Aggregated Year-End Music Lists, plus some more lists for diversity

December 23, 2019 8:35 PM

If you're looking for the best of the best (by certain criteria), Album of the Year has their annual rating aggregation for all genres, or you can browse by genres and year-end lists. These lists skew English-language and western, so here's some additional lists: Alt.Latino looks back at the best music of 2019 (NPR) and Afropop runs down 2019, both covering a lot of geographical and stylistic territory in limited web-space. For a more focused look back, here's 10 best K-Pop songs from 2019, from South China Morning Post and another 10 from Desnudo Magazine, a top 20 from Dazed Digital, and 29 from Refinery29 .
posted by filthy light thief (6 comments total)

And a bonus link from Okay African -- The Decade In Afrobeats: Top Artists Share the Moment They Knew African Pop Music Would Take Over the World.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:37 PM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Woah, thanks. These lists are pretty much where I get most of my recs now, as I start to lean fully into being old and washed, so this is great.
posted by ominous_paws at 9:22 PM on December 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

***Shameless self-promotion corner***
Here is my list for 2019. It's on Facebook, but it is a public link so anyone can view, even if you don't have an account.
posted by theartandsound at 9:40 PM on December 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Here's a list made in Argentina, which doesn't have only 'latino' music (WTFTM).
posted by signal at 7:46 AM on December 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

signal, thanks for that list!

And regarding the term "Latino" as it relates to music, the Alt.Latino article opened with this:

Every year, the story is whether the term "Latin music" has any value any more, but it felt particularly acute in 2019. Mostly because the range of artists who released albums spread wider than before.

Consider the difference between the ferocious bilingual punk of the all-Chicana San Antonio trio Fea and the intense vocal artistry of the NYC mariachi band Flor de Toloache. What they have in common argues for a new way to think about musical expression as it relates to self identity. But that is a subject for another show.

So they recognize that the "category" or "genre" is way too broad of an umbrella to have much meaning on its own. In my eyes, it's probably music that is by and large in Spanish, but I think Portuguese and indigenous languages from Central and South America could also fit under that umbrella, given that the show tries to represent and capture a broad swath of music that isn't otherwise highlighted on NPR.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:22 AM on December 24, 2019

No I get that, I'm just put off by the construction of 'Latino' as an identity related to being a minority in the U.S. as opposed to somebody living in a latin american country, which I get and both are valid, of course.I think I'm mostly reacting to people who assume that being-latino-in-the-US (and this mostly through how they're represented on TV or movies) is the main arbiter of being latino, for example people who think people in Uruguay call each other 'ese', or the gringo who shoved a spoonful of super hot chili in my mouth because 'I thought latinos like hot food', or some such nonsense.
No real snark intended , and not aimed at you or anybody here.
posted by signal at 7:30 AM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]