robert Christgau and Matador Records founder Gerard Cosloy argue over whether Royal Trux has the right to exist.

Good morning! Yesterday I learned about the Russian Rickroll! I'm fairly late to the party on this one, I gather. Nevertheless: Guess where this roundup is going!

Long before she became the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar, Kathryn Bigelow directed a New Order video, in which she dressed the synthpop heavies up as a hair-metal band.

The University of Texas has bought the papers of the late novelist David Foster Wallace. Included in the documents is Wallace's final, unfinished novel The Pale King, which Little, Brown is publishing next year.¹

Every issue of Spin from 1985 to last October is now online and free for browsing in Google Books. Believe it not, this issue from 1986 has a featurette on the D.C. go-go group the Junk Yard Band. Also, Beaujon used to work there.

A few days old, but well worth checking out: Local label Ruffian Records posted a pair of remixes of "Go Where Airplanes Go," the best (or, well, my favorite) song on the recent album by D.C. art-punkers Imperial China. The group is currently touring, and is keeping a pretty entertaining diary. On the group's Frankfort, Ky., show:

1. Witnessed a fight between an undercover DEA agent and a young patron of the bar. This DEA agent was also shocked and disappointed to learn that Brendan Harris, the booker, was indeed not a “faggot.” He learned this after hitting on Brendan’s wife.

2. As the fight developed, a woman from the peanut gallery yelled, “I told you there was gonna be some real white trash shit here.”

Imperial China plays Velvet Lounge on March 26 with Cephalopods, which is the band of Ruffian's Hugh McElroy.

That's all! TROLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLO.

Perez's self-proclaimed "good ear" and subsequent blog endorsements helped him score a record imprint under Warner Bros.*

In response to claims that the notorious self-promoter is riding not only the coattails of countless musicians he's endorsed on his blog, but also the people who wrote about those acts first, Perez Hilton claims he has no idea what's going on in the world of music criticism, and thus can't possibly be riding anything.

"I don't read any music magazines. I don't read any music blogs," he told me in a phone conversation a few weeks ago.

Perez credits his fans with supplying promos, and claims he receives roughly 30 musical items a day from them.  "I discover the music from word of mouth and my readers. I listen to everything that is sent my way—most of it is crap, but I listen to all of it," he says.

Despite having never received credit for writing about these bands first, Robinson says he isn't annoyed.

"One of the brilliant and obvious things about [writing about music] is that I can help music reach a wider audience. I've been telling A&Rs, DJs, other journalists, managers, publicists and publishers about my favourite music for years. If Perez is one of those people that's great–his passion for music is the one genuine emotion I think he communicates to his readers–but if he's not I don't think I'll lose any sleep."

This is an incredibly generous statement on Robinson's part, as Warner UK recently passed up on a PopJustice label that likely would have represented the same artists that Perez plans to release under his U.S. label.

"There is a big difference between saying a band is brilliant and saying they'll sell records. As a pop fan, and as a music journalist, I only need to concentrate myself with the former which is an amazing privilege when I think about friends at labels whose passion for music has been killed by the need to shift units," Robinson says.

Black Book's Guha, however, sees a wider problem with Perez's failure to give credit: Principle.

"We're always ripping off each other," Rohin wrote in an email, "but most of us have the courtesy to include some sort of hat-tip to the original source. So what's upsetting here is any lack of attribution Perez Hilton offers to the source where he's clearly getting his ideas, or inspiration, or whatever you want to call it."

Guha offers an example: "PopJustice–a British website that Perez has pretty regularly 'been influenced by'–started chronicling the genesis of a new girlband, The Saturdays. Three months later, as the girlband gears up for their first single, Perez Hilton claims them as his latest discovery. It's not just coincidence that he stumbles upon this particular act."

* * *

"I wrote about Amy Winehouse before she blew up," says Perez. "I became aware of her at the exact time the 'Rehab' single came out in the UK, because I was there at the time."

Archives, however, don't lie, and those at perezhilton.com say the gossip blogger is exaggerating just a teensy bit. Winehouse's Back to Black, which features the hit 'Rehab', came out in October 2006 in the UK, and March 2007 in the U.S. But Perez didn't write about Winehouse for the first time until June 2007, three months after Spin announced the singer was touring the U.S. in support of her album.

That's not to say that Perez was copying Spin. It's more likely that he had yet to perfect ripping off PopJustice quickly enough to give the impression that the endorsements were happening simultaneously.

Take Empire of the Sun, the Australian electronica duo whose two singles charted in the U.K. more than a year ago: Perez says he first blogged about them  in September 2008, and that the duo "only got buzz in America the last few months," thanks, in part, to his coverage.  He insists the same is true of Australia's New Zealand's Ladyhawke, whose September 2008 eponymous debut Perez mentioned within weeks of its release, and of whom he proudly states, "She is finally getting radio play."

