Recently in Best of 2007 Category

by Chris Ryan

LCD Soundsystem's sophomore effort, Sound of Silver, has won the second annual Idolator.com Critics Poll, besting M.I.A.'s Kala in the albums race. And in a turn of events about as surprising as the sun coming up this moring, Rihanna's "Umbrella" was named single of the year.

   
The Internet, for better or worse, is a great experiment in democracy, giving everyone a critical soapbox to shout from. That can be a wonderful thing, but it does make for a daunting number of year-end “Best Of” lists. Certain artists appeared with predictable regularity: M.I.A., LCD Soundsystem, Panda Bear, Arcade Fire and The National all got ample amounts of love. We’ve sorted through the web’s detritus to come up with a handful of our favorite lists, from the mainstream to the underground and the just plain bizarre.

And if the following links don't quite satiate your need for meta-list craziness, check out the archival work of those gracious overachievers over at Largehearted Boy.

by Matty Karas

Commercially speaking, 2007 was a worse year for pop music than 2006, which was worse than 2005. The Internet is ruining everything. As of this writing, exactly five albums have sold as many as two million copies this year. Two are Disney soundtracks, one a classic-rock album available only at Wal-Mart, one a Christmas album, and one a rock band that got its break on "American Idol" (thank god for "American Idol"). Fortunately, actual rock fans don't subscribe to Billboard or look at Soundscan every week. They just turn on the radio or go to clubs or surf YouTube and MySpace in search of Lil' Mama or Lil Wayne or a lil' techno or a lil' acoustic number. Or they actually watch "American Idol." Or make their own music. When everyone else is bitching about the rain, they simply open an umbrella and carry on. In all those ways and more, 2007 was a fantastic year for pop.

by Nate Cavalieri

The more we reflect on the year in rock, the more it feels like a long afternoon spent at the multiplex. There were well-anticipated (if only occasionally) satisfying blockbusters, nubile starlets debuting in breakthrough roles, and a sprinkling of art-house crossovers. Like sequels to our favorite flicks, the parade of marquee reunions offered both spine-tingling and unsightly results. The year's other rock-related stories, like Phil Spector's trial, Van Halen's roller coaster and the lumbering maneuvers of the record industry, were chock-full of surprise endings. Here are the top 10 memorable rock'n'roll moments of 2007.

by Dan Shumate

'Twas an exciting year for alternative, indie and punk. There were many a fine album, most notably from LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire, M.I.A. and Spoon. Radiohead's DIY approach to selling music demonstrated how a single band could instill change in an entire industry. Indie rock went top 10. Against Me! and the return of Bad Brains revived punk's feeble pulse. And Daft Punk blurred the lines between performance art, theatre and live concert. And now, for the top 10 highlights of 2007 ...

By Toshitaka Kondo

Rhapsody hip-hop editors Sam Chennault and Toshitaka Kondo linked up to try and make sense of it all. Read on for their take on the year’s 10 biggest trends, events and releases.

Country music chart-hawks and industry movers might be pleased to check out our 2007: The Year In Country playlist. But the following top 10 twang-based list is a bit more personal. I've been the Country Music Editor at Rhapsody for over eight years now, and 2007 was the first year that I went to Fan Fair in Nashville. It was there that I attended countless live performances and met a sea of truly interesting people, so some of those experiences helped make up this list. And as my luck would have it, there were some really crazy and cool things happening on the sidelines that couldn't go unmentioned. Of course, there were some albums and songs from off the beaten path that I'd like to share with you too. So here it is, my top 10 list of what I remember most about country music in 2007.

Yes, we work with -- and listen to -- music all year long. But we're not agnostic eunuchs -- we got views on what's good, what's bad, what's ugly, and we express these to each other, loudly and boisterously (sometimes, even explicitly). And the Rhapsody Poll is where our collective opinion stands up and gets counted - literally.

Here's how it worked. Every Rhapsody staffer offered their favorite 10 albums of 2007, the top 90 or so albums cited were put in a pool, and each member of the Rhapsody editorial staff assigned points to their favorite ten of those (10 points for #1, 1 point for #10). (The song poll was a complete free-for-all.)  Capiche? Enjoy!

by Chris Ryan

Judged by the habits of Rhapsody listeners, 2007 was a year ruled by women. As it should be.  Despite the disproportionate male domination on the release schedule, fully half the albums and songs in the Listener's Favorites Top 10 (compiled from Rhapsody statistics) were by ladies, including both top album and top song spots, and the top four songs. So roll on glamorous sisters, girlfriends, big girls, good girls and back-to-black girls. And may '08 see your success reach beyond the pop realm. We'll be listening.

by Piotr Orlov

Some years ago, a wise person pontificated that electronic music was the only real world music, because it could be made everywhere by anyone and could be understood just as universally. Many beats, many passports, one dance floor – discuss! And while the hippie dream of such shared-knowledge thesis is slightly unnerving, electronic music’s global march does continue unabated. No surprise then that the 10 highlights for the year in electronic/dance music feature, in no direct order, residents of New York, San Francisco, Detroit, London, Paris, Berlin and Norway, a Brazilian who records in Germany, a Sri Lanka-born Brit who recorded in India, Jamaica and Liberia before moving to Brooklyn, a budding Australian music scene, and robots who made the term “around the world” their own. Sometimes, globalization is a good thing!

