sing if you're glad to be grey

the Dean celebrates 2011 as a year of Dad Rock:

"Even so, there's never been a year so chocked with comebacks and tributes, survivals and revivals -- with reaffirmations that blues-derived iterations of what it means to be human have plenty of life in them yet. Paul Simon's best recording since 1986, Eric Clapton's best recording since 1972, 67-year-old Garland Jeffreys justifying his next-big-thing 30s, Aaron Neville's cast-aside gospel set, and what I consider Merle Haggard's finest album-as-album. A scintillating minor-label Buddy Holly tribute making up for the bloviating major-label one, jazz bassist Rob Wasserman's addition to Nora Guthrie's reimaginings of her dad's lost lyrics, 70-year-old guitar icon Steve Cropper burnishing his and the Five Royales' rep simultaneously, 60-year-old guitar oddball Gurf Morlix doing the same for long-dead odderball Blaze Foley. A late-McGarrigles miscellany and the eternal Peter Stampfel."

which he prefers to the stuff on the Pitchfork list: "experimental electronics both dancey and arty as well as other outliers... most of them classifiable as what is sometimes called 'post-rock'."

made a similar point here

this point:
"For the second straight year -- and though I don't do trends, this might be one -- nothing felt momentous no matter how much venture capital Watch the Throne put into trying"

chimes with what Steve Hyden said here about it being the Year of No Important Albums (and many Good Records)"

which chimes with what i said here about how Importance gradually faded as a possiblity, an eventuality, a likelihood, during the Noughties... and may soon fade away as a criterion, a desire

which chimes with the Dean's oft-quoted quip about "I kind of miss the monoculture"

(although Hyden elsewhere challenges monoculture-nostalgia, says it was a myth)

myth or not, it made certain kinds of intensities and convergences of energy possible...