And let's not forget his most cherished protege: Katy Perry, who he first mentioned way back in 2007.

If Perez had been following American music publications as closely as he's clearly following PopJustice, he might've realized other people were writing about these bands at the same time, and, in some cases, also arguing that they deserved more attention. Pitchfork reviewed Ladyhawke in December '08, and reviewer Mike Orme observed then that the album had "been met with relative apathy in the States." The same goes for Empire of the Sun's Walking On a Dream, which Orme reviewed three months after Perez "mentioned" the duo on his blog.

And Katy Perry? Blender wrote about her in 2004, the first time she was famous.

***

The closest Perez comes to admitting that he didn't discover all the bands on his tour is this relatively innocuous statement: "It's the first time [Frankmusik] is performing in America."

The tour, called Perez Hilton Presents, is intended to build buzz for his new label. It's currently in the tank. Tickets are going for $30, and the crowds in D.C., (where Perez launched the tour) and Boston were tiny. The phantom audience didn't miss much. Ida Marie was drunk when she performed at the 9:30 Club, and had a walk-off-the-stage-come-back-crying breakdown at the House of Blues in Boston. Whatever attempt Perez might have made at controlling the damage failed miserably. [UPDATE: Ida Maria has dropped off the tour.]

The implication that Perez's skills as a promoter have helped these artists' careers–a possibility that Perez simultaneously embraces by recounting that Adele sent him a "a gold commemorative plaque" when she won Grammies this year for Best New Artist and Best Female Vocalist, and yet  downplays with statements like, "I would never take credit for anyone else's success"–are likely central to his deal with Warner Bros.  Consequently, Robinson feels that his inability to "talk the talk" as well as Perez was likely why Warner UK passed on a PopJustice label.

But Perez talking is more impressive than Perez doing.

Says Guha: "He seems like a one-man branding crisis–maybe rising pop stars would do well to find champions elsewhere?"

Perhaps a PopJustice label?

*This story originally said that Frankmusik was the first artist signed to Perez's label. The first artist is actually Sliimy.

The results?

"In the end, Animal Collective edged out every other artist for both Best Album and Best Song. Artists like Grizzly Bear, The Decemberists and Neko Case weren't far behind. One thing was clear: that 2009 has been one of the strongest years for new music in recent memory."

MP3 tracks accompany the list for Best Songs of 2009 (so far), in case you're not up to speed with what's cool.

About that last point: Did ASC mean new music or new artists? The former is redundant; you can't poll Best of 2009 (so far) using music released prior to 2009. And the latter is simply untrue. Bob Dylan, U2, Conor Oberst, Animal Collective, Neko Case, Grizzly Bear, The Decemberists–which of these is a new band? I took the remark to mean that the field is flatter, the world more fair, but I think that's kind of naive: The Internet is just as good as FM radio and MTV at promoting some bands above all others and keeping them up there for a while.

Jonah Weiner has a piece up at Slate explaining the recent deaths of Vibe and Blender and layoffs at Spin and Rolling Stone. He serves his argument in three parts: 1.) "There are fewer superstars, and the same musicians show up on every magazine cover"; 2.) "Music mags have less to offer music lovers, and music lovers need them less than ever anyway"; 3.) "Music magazines were an early version of social networking. But now there's this thing called "social networking"..."

Point no. 2 deals much more plainly on the topic of critic access (see: watermarks), with one strange deviation. Weiner writes:

"It's a valid point that the professional critic still wields an aura of authority rare in the cacophonous world of online music, but between taste-making blogs and ever-smarter music-recommendation algorithms like Apple Genius and Pandora, the critic's importance is being whittled down."

Except, that's not a valid point. It feels good, sounds good, etc., but labels don't see "us" as authoritative and readers are often able to form their opinions, thanks to leaks and album streaming, before we're able to tell them what's what. (That NPR is using its readers to determine a best-of list is a great example of this. This used to be a privilege of music critics.)

Also, smaller point: The essence of a cacophony is that you can't tell one voice from another. I really think that's happening.

In a piece that we published today, I interviewed executives from Sub Pop, Definitive Jux, and Nasty Little Man, and music writers Jessica Hopper and Douglas Wolk about the state of music reviewing and copyright protections.

If you've never reviewed a copyright-protected promo, imagine the restrictions of DRM and then some: interruptions on every track during which a voice says, "This is a promotional copy"; poorly designed desktop media players; blood pacts.

Turns out labels know damn good and well that these sorts of restrictions interfere with the review process. And that made me wonder if labels are less concerned with pre-release coverage than they used to be.

The answer is yes and no. For an explanation, read Watermarks Break My Heart: Journalists hate them; labels love them. Why copyright protections aren't going away.