The Friday Morning Listen: Regina Spektor – Far (2009)

Lots of review sites have already posted their best-of lists for 2010. We here at SomethingElse! are still in heavy consideration mode. Every single evening for the past couple of weeks we have been locking ourselves into the SomethingElse!Study™ with our slippers, smoking jackets, top-shelf brandy, and sharpened pencils. Now don’t you laugh…Nick looks absolutely swank in that jacket! Besides, it’s quite important to get cozy because this is no easy work. A ton of music has been born this year and we want to make sure that our assessments are correct.

I tell you though, the daily bombardment from the publicity folks is not making our job any easier. The notices keep pouring in with “hints” for our best-of selections. Some of them are just reminders, with short lists of this year’s releases. Sometimes the hints are of the form, “Hey, my artist was nominated for a Grammy!”

This is where it gets dangerous, because those darned Grammy awards can get folks a little torqued up. We’d hate to have our judgement clouded by the not-quite-faded memories of Cristopher Cross winning all those trophies (including Best New Artist), the great Metallica/Jethro Tull fiasco, or Maroon 5 or…

It’s best not to get involved in these bile-inducing sort of emotional pileups. What’s the point of getting pissed off at supposedly misplaced popularity? People get too cynical about this stuff. Yeah sure, there’s a lot of junk out there and guess what? People love junk! As the years have gone by, the concept of “guilty pleasure” has become meaningless to me. Yep, there are songs & artists that I like that most people would place on the junk list. That doesn’t bother me one bit.

Apparently, Regina Spektor agrees with me on this topic. During an interview with Daily Candy, Spektor was asked about her guilty pleasures. While the question was pointed at books or movies, her answer was so genuine that music was obviously included: “If anything’s good and makes you happy, you should be like ‘cool, this makes me happy.'”

This is the attitude we’re trying to cultivate in the SomethingElse!Study™ So while we’re trying distill the year to its golden essence, please send us your lists of supposed “guilty pleasures.” We’ll be needing some cheap entertainment after the brandy runs out.

In the meantime, here’s some no-guilt all-pleasure viewing:

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