Music to me is by far the most subjective art form. Music is so diverse and so personal that for anyone to say what the "best" music is, or the "best" albums or songs from the past year, is equal parts arrogant and ridiculous (although the worst music is a different story). That's why I'm not even attempting to compile the "best" albums of 2007 - merely ones that I personally enjoyed, and maybe you'll enjoy some of them too. I'm also of the mind that music journalism is pointless in the digital age. When magazines like Rolling Stone were in their heydey, people needed to read about music from journalists they trusted before taking a chance buying an unfamiliar album. In 2007, if you hear about a new band, simply hop over to their website or their MySpace profile, and within seconds you can hear what they sound like for yourself, and decide whether you like them, without having to suffer through the tired, pretentious ramblings of amateur journalists. All a record review needs to say in 2008 is "we think this is pretty cool, if you like bands x, y, and z, you might like this, click here to listen for yourself." No need for stomach-churning thesaurus abuse from snotty kids trying to describe a band's sound with flowery grammatical masturbation. Just click, and listen.

So with all that in mind, you won't see one word from me about any of the artists I thought made great music in 2007 - just press play on the playlist to the right, or click here to launch the playlist in a new window, and you can decide for yourself if you agree with me. If you like anything you hear, stop by the 2007 Favorites Store and pick up CDs or DRM-free MP3s. All the albums on the store page have been screened for RIAA-affiliation, so you can support those artists without giving a dime to the bad guys.

Oh, and leave some comments on what your favorite music from 2007 was. Now onto the awards for...



Like a harrowing saga of heroes and villains, the fate of the music video has been an epic tale. Just when it seemed like the aging dark wizard MTV had completely killed its own son, the music video, the valiant prince YouTube rode up on the white horse of the internet and slayed MTV, banishing it to the land of tween reality TV, and rescuing the ailing music video. Under the care of YouTube, the music video recovered - without its million dollar sheen, but with a new sense of freedom its former master would not allow. So 2007 saw musicians starting to get a grasp on how to re-approach the music video by turning down the budget and turning up the creativity. It has a long ways to go - there are far more bland videos than good ones - but as artists become more comfortable with the music video's new role in the world, you can expect better and better results in the coming years.


Best Performance By A Klingon Hipster in a Music Video:
Grizzly Bear - Knife

If Lieutenant Worf collected vinyl and hung out in coffee shops, he'd probably look like the guy in this video. Actually, now that I think about it, he'd probably look like this:



Either way, this was one of the most wonderfully weird music videos of the year:

Grizzly Bear: Knife



The OK Go Award for Single-Shot Music Video Choreography:
Feist - 1,2,3,4, Bat For Lashes - What's A Girl To Do? and RJD2 - Work It Out

2007 was the year of the single-shot music video. Sometimes real, sometimes fake, sometimes impressive, sometimes stupid, the technique was employed in some fashion or another by the likes of Low, Jarvis Cocker, Nine Inch Nails, LCD Soundsystem, Maximo Park, this douchebag, and the wildly popular Daft Punk fanmade "hands" video.

Here are a few solid examples of wonderfully-choreographed music videos that seem to have been actually shot in one take:

Feist: 1, 2, 3, 4


Bat For Lashes: What's A Girl To Do


RJD2: Work It Out



The OK, I Think We Can Stop Now Award for Single-Shot Backwards Music Video Choreography:
Mute Math - Typical

Hopefully this video will put a golden nail in the coffin of carefully-choreographed single-shot music videos. Everyone's done it, we've seen some impressive stuff, time to move on, and I can't imagine the gimmick needs to be taken to much more of an extreme than doing it backwards. Of course, this video uses some editing trickery to fake the appearance of a single shot, but the band made up for it with a live backwards performance of the song on Jimmy Kimmel. Christ, once upon a time all you had to do was sing good songs to be noticed.

Mute Math: Typical



The Most Likely To Induce Either Nightmares or Erections, Depending On How Much Time You Spend On The Internet Award:
Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton - Our Hell and Liars - Plaster Casts of Everything

People with pig heads, evil clowns, and naked old ladies should be the things nightmares are made of, but the internet is a dark, dark place, so your fear/arousal ratio for things like that probably depends on how familiar you are with 4chan. Either way, these are pretty cool videos:

Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton: Our Hell


Liars: Plaster Casts Of Everything



Best Performance By The Entire Cast Of The Muppet Show In A Music Video:
Escort - All Through The Night

Chopping up old video content has become a popular technique for creating low-budget video goodness in the digital age, legality be damned. Maybe I'm just a sucker for anything involving the Muppets, but I think this is 2007's best example of the re-edit approach:

Escort: All Through The Night



Best Performance By A Single Muppet In A Music Video:
Sad Kermit - Hurt

Kermit The Frog looks back on a life of pain and drug abuse as he strums an acoustic version of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt in a video sure to have Jim Henson rolling over in his grave. Points for a funny idea well-executed, and for Kermit looking genuinely beleaguered as he succumbs to blowing Rowlf for drugs.

