Apparently, I Have Aged Tremendously Overnight

(Dear Readers: Sorry for not posting anything all of last week. It was not a very funny week, and also I scored some new translations from the people that sent me the Argentine tax document translations, for which I initially thanked them, but now I am cursing their name. They now have me translating treaties on avoidance of double taxation. It is as fun as it sounds. In any case, I promise several postings this week. I hope I haven't inconvenienced either of you in any way.)

It is now mid-December, and that means Year's Best lists.

I have yet to see many of these, aside from a few book lists I have taken a look at. And then the other day I was looking at Slate.com and saw that they have a little roundtable going on the year's best music. I checked it out.

It was horrifying. I hadn't even heard of 80% of the artists listed. Here's the list of the author's top singles:

1. M.I.A., "Bird Flu"
2. Lil Wayne, "I Feel Like Dying"
3. Sophie-Ellis Bextor, "Catch You"
4. Usher featuring Ludacris, "Dat Girl Right There"
5. Eve, "Tambourine"
6. Ciara, "Like a Boy"
7. Jennifer Lopez, "Qué Hiciste"
8. Rihanna featuring Jay-Z, "Umbrella"
9. Aventura, "Mi Corazoncito"
10. Miranda Lambert, "Famous in a Small Town"
11. Hector El Father, "Pa' La Tumba"
12. Amy Winehouse, "Back to Black"
13. Robin Thicke, "Lost Without U"
14. Eric Church, "Guys Like Me"
15. The Pierces, "Boring"
16. Sugababes, "About You Now"
17. Gwen Stefani featuring Akon, "The Sweet Escape"
18. Kanye West, "Can't Tell Me Nothing"
19. Mika, "Grace Kelly"
20. The Fratellis, "Flathead"
21. Natasha Bedingfield, "I Wanna Have Your Babies"
22. The-Dream, "Falsetto"
23. Mickey Avalon, "Jane Fonda"
24. The Cribs, "Our Bovine Public"
25. Katherine McPhee, "Over It"

Out of those 25 songs, the only ones I have heard are "Umbrella" and "Flathead" (that Fratellis album is worth checking out). Those aren't even the two songs by the Puerto Ricans! I don't even want to get into how many of these artists I've never heard of.

I was less horrified by the list of the top 10 albums:

1. M.I.A., Kala
2. Miranda Lambert, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
3. Brad Paisley, 5th Gear
4. Lil Wayne, The Carter 3 Mixtape
5. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
6. Kanye West, Graduation
7. Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
8. Feist, The Reminder
9. R. Kelly, Double Up
10. The Pierces, Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge

Left: Amy Winehouse: You can expand the picture by clicking on it (if you want your Christmas ruined).

Here I have at least heard of half the artists. M.I.A. is some sort of Indonesian hip-hop Manu Chao, LCD Soundsystem is a band my brother likes because they have robot singers, Kanye West is an indie artist who I think may make it big someday, Amy Winehouse is some sort of drunken British witch, and R. Kelly likes to micturate on the underaged. As for Melissa Lambert? I guess it would be cool if she turned out to be Christopher Lambert's daughter. Maybe the whole album is songs like "MacLeod's Lament" and "There Can Be Only One." But somehow I doubt it. Lil Wayne I presume is some sort of child rapper. Or an obese rapper. I will probably never hear that album, whatever the case may be. Feist means "a small mongrel dog," mainly in the American South. Perhaps the Pierces have something to do with Niles Crane. And I have to say that Brad Paisley's "5th Gear" sounds like some sort of Sammy Hagar album. No thanks.

The reason why all this is so horrifying is that at one point in the not too distant past I recall at least being aware of what was going on in popular music. At some point in the early 90's, Prepubescent Paco suddenly decided that he was going to know all about every band that showed up on MTV. A video would come on and I could immediately name the artist, song, and album title (these were the days before they started showing the name of the video director, which, by the way, was almost immediately followed by the current "we don't actually play videos anymore" era of Beach Houses and TRL; perhaps showing the directors' names somehow killed videos--somebody should investigate this. Maybe Michael Mukasey, as it is now clear that he won't be investigating anything relevant for the next 13 months), all before these were displayed on the screen.

All of a sudden it's 2007 and I'm finding out from fucking Slate of all things that Alan Thicke, the dad from "Growing Pains," had a kid (the are-you-kiddingly-named Robin Thicke) who is now a famous recording artist who gets to grope hot ladies all day even though his last name is synonymous with stupidity, and he shares his first name with a) a pretty little bird and b) Batman's boyfriend, while I have somehow turned into Andy Rooney.

Left: Robin Thicke: Wrong for America.

I may have to kill myself soon.