2024 Bucket Resolutions
One last task before the main show
My bucket scoring system is great for how my mind works and processes things — largely in that it doesn’t force me to dither and handwring over finite scores and decimals. But it does include a problem that I have to deal with every year before I can get to the main event: temporary buckets.
If you aren’t familiar with my scoring system, it’s a rainbow. Why? Because I like colors and it’s pretty simple to grasp that higher energy wavelengths equate to higher scores.
But when it comes to the REALLY high scores, I’m not always immediately comfortable with certifying that an album has FOR SURE passed that bar.
So there are two Temporary buckets:
Teal, which straddles the 8.0 line between Green and Blue; and
Lavender, which sits at the 9.5 mark between Blue and Purple.1
Once all of the reviews are in, it’s time to revisit those who have been deferred and finalize them. In 2024, there were three Lavender albums and 21 Teal albums, which is significantly less than the amount I needed to sort to wrap 2023.
The final ratings for these 24 albums are:
Purple
Blue
Green
Blacklisted
I don’t often discuss my blacklist — that’s kind of the point. Problematic artists who promote problematic (or sometimes downright wrong) ideas aren’t welcome on my platform, small though it may be. The exact reasons for blacklisting vary, but I don’t do it lightly. Interpersonal drama doesn’t qualify as a legitimate reason to drop an artist.
Warning: rant incoming.
And for anybody prepared to clutch your pearls and decry “cancel culture”: boycotting businesses or artists due to morality conflicts has been a thing for basically forever. “Cancelling” is just a new term for the same thing. And it boggles my mind when I run across quotes like this (on an article discussing Carrie Underwood performing at Trump’s inauguration):
Alyssa Farah Griffin, meanwhile, said she hopes that "we're moving beyond the era of politics where we want to cancel people's livelihoods because we don't like their politics," and if people have a problem with Underwood's decision, they can "register your complaint by not downloading her songs and not going to her shows."
What?! “Don’t boycott her because you don’t like her politics, but if you don’t like her politics, boycott her!”
Look, there are plenty of recorded cases of twitter mobs taking things out of context and ruining lives based on faulty assumptions or incomplete information. That’s not okay.
But when an artist grants tacit support to a public figure who you disagree with on an ethical, moral level, you should absolutely, actively cull them from your consumption habits (at least as much as you can bear to).
The problem is that this new term, “cancelling”, has been weaponized, rhetorically, by the Right against the Left. Propagandists at Fox and Newsmax will rail against cancel culture for fifteen minutes, then turn around and tell their audience to boycott/cancel specific movies or actors or companies.
The Right also has the right to make organized moral stands against people and ideas they disagree with — that’s not the problem here.
They just tend to disagree with things like equality/equity, freedom, and human rights, and then act and speak like hypocrites on the subject of “cancelling”.
End rant.
I want to note that it is possible for many of those who are currently on my blacklist to be removed from it. People change and learn and grow. Second chances should always be given. But I do need to see evidence of growth, and many of those who are on the list only double down on their unethical stances.
I’m certain there are many other names who deserve to be on there. It isn’t an exhaustive list.2 But I do take care not to publicly promote any artists listed there. I won’t review their albums; I won’t discuss their achievements. And that’s that.
Summary
With this task completed, I’m able to turn my attention to ranking the best 40 albums of the year. Given the number of albums I’ve been reviewing, annually, all 40 will be albums that I rated at higher than an 8/10 — so even #40, and the honorable mentions below it, will be something that I can enthusiastically recommend.
Eight of the 21 Teal albums were promoted to Blue, which tracks for my expected 1/3 ratio for that bucket. A few of those relegations were painful, and came down to the slightest imperfections.
Of the three Lavender albums, only The Last Dinner Party was relegated to Blue. This once again gives me a final Purple count of 9 albums. For the third time in five years. Weird.
I’ll spend the next week sorting and ranking and writing up my Top 40 posts, and those will go up the final week of January, starting on the 27th.
First Release Today!
Finally, I have to note that the first album on my release schedule is coming out today: Rebecca Black’s Salvation.
Except nevermind, because Black’s new album has been delayed until February 27th in response to the LA wildfires. The first album of the year is now Larkin Poe’s next offering, coming out next Friday (Jan 24).
I use a variety of playlists to organize the albums I review and the best songs from them throughout the year. Feel free to follow along. The links below are the playlists I’ll be using for 2025, but the one earlier in the paragraph goes to the page where I record links for all years.
Reviews for these new albums will start trickling out in early February. I’m not going to rush to get them out because nobody is paying me to, and I’d like to spend a little time with them before discussing them.
And yes, I know that “Indigo” would have made more sense, but then I’d need to find a definite “THIS IS INDIGO” shade on my spreadsheet and then I’d probably need to rename “Purple” to “Violet” to keep the “BIV” intact.
Fuck that. Roy is not my boy. In my house, we like Ike.
Do I really need to waste energy typing out Kid Rock’s name to add it to the list, for example? It would be akin to adding a Digimon to a list of the worst Pokemon. He doesn’t count.