How do you write about music in 2010? As we settle into the new decade, I find we’re in uncharted territory. We’re where there be dragons. As many bearded men with Elvis Costello glasses have pointed out, we now live in the post Animal Collective era. It’s a time when prom queens listen to Deerhunter and care about who won the Polaris prize, where hipsters gush over Soulja Boy, and where Eminem makes music about holding hands with friends. Anyone else feeling a little disoriented recently?

In this suddenly all too real future world where literally almost anything feels possible musically, how does an artist be good? It seems entirely plausible that their quality is inherently connected to their personal presence, inseparable from how we perceive them as a human or, even stranger, an icon. Am I more likely to download a Lil’ B mixtape if he DM’s me on Twitter? Y’know what, I probably am. So when I want to write about “music” what should I strive to encapsulate? The best albums? The best EP’s? The best personality? The best mixtapes? How definite are those division anymore? The mind reels.

Even musical classification has evolved at a staggering rate. Tell me, have we moved beyond genre, or are our interests more defined by it than ever? My only answer is both. In part, we have become immune to shock from artist’s exploration of new territory. Kanye makes a Joy Division album? OK. White dudes with laptops pump out bedroom R&B? Why the hell not. But at the same time new music, mostly that which exists on the bleeding edge of the internet, lives and dies by it’s inclusion in increasingly neonatal genres or (sigh) sub-genres.

Is this a bad thing? Hell no. One of the better experiences in music appreciation is finding yourself actually being a part of something new, something, yes, cool.  The speed at which this phenomenon occurs now is, in my opinion, fantastic. A couple of years ago you could get in on the ground floor of dubstep, then last year the birth of glo-fi inspired legions of stoners, and this year Мишка and many others found a new brotherhood in the triumphant return of IDM and certifiably amazing rise of Witch House. This must be good, right?

So I return to my original question: how do you write about music in 2010? My answer (perhaps wrong, I’m no scholar) is more optimistic than I thought it would be. It’s simple, yes, and maybe even a little schmaltzy. But I like it, damn it. So here goes. Is it possible that with all of the added stimuli, with the buzz, and the tweets, and the blogs, and the arrests, and the books, and the videos and the everything else, is it possible that it’s actually easier than ever to rectify from that the one thing that really matters most: the music itself? It sure as hell better be. Tell me my glass is half empty if you want, but I wanna believe that shit.

Here’s why: because music can still enthrall. Because no matter how many texts you’re getting, passing a bar playing a great song you’ve never heard will make you break out the shazam faster than I can finish this sentence. Because a song good enough, even if you heard about it through a tweet, will still make you drop whatever you’re doing and just listen, trying to absorb every note. Because as I’m writing this I can’t help but replay a track I’ve already heard probably 20 times today.

Because we can still simply enjoy music. We just can’t help it. But nowadays, discovering the best music can be taxing, verging on arduous. The desert is vast, and the signposts few. So let us be your guide, friend. Allow us to help make finding great music effortless.  I’ve always found lists to be elegant in their simplicity. So we’ve created one for what we consider to be the best albums of 2010. To create our list, all of our music centric bloggers/reviewers were asked to submit their own individual lists of their top 50 albums for the year.

We all wholeheartedly decided to allow mixtapes to be included this year. Much like EP’s, mixtapes more that ever have become full-fledged works of art. No longer are they something less than an album, but rather just a different kind of one. Then based on the works’ individual rankings and frequency of appearances across multiple lists, this master Bloglin top 100 Album list was created. This is not a list based on hype or buzz or obligation or anything like that. More than anything else, it’s a list of 100 albums that we really liked listening to this year. We hope you like them too.

The Bloglin’s Best of 2010: The Top 100 Albums

- Whole Milk