The year is drawing to a close, which means it's time for us music writers to puff out our chests — those chests emblazoned with big red “C's” for “critic” — and be extra insular, bombastic, and pissy. In our year-end lists and year-end essays and year-end slideshows, pop music's moments of glorious unpredictability will be rationalized in comfortable, arm-chair hindsight. We will out-thesaurus one another and out-douche one another, all while spouting words like “crystallize” and “contextual” and “conceptualize,” and spewing phrases like “solipsistic wonder” and “abject fetishism.”
We will praise the “sonic erudition” of M83 while expressing caution over the “Dionysian superfluousness” of LMFAO. We will pooh-pooh the “parasitic appropriation” of Pitbull — but then, in an effort to prove that within us exists the capacity for self-awareness, as well as an appreciation of the fact that erudite wordplay can induce migraines (I have one right now, in fact), we will follow up by saying that Pitbull also “sucks gnarled goat taint.”
Well forgive me, please, for I'm not participating in such amusement this year.
