Loose Thoughts on 20 Albums from 2011

N.B: We have arrived at the end of my music-year retrospectives. See here for best and worst songs. Below is Part One of the Albums list. Part Two runs Friday. Should someone ever perform the community service of writing a definitive obituary for hip-hop's critical standards, that author would be smart to identify some moment around 2005 as the time of death. To the extent that critical standards were ever alive and well, they surely passed away around the time when Kelefa Sanneh was intellectualizing ******** for The New York Times and Tom Breihan was arguing that Pitbull was better than Nas. By the middle of last century, the rap-critic intelligentsia was exploring its deepest fetishes for all manner of bad music. That meant riding for Mike Jones and beseeching that everyone give Gucci Mane a chance.This critical filter through which many of those writers listened to music did not permit better hip-hop to pass. Writers would not rest while insisting upon Wayne's verbal dex...