ALBUMS (descending points)
1. Gogol Bordello - Super Taranta!
2. Balkan Beat Box - Nu Med
3. Miranda Lambert - Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
4. The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
5. Mavis Staples - We'll Never Turn Back
6. Public Enemy - How You Sell Soul to Soulless People Who Sold Their Souls?
7. Jean Grae - The Orchestral Files
8. David Murray and the Black Saint Quartet (featuring Cassandra Wilson) - Soundtrack to the film BANISHED
9. M.I.A. - Kala
10. Lil' Wayne - Da Drought III

TRACKS
1. Mac Lethal "Jihad!"
2. Swamp Dogg "We Crowned an Idiot King"
3. Randy Newman "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country"
4. Gogol Bordello "Supertheory of Supereverything"
5. Levon Helm "Feelin' Good"
6. 7L and Esoteric "Get Dumb"
7. Nick Lowe "I Trained Her to Love Me"
8. Animal Collective "For Reverend Green"
9. Lil' Mama "Lip Gloss"
10. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings "100 Days, 100 Nights"

REISSUES
1. The Staples Singers - The Best of the Vee-Jay Years
2. Gram Parson/The Flying Burrito Brothers - Archives, Volume 1: Live at the Avalon Ballroom, 1969
3. v/a - A Date with John Waters
4. Moloch - Moloch
5. Ed Sanders - Sanders' Truck Stop

ARTISTS
1. Gogol Bordello
2. Lil' Wayne
3. Miranda Lambert
4. The Arcade Fire
5. Bob Dylan

COMMENTS
Two moments defined the year in pop for me in 2007. One occurred while I was reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road on a bus full of anxious seventh- and eighth-graders bound for New York City, the bus veering between and around Pennsylvania hills and mountains on a monolithically gray and rainy day. I dialed my iPod to The Arcade Fire's Neon Bible and over the next 45 minutes experienced the most penetrating coalescing of music, ideas, and reality I'd known in years. I am not sure the last ten years have been good ones for the concept of "the album," where a collection of 10-15 songs really speak as a whole, but I can say the innocent yet dead-serious mournfulness of Neon Bible would be diminished by the removal of any one of its songs. The combined effect of the weather, McCarthy's spare, bleak, yet surprisingly (OK...late-breaking) hopeful prose, 50 kids nervously anticipating setting foot on Big Apple sidewalks—the site of a recent life-shattering disaster—and music that did really seem to put a black mirror up to reality has seared itself into my memory.

The other moment was far simpler—and more fun. It took me back to the mid-'80s, when two friends and I often spent many days in anticipatory pain waiting for an upcoming Replacements, Minutemen, Husker Du, or Tom Waits album (also having to plot where to get them, as the record stores in the Midwest were none too imaginative or daring in their selection of inventory, nor too accommodating when it came to the archaic phrase "special order"—my, my, how things have changed). It's been quite awhile since I have loved a band so much that I would buy its latest record without reading about it first and at least sampling a track or two, or since I have been in a peer group that shared that keen and unbalanced level of enthusiasm. A senior in my British literature class and three-year stalwart in my music appreciation club, the Academy of Rock—no Jack Black stuff here; I can't play any instruments, I can only enthuse—and I had, thanks to two records called Gypsy Punks Underdog World Strike and Balkan Beatbox, transformed ourselves into drooling Eastern European dance-punk fanboys, spending untold hours shaking the covers of those two CDs fanatically in the faces of our high school's benighted until they agreed to borrow them and rip 'em to their MP3 players. 2007 was a year for celebration for both of us: not only a new Gogol Bordello CD (the almost-autumnal Super Taranta!), but, fast on its heels, a new Balkan Beat Box, Nu Med, even—impossibly!—better than the debut. And—they were, as we knew they would be, life-affirming, motion-stimulating, thought-invoking, hilariously mad slabs of joy. Why the blind devotion? I don't know, other than, yep, both bands are unshakably alive, Eugene Hutz makes me miss Joe Strummer less, and Balkan Beat Box's instrumental cocktail of Balkan, Middle Eastern, and New York rhythmic sublimity is my idea of world harmony in these fractured times.

Beyond those two moments, some other reasons to believe in pop music: the phenomenally consistent fecundity and weirdly impish sense of humor of the amazing Lil' Wayne—can Tha Carter III possibly live up to the expectations created by god-knows-how-many damn good 2006 and 2007 mix tapes?—the return of Swamp Dogg (winner of the prizes for most ridiculous album cover of the year, greatest anti-Bush song of the year, and—as usual—the most hilarious, off-the-wall liner notes, a category in which the former Jerry Williams has never had ANY competition); while we're talking humor, hyphy, the West Coast's goofy, differently-self-medicated riposte to the Dirty South's crunk hegemony; the unaccountable resurgence of soul music ( fired by Mavis Staples, Sharon Jones, and Bettye Lavette, with the naughty Motel Lovers a compelling and salacious side-commentary, by oldsters capable of making the Ying Yang Twins blush—men, please attend the man in the boat!); Miranda Lambert proving "Kerosene" was not only not a fluke, but also just a teaser, with one of the best beginning-to-end country album in years; Public Enemy making a kick-ass album despite Flavor Flav's attempt to destroy the organization's dignity and Chuck D's amazing 47 years—that's right, folks, 47 years—on the planet; Staples' and David Murray's intense commentaries on America's most egregious racist moments on the citizens of its present; Levon Helm, "Feelin' Good" again after the devastating, drawn-out, and ugly demise of The Band and a battle with throat cancer; Sonny Rollins' continued capacity to amaze with his golden tenor at the ripe old age of 77 on the unlisted Sonny, Please; and Bob Dylan's continued improbable sexagenarian roll (a terrific XM radio show in its 2nd season, a tantalizing new biopic, and the corresponding official release—on a damned good soundtrack—of the most mysterious "Basement Tape" of all, "I'm Not There").

Also, this year is the first in many during which I was repeatedly knocked out by women, several (Jenny Lewis, Amy Lavere, Sharon Jones) for which no room exists on the list, and many of which do their own writing. That is a trend I hope continues, not least because it keeps me from looking like such a boy.

If you re-read that series of hosannas, you'll no doubt extract a theme I've been hitting for years in these polls, a theme that helps keep me not only happy but, at 45, optimistic about the future, musical and otherwise: rock and roll (an umbrella term I use for the spirit of the various musics represented here) isn't necessarily youth music—unless that means it's meant to keep the heart and soul young. It's a worthy career pursuit, it's not necessarily flashy, shiny, disposable, sensational product (though, Lil' Mama, that can be quite wonderful, too), and as such it can give you sharp, soulful artistic companions to mature with. No reason to get a transfer for the classical bus in mid-trip, in other words. I anxiously await 2008.