My list of my 100 favorite albums from 1996-2011.

Many musicians express a complex relationship with the term 'riot grrrl'-- a reverence for the movement's origins but also frustrations about the difficulty of escaping the limits of gendered language.

A good overview and some best-of lists for dubstep and its offshoots in 2010 that I can mine later.

"For every Vampire Weekend or Arcade Fire that goes beyond this point, spinning online buzz into big success, there's an M's, or a Thrills, or a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — take your pick of any blog-hyped band that once generated copious heat only to cool off considerably, partly victims of a zippy online impatience that, as Matthew Johnson, founder of Fat Possum Records, put it, 'can devour bands whole, and be done with them.'"

"'It sucks,' he says. 'It's no fault of any of the people in the industry, but music is not the main focus of my life. I never really planned on it being that way. When I meet people on the business end of this music-industry thing, they tend to really gross me out. I'm not trying to make money through this.'"

Why Altered Zones, Pitchfork's new MP3 blog collective, is a destructive force toward artists. However: This isn't all Pitchfork's fault. An artist doesn't get on the internet without their own considerable effort. They don't have to react to coverage. Young people are inexperienced and I don't blame us for going for fame as soon as the slightest hint thereof beckons, but there's more to this than the idea that Pitchfork is trying to co-opt all the young rebels.

Is Lil Wayne's 'Rebirth' really that bad?

Getting politics wrong and getting pop wrong.

The last paragraph hits every nail on its head.

"Anyway, here is A Completely Unscientific and Random Sampling of a Very Small Percentage of Tracks Submitted to This Enormous Project, Some of Which Are Kind of Bad, But I Like Them Anyway."

About thirteen minutes of The Field doing his remix of The Honeydrips' "Fall from a Height" while !!! jam out over it. One of those times I want to say, "that's the best thing I've ever seen." Add this to the surefire-cheer-up list.

"This track is like being raised on velvet pillows and then, on your 18th birthday, having a crazy albino mannequin begin to rub sandpaper on your face."