2007 was a superlative year for music, and -- in its stubborn and eccentric ways -- classical music was a big part of the reason why. Amid larger signs of a music industry in turmoil, the classical institutions -- labels, concert promoters, orchestra administrators, performers, listeners, critics -- seem to have figured out that the Internet is surprisingly friendly to a thousand-year-old musical tradition. Here are the other reasons 2007 was a memorable year for classical music.

As the blues starts becoming more and more of a specialty item, it was great to see that the music was still being filtered through to the mainstream in various forms. Superior blues tracks could be heard on Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' priceless Raising Sand collaboration. And while John Mayer has become a star with softly rocking material, in concert he dazzles with some serious blues-guitar chops. But if you want to cut out the pop fat and head straight to the lean blues treasure trove, just listen to selections from Rhapsody's list of the Top 15 Blues Albums of 2007 here. Then, read on to discover more about the top 10 blues albums of 2007 in more detail.

by Jen Guyre

The past few years have been momentous for the hard and heavy, and 2007 was no different. Before we dive into the headlines, tours, trends and MASSIVE reunions this year has shown us, first, we must thank the dark lord for bestowing upon us five phenomenal releases from Dillinger Escape Plan, Baroness, Pig Destroyer, Down and High on Fire, in that order. Secondly, no small children were harmed, nor were any animals sacrificed to make this all possible – a notable feat for this group of nihilists and/or Satanists. And lastly, if these past 365 days of heaviosity are any indicator of the ferocious headbanging to come, 2008 will surely be the year of the beast. Behold the top 10 heaviest moments of 2007.

In 2007, R&B was more like a year of discrete, memorable moments than it has been in the past. Sure, you could ascribe many of these moments to various momentous -- no, monumental -- singles, or perhaps to the ever-diminishing importance of the album, but there's more to it than that. Many of the year's most successful songs and acts carried a greater mystique than usual; that is, their songs managed to capture not merely most of themselves as artists, but also the particular perfect moment at which they arrived. It is both a model of how music is supposed to function -- for artist and listener -- and a sure sign that 2007 was a bumper year. Here, in no particular order, are the year's most memorable moments.

Forget the doom-and-gloom scenarios -- jazz is alive and well in 2007. It may not get much airplay or mainstream promotion, but amazing jazz releases just kept coming out all year long. As a matter of fact, there have been so many fantastic jazz albums this year that we've broke things down into 10 broad topics below. As you read, why not listen to cuts from Rhapsody's list of best jazz albums of 2007. We're so jazz-crazed over here, we even created a list of Rhapsody's favorite jazz reissues of 2007. Whew!

by Piotr Orlov

You could be forgiven if you thought that reggae fell out of the limelight in ’07. Yet while there were no headlines to feed the populace -- no Sean Paul or Matisyahu, no “Ghetto Story” or “Welcome to Jamrock,” certainly no single riddim ruling the nation and no backward-/forward-looking trends taking over – reggae continued its 21st century expansion into the minds of the pop masses. The JA singles market may have fallen off due to the shortage in vinyl production -- coinciding with the riddim train running out of track. But the one-drop roots remained strong, and foreign talents from unlikely shores -- like the Italian, Alborosie -- gained reps and scored hits. Here’s a rundown of the year in reggae: the tragedies and triumphs, the hellos and goodbyes, the easily predicted and the highly unlikely.

Comebacks, reunions and tributes made for some of the best Latin music in 2007. New bands showed that bilingual was more beautiful than ever, Juanes set a digital record, immigration remained in the headlines, and everyone kept leaning like a cholo. Here, in no particular order, we revisit some of the most notable music and moments of 2007.

by Sarah Bardeen

In the past few years, hip-hop producers sampling Bollywood has become old hat; Mexican duranguense music found a home in Chicago; and a Sri Lankan/English bad girl became the darling of indie-rock fans everywhere. (Even Avril Lavigne got in on the global act -- check out her multilingual versions of "Girlfriend"!) World music is mixing it up -- and none too soon. 2007 was a banner year for both traditional world music and all the beautiful, insurgent hybrids redefining the term -- check out our top 10 picks.

Welcome fellow folkies! There were some pretty cool things going on in folk music this year. For starters, six different people portrayed six different phases of Bob Dylan in the film I'm Not There (which also birthed a pretty stellar soundtrack). On a lighter note, the soundtrack to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, starring John C. Reilly, boasts a near perfect Dylan imitation (more on that later). Oh, let's not forget that Leonard Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And in San Francisco, the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival featured more pickers, players, crooners and attendees than you could shake a dulcimer at. But most importantly, 2007 yielded some truly amazing songs. Here is our top 10 list of folk's greatest triumphs of 2007.

From raucous teen-sex "anti-musicals" to moody movies about post-punk suicides, 2007 was an excellent year for music in film and onstage. To celebrate the fortuitous collaborations between these genres, we present our top 10 stage and screen moments of the year.

by Dan Shumate

What a depressing year. The unpopular war in Iraq seems unsalvageable. The U.S. economy is in the crapper. The housing market has fallen into a seemingly bottomless pit. The credit crunch. ... Is this the end of our great empire? Perhaps. But at least there's some comic relief to make your worries subside -- at least for a few moments. Shoo away those feelings of impending doom with our top comedy picks of 2007.