Respect Authority

By this time next year, we’ll all carry personal auto-tuners around with us and even the fucking Beatles will be reuniting. It was a weird year for music, and it’s hard to say where the industry is headed (I mean, other than down). But one thing is for sure, those iPod earbuds still look great with some dark denim and a Palestinian kaffiyeh (that trendy scarf you’ve appropriated and know nothing about). Here are our picks for this year’s music that’ll rock you harder than a suicide bombing.

Lil’ Wayne
I don’t care if its The Carter I, II or XXLVVII, if Weezy is spitting hot fire, I will be there, guns blazin’. Okay, so I don’t have any guns, but if I did, this is exactly what I would use them for — to shoot in the air as I rapped along about gangster themes like drugs, girls and being an alien rapper from outer space who came to Earth to literally eat the sub-par hip-hop competition. Vibe magazine readers may have named Eminem the best living rapper, but I would bet cash money (millionaires) that’s because they haven’t listened to “Shooter” while smoking a joint on the fire escape.
— kira

The Hood Internet — The Mixtape Volume 3
My debilitating lack of attention span means I generally get bored of an album after only a couple weeks, leaving me an insatiable fiend always itching for his new fix. Having The Hood Internet’s third mixtape on my iPod is like walking around with an endless methadone IV attached to my arm. The Chicago-based DJ Duo are producing some of the most innovative mashups in the supersaturated genre, and their albums are consistently more surprising and more accessible than King Girl Talk, who, on his own solid release this year, started to wander off into the land of Bar Mitzvah Top 40. — aaron

Beyonce — Single Ladies
The song’s retarded but clearly it wasn’t made for the radio; it was made for YouTube. The video is ridiculous, her ass is ridiculous, and the fan videos make the original seem like a masterpiece. Absurd doesn’t begin to describe it. — lou