Stewart Mason’s Critical Albums Of 2011

I can understand not having any interest in what's currently hip at any given time. (As Stew put it a few years ago in The Negro Problem's great song "Is This The Single?," "I got your comp in the mail today/If this is where it's at, I can step away.") What I don't get is when people wear their disinterest as a badge of honor. Several times this year, as my friends and I have been passing around the various 2011 best-ofs on Facebook, others have occasionally chimed in with variations of "I've never heard of most of these."

Usually, the tone is "Gee, maybe I haven't been paying attention." Which happens to all of us sometimes. (2002, the year I got married and moved to Boston after a lifetime in the southwest? Total musical blank for me. Couldn't even tell you what came out that year.) But a couple of times this year, I've seen people say things like "I'm proud to say I don't own a single one of these records!"

What a strange thing to be proud of. Of course, musical taste is entirely subjective. This year, for example, many of my friends have gone utterly mad for The Joy Formidable, whose debut album I personally found pleasant enough, but kind of overblown. Similarly, I know a lot of people who couldn't get into my own #1 pick of the year, Destroyer's Kaputt, because they just don't like Dan Bejar's voice, which admittedly is...let's call it distinctive. But I'm kind of boggled by the idea of dismissing an entire group of albums, unheard, because they're "too hipster," "too commercial" or any other blanket condemnation.

One of my core beliefs as a critic is that at any given time, there is more great music to be discovered than a single person can process. No one can have heard everything. It just seems a shame not to at least try.