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High Notes of 2007Jody Rosen takes readers' questions about this year's musical hits and misses.

Posted Thursday, Dec. 27, 2007, at 3:14 PM ET

Slate music critic Jody Rosen was online on Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, Dec. 20, to take readers' questions and recommendations on the best music of 2007 (the topic of discussion in Slate's ongoing " Music Club" back-and-forth).

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Walk Hard is great, but I think I prefer Royal Jelly from Dewey's Dylan phase.

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This Year's "Emperor's New Clothes": What act had your fellow critics going ape-pooh this year but that you think is a bunch of bullocks with no "there" there?

Jody Rosen: Panda Bear.

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Jazz Fan, Va.: Did Slate pick any jazz CDs? I'm liking the Terence Blanchard CD, A Tale of God's Will. What say you?

washingtonpost.com: The Best Jazz Albums of 2007 (Slate, Dec. 18)

Jody Rosen: Yeah, check out Fred Kaplan's nice overview of the Year in Jazz on Slate.

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Washington: The Dewey Cox box set is the album of the year! Did you like the Gogol Bordello album? Is it at the top of your chart? How about the Black Lips? They had two discs this year.

Jody Rosen: Dewey Cox is sure getting a lot of love here. I do love Gogol Bordello, although I prefer them live to on record. They're one of those bands whose sound is too manic to be properly captured on a recording, I think. Plus lead singer Eugene Hutz's mustache must be seen to be understood.

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Annapolis, Md.: Some CDs on my own top of the year list are Iron & Wine's The Shepherd's Dog, Patrick Wolf's The Magic Position and Kevin Drew's Spirit If... Which albums didn't quite make your list?

Jody Rosen: Well, I'll resist the opportunity to give Iron & Wine another swift kick—we did enough of that in the Slate Music Club. Suffice it to say that he's not my favorite.

Some of the albums that just missed my Top 10 list include: With Lasers, a great, party-hearty dance record by the Brazilian band Bonde Do Role; Love Hate, a very fun, very slick, very-Prince-inspired R&B album by The-Dream (who wrote Rihanna's big hit "Umbrella"); and At My Age by Nick Lowe, who I'm beginning to think may be a better songwriter, all things considered, than his old friend and collaborator Elvis Costello.

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Claverack, N.Y.: Album of the Year: In Rainbows, Radiohead. It seems outrageous to say, but despite being named album of the year by Billboard and Filter, and one of the top ten of the year by Rolling Stone, this amazing disc still doesn't gets its proper due. Perhaps it is twice overshadowed; first by its innovative online distribution scheme, second by its progenitors ("well of course it's great, it's Radiohead"). Yet with In Rainbows, the band managed to pull off the enviable feat of recording their most accessible album since OK Computer while not sacrificing a bit of their distinctive complexities of rhythm and sound.

Jody Rosen: In Rainbows definitely is growing on me. The band writes some very beautiful songs. And as you say, the music is both complex and inviting, which isn't easy to pull off. There's something about Thom Yorke's voice that I find a touch grating, but that's my shortcoming. I do think it's good development that, as my colleague Ann Powers pointed out, Yorke is letting his libido seep into the music a bit.

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Kusel, Germany: Jody, one thing that frequently is lacking in modern music criticism is an actual discussion of music—specially the basic elements that make up all music, rhythm, timbre, tempo, dynamics and pitch. Melody and harmony of course evolve out of these basic elements. Often discussed are the social context, and lyrics of particular songs. Often, in reading your reviews and reviews of other critics, I sense that disconnect. Songs and in fact entire genres of music seem to be preferred based on extra-musical elements. In fact, I have sensed from you a genuine lack of understanding why some people might enjoy a particular genre, artist or song, because they don't qualify as "up to snuff" according to the extra-musical standards most critics employ today.

As a music educator, I feel that this move away from actual musical evaluation of popular music does a disservice to the music as well as to the culture of popular American music. As a listener, I often don't care about the lyrics, but listen more to chord progressions or timber. My question for you is, is there a way for music criticism to return to looking at musical elements?

Also, there has been much discussion on—I forget how it has been worded—but the lack of inclusion of African American elements in music as a particular flaw in music, particularly in indie rock. I think that this is a flawed assessment and seems to discount the complete integration of African and European music that occurred at the end of the 19th century. I believe that the integration of these two divergent musical cultures is so great that you truly can't find any American music, including indie rock, that does not reflect African traditions. As a brief example, there is a line in The Shins's song "Phantom Limb" that has polyrhythm that, while brief, is straight from African polyrhythmic traditions.

There may be a certain "groove" factor that might seem to be missing, but in fact it is a matter of the degree to which a song has that groove element, not the lack of this element entirely that you are hearing in many songs. My apologies for a lack of complete fact-checking on articles—it is midnight in Germany and time to sleep.

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Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He is the author of White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and The Nation.

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