Sad Kermit: Hurt




Best Canadian YouTube Musical Comedian:
Jon Lajoie

I really hate musical comedians. I can't stand assholes who come on stage with a guitar and sing their jokes as stupid, gimmicky acoustic songs instead of just speaking them like a normal comedian. YouTube has become a dangerous breeding ground for such abominable entertainers, but somehow, I have on at least two occasions been directed to comedy songs performed by Jon Lajoie, and I've actually laughed. His musical tribute to the infamous 2 Girls 1 Cup is actually almost brilliant ("she's covered in vomit and human feces, that's how I know that she needs me"), and his spoof of ego-centric rap songs, Everyday Normal Guy is pretty clever - the line "I get nervous in social situations, motherfucker!" makes the whole thing worth it. Lajoie's most recent video, Mainstream Media Commercial, shows he has his head in the right place, too.

Jon Lajoie: 2 Girls 1 Cup Song


Jon Lajoie: Everyday Normal Guy



The Conor Oberst Please, Punch Me In The Fucking Face Award:
Fall Out Boy - The Take Over The Breaks Over

Just try to watch this video without wanting to beat the fuck out of every one of these boy band vaginas. As an added bonus, this is a God-fucking-awful music video. Sadly, I bet even the butt-ugly lead singer gets laid more than I do:

Fall Out Boy: The Take Over The Breaks Over



The For Fuck's Sake, Now Even Hip-Hop Has Gone Ironic Award:
Snoop Dogg - Sensual Seduction and Kanye West - Can't Tell Me Nothing (Alternate Version)

Once reserved exclusively for beard-scratching, Pabst-drinking hipsters, irony has been penetrating suburban malls and teen pop videos for half a decade now, but the diamond-grilled world of hip hop had been slow to catch on. It seems that's all changed, and naturally, Snoop "I'll do anything for money" Dogg is leading the charge. His kitschy '70's video would have been clever had it not been done by The Strokes five years ago, and by countless other bands since then. But the kids sure love it, don't they? Oh, and Cher called, she wants her shitty, decade-old vocal effects back.

The second video is the result of Kanye West hiring a fat, white, bearded comedian named Zach Galifianakis to lip-sync his lyrics, because we all know that country-folk white people acting like urban black people never, ever gets old. Ever. Mr. Galifianakis previously had a tiny blip of fame for a 2006 Fiona Apple music video where he (surprise!) lip-synced her song, because the only thing funnier than country-folk white people acting like urban black people is fat burly white men acting like skinny little white women.

Thank you, Snoop and Kanye, for dooming us all to another five years of ironic Urban Outfitters t-shirts with stupid catchphrases in '70's fonts, and more "white people are funny when they do black people things" humor, respectively.

Snoop Dogg: Sensual Seduction


Kanye West: Can't Tell Me Nothing (Alternate Version



The Maybe If We Make A Video With A Stupid Story No One Will Notice How Shitty The Song Is Award:
She Wants Revenge - True Romance

I'm not sure how it happened, but there are people out there above the age of sixteen who actually think She Wants Revenge is cool. I don't know how a trend-hopping former white rapper who looks like Gene Shalit and only "sings" one note as he rips off Interpol ripping off Joy Division ever passed for cool under even the loosest of standards, but hell, if Steve Aoki is furiously licking his balls, who am I to argue?

If you have now, or have ever, thought She Wants Revenge is a thing of quality, try and defend that opinion after watching this masterpiece. Any time a video has an overbearing story with lots of words on the screen, it's trying very hard to make you forget about how terrible the song is. In this case you lose either way, because the video sucks just as hard:

She Wants Revenge: True Romance




Least Instructional Instructional Music Video:
Soulja Boy telling us How To Crank That

Ten thousand dollars to anyone who can decipher every word Mr. Boy mumbles as he teaches you the dumbest-looking dance since The Macarena:



Yeah, it's only funny until you notice that this video has already "instructed" 24 million idiots.


Most Awkwardly Desperate Song Of The Year:
Good Charlotte - Keep Your Hands Off My Girl

Good Charlotte are a tremendous joke of a band, but they were, at one point, extremely popular - at least amongst the pimply, peach-fuzzed, white suburban demographic. But instead of rolling with their inevitably rapid fall from grace and just dropping off the grid altogether, the Charlotte boys have continued to punish the world with their terrible music. Particularly, they've made music that furiously grabs for any current trend they could cash in on, like in this video, which will leave you cringing as they call out clothing brands and talk about their brass knuckles. They might say something about rims, but I wasn't able to make it that far into this horrendous song. If there were any justice in the world, this video would be a bad joke. Sadly, it's not:




Lamest Attempt At Shock Value From Someone Who Used To Be Good At It:
Marilyn Manson - Heart-Shaped Glasses

