Sunday, November 27, 2011

New year, new countdown, new critics

It's time once again for the people who post on this her blog, the self-proclaimed Higher Ed Music Critics, to share our collective and individual thoughts about the year's best music. This marks the third year of a project that began with an ambitious ranking and countdown of the top 100 albums of the first decade of the 2000s. (Technically, it was a ranking of the best albums released between 2000 and 2009, which wasn't the first decade of the 2000s, since the year 2000 actually marked the end of the '90s. But tell that to the hundreds of other music bloggers who did the same thing a year early.)

In year two, we scaled back our approach and focused on the top 50 albums of that year only.

Now, for year three, we're taking the same approach as year two and preparing our rankings of the top 50 albums of 2011. We do so with a slight change in the lineup.

New to the Higher Ed Music Critics collective this year are Joel Goodman, Mark Greenfield, Gordon Ryan, Alaina Wiens and Dylan Wilbanks. Joel and Dylan both shared guest posts last year (Dylan's is here and Joel's here), but Mark, Gordon and Alaina are complete newcomers to the effort. We're excited to add their perspectives to the effort.

Also this year, a few past contributors are taking this year off. Georgy Cohen, who was one of the original bloggers at this site, is focusing on her new business and other projects this year. Jenna Spinelle and Mike Petroff, who contributed to last year's effort, are also sitting this one out. Their insight with past projects has been highly valuable, as each brought a slightly different perspective to the effort. We hope they'll be able to rejoin us in 2012.

You can read a bit more about current and past contributors in the sidebar titled "The Monsters of List." There you'll also find our Twitter handles so you can connect with us via that network and harangue us about our suspect taste. In the meantime, we have lists to make. But we'll see you soon.

No comments:

Post a Comment