Remember the good ol' days of the '90's, when Marilyn Manson showed up and he was weird, and scary, and exciting? You know, before you saw him trying to hang out on every red carpet in Hollywood while his music got shittier, the drugs got heavier, and his schtick got more tired. Narrowing down the exact lowest point of Manson's musical career would be a laborious task indeed. Was it the high school gangsta-goth video? Or maybe the high school football-goth video? How about the world's seemingly most pathetically obvious cover, later trumped by the world's actual most pathetically obvious cover? 2007 brought a strong new contender for the great debate, as the tired, drug-addled Manson tried for a little of the ol' shock-value magic in a video so bland, boring, and self-absorbed that it does indeed shock, but not in the way he probably intended:

Marilyn Manson: Look Everyone See I Have A Hot Young Girlfriend And We Have Sex See I'm Still Cool I'm Still Famous And Obviously I Don't Miss You At All Rose And I Don't Care That You Dumped Me Because Look I Have A Better Girlfriend Now And She's In My Video And James Cameron Directed It Oh Wait Not Really Heart-Shaped Glasses



The Demonbaby Embarrassing New Lows In Music Award For 2007:
Will.i.am - I Got It From My Mama and Red Hot Chili Peppers - Hump de Bump

If the Black Eyed Peas hadn't dumbed down music enough with the abomination that was My Humps, their members Fergie and Will.i.am branched out on their own in 2007 to compete for new ways to lower the bar of taste. Despite the odds, Will.i.am came out on top, with a song so ludicrously stupid, desperate, and poorly-produced that I'm ashamed to live in a country that could allow it to be popular. Hip hop has hit so many lows in recent years, but no matter how bad it gets, there's always someone ready to take it down another notch to sell a few ringtones.

And then we have the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This video is actually so God-awful that I completely erased it from my memory, and almost accidentally left it out of the awards. Earlier this year I described "Hump de Bump" as "possibly the worst song/video combo attack in the history of music," and seven months later, I can still safely stand by that assertion. If you're still clinging to the tragic idea that RHCP is a good band, just try to stomach these grilled, hip-hopping middle aged white men vomit lyrics so retarded Will.i.am would be proud, and proceed to embarrass everyone involved as they stumble through the same shitty white-guy funk they've been regurgitating for decades. And if you watch it and still think they're a good band, go ahead and kill yourself.

Will.i.am - I Got It From My Mama


Red Hot Chili Peppers - Hump de Bump



The Please Fucking Blow Me You Greedy Old Dinosaurs Award For Backwards-Thinking Music Video Stinginess:
Universal Music Group

As I've been compiling these awards for you, I've encountered numerous YouTube videos posted by the almighty Universal Music Group. Recently, someone told them about this crazy contraption called a You Tube, where kids were watching music videos owned by Universal Music Group on their computers, instead of on MTV, where they're apparently supposed to. Now UMG's reaction was not, "Wow!" What a great promotional tool! Let's take advantage of this as much as we can to promote our artists!" Nope, their reaction was "Hey, we OWN that content, and these doggone kids are spreading it all over the internet without paying us a dime! We're going to start our own YouTube profile, and make sure YouTube pays us for the content we post and make sure our videos come up at the top of every search, while ensuring that we cripple our videos in really annoying ways that defeat the whole purpose of 'viral' content!" As a result, nothing posted by Universal Music Group is embeddable into websites outside of YouTube (why, you ask? Because UMG makes their money from ads shown on their YouTube channel), which means instead of me utilizing the official videos they've uploaded for this article, which possibly would have resulted in people clicking back to the UMG channel which would make them some money, I had to find alternate versions that fans had uploaded (which took all of two seconds), ensuring that UMG will make no money. Brilliant thinking, guys. Additionally, the official videos UMG posts are always censored versions or clean edits, or are in the wrong aspect ratio - sometimes both. Good going Universal, you're fighting the good fight, and your record sales reflect that.


The Journey Lifetime Achievement Award For So-Bad-They're-Awesome Music Videos:
R. Kelly

2007 saw R. Kelly add nine more chapters to his epic, unintentionally hilarious urban opera, Trapped In The Closet. I sung praises about Trapped In The Closet when it first appeared, and like then, I still have no words which can sufficiently describe it. I encourage you to buy the new DVD set which collects the entire series, because it's going to take the support of people like you and me to help realize Kelly's dream of letting Trapped continue on with new episodes for the rest of time. Make some popcorn, get some friends together, and prepare to laugh in jaw-dropped astonishment like you never have before.

But if Trapped In The Closet wasn't enough for you, R. Kelly also made the other most unintentionally funny music video of 2007: Real Talk Behind The Scenes. Watch, be amazed, and be sure to stick with it until the ending:

R. Kelly: Real Talk Behind The Scenes


Hats off to you, Mr. Kelly. May you never stop peeing on teenage girls, and never stop making the world's worst/best music videos.

Edit: If you need a reminder why this final award was named in honor of Journey, then behold, the greatest so-bad-it's-awesome music video of all time:

Journey: Separate Ways