Joshua Alston perfects the art of the slow jamz mix
Andy Battaglia wonders what it means to be an American
Andy Beta focuses on Brooklyn (and everywhere)
J. Gabriel Boylan searches for the revolution
Jalylah Burrell explores the jazz/R&B nexus
Jon Caramanica rounds up some posse cuts
Daphne Carr gets grown and nerdy
Chicago is Mairead Case's kind of town
Chuck Eddy evolves!
Tom Ewing starts some arguments
Tim Finney salutes the nu-Balearica
Dan Gibson has a meaningful talk with his son
Matt Goldenberg will see you in the mosh pit
Eric Grandy throws a blog-house party

Brian Raftery plays some songs for his friends
Kate Richardson feels kind of guilty
Close to the edits with Britt Robson
Peter S. Scholtes takes a bite of the Minne-apple
Philip Sherburne raves without even trying
Al Shipley turns on the Charm City
Rod Smith spends some time on YouTube
Lindsey Thomas traces a life cycle
Elisabeth Vincentelli goes around the world in 80 minutes
The expansive, globalist, beat-conscious K. Leander Williams
What is Douglas Wolk's hidden agenda?

Eric Harvey marathon packs 'em in
Will Hermes won't stop believin'
Rich Juzwiak takes R&B to the disco
Andy Kellman soothes or disturbs (take your pick)
J. Edward Keyes has just the treatment you're looking for
Jason King thinks and dances at the same time
Michaelangelo Matos goes forward into the past
Mike McGonigal heads into the red
Chris Molanphy waits on the delayed diva
Chris Neal tips his Stetson to the ladies of country
Hip-hop's rich, crowded mosaic, per Ethan Padgett
Amanda Petrusich joneses for the wobbly and bizarre

Every December, I wonder if people in other cities are doing the same thing I am in the wee hours of the morning—namely, catching up on stacks of local CDs from the previous 12 months. How do our scenes compare? And do other towns have secrets as sweet? We'd need thousands of homemade local 80-minute CD-R compilations from around the globe to tell, and until we do, there's no way to know if Minnesota, U.S.A., is as relatively rich as I suspect it is. (If you want to hear this and judge for yourself, email petescholtes at gmail dot com.) Still, it says something that this fan of Low and Prince had to leave out Low and Prince from his '07 MN mix-CD in a year when both artists released good stuff. Word to my discard pile: I also rejected the Hold Steady covering Dylan (a match made in New York more than Minnesota), comebacks by Tom Hazelmyer and Greg Norton (I prefer music with lyrics), and rising mixtape rapper Trama name-dropping yours truly (I'm vain, but not that vain).

Even without bigger names, though, I'm able to open with two figures of international cult stature: Michael Yonkers, the spine-injured '60s psych guitarist now teamed with a two-ax punk trio to sound like Buddy Holly fronting Fugazi; and Brother Ali, the blind Muslim white albino rapper, who turns his sonorous bark into a supple instrument of sensitive-badass blues. Look them in the eyes and tell them that they're satisfied.

As it happens, Brother Ali first raised eyebrows battling MCs at local events hosted by Zachariah, a.k.a. New MC of Kanser, a.k.a. Big Zach, a.k.a. White Jesus—himself an ultra-casual battle champion whose distinct nasal flow and humorous frankness never quite came across on CD until now. He's a taken-for-granted scene fixture suddenly ablaze, much like Little Man, a.k.a. the diminutive Chris Perricelli plus friends, the rare '70s-loving guitar virtuoso whose voice is even more expressive and distinct. (That's him on backups, too.) The slow-burning Owls are simply one of the finest new bands since I don't know when, and easily the catchiest boy-girl-boy-girl multi-songwriter set-up since Fleetwood Mac. Generous with arrangements and hooks, while withholding when it comes to vocal inflection or conspicuous displays of technique, they seem to have beamed their very deep pop songs straight from the imagination and into their still-learning fingers and throats, unimpeded by any distracting ability. (On a personal note: I wrote cover stories for City Pages this year about both Little Man and Brother Ali, and saved my last one ever for the Owls, which hit print shortly after I left the newspaper for good after ten years.)

The Owls and Little Man in some ways feel like the culmination of a local pop movement initially nourished by these vets in the early '90s: Dan Wilson of Semisonic and Trip Shakespeare, Ed Ackerson of Polara and the Susstones label, and Shatterproof singer-songwriter Jay Hurley, whose earlier Hovercraft was my first in-person band interview. (Shatterproof's new album was also recorded in 1996, and I imagine there's a major-label horror story there somewhere.) If you notice a sonic trend so far, it might be the increasing pull towards those twin contemporary pop commonplaces: acoustic guitars in rock and pop melodies in rap.

Maria Isa was the subject of a 2006 cover story I wrote about reggaeton, but as you can tell from this track, she's as pan-musical as M.I.A., and her melodic sense fits snugly between Fergie collaborator Golden and former I Self Devine student Indigo (breaking out here with Technicolor musicality). In truth, there are only so many ways to restate the DIY ethos in rap, but Big Quarters somehow found an ingenious new tack on "How to Kill Your Rap Career," offering advice in reverse over a hardcore beat, with I Self himself on guest vocal: "Fuck family, they just want paper/Fuck independence, go major/Don't follow your heart, make hits/Publishing and points ain't shit."

A newish guitar sound from an indie band is just as rare, so here's a big yellow smile to Mouthful of Bees frontman Chris Farstad for his warm fuzzies, though he seems to have gone to the J. Mascis school of singing. The Great Physician are another guitar band beneath strings so apparently decorous that I thought the song would wither and blow away once its underlying elements sank in. Instead the arrangement sticks, and the mystery of the lyric thickens—something about living above your class. By contrast, with Desdamona what you hear is what you get, though her way with the literal and the true is so eloquent and pleasing that her spoken-word pulls you in like the rap that it's not.

Desdamona collaborator Moochy C established himself as one of the more comically needy tough guys on the local message board DUNation before turning around with a surprising sophomore album that makes good on its pretensions to unite "gangsters" and "backpackers." On "The Club," Slug (of Atmosphere) surveys his surroundings, and jokes about the incongruity of even being here: "All these women look like goddamn strippers/And I bet these dudes probably carry hand mirrors." Of course, such social lines have blurred for years in Minnesnowta, with Carnage reaching out to guitarist Bill Mike on his latest, MF Doom pal Andrew Broder fronting the increasingly prog Fog, and Ryan Olcott, the former frontman of 12 Rods, ditching his Police-like brassiness for breakbeats and quiet melodicism with Mystery Palace.

M.anifest would probably get beat up for the line, "Civilize the savages/Throw your mind overboard like slaves in Middles Passages," if he weren't Ghanaian-born, and if so many young black rappers around here weren't already using Africa and slavery as the punch line for putting down peers with darker skin. Happily, my 2006 piece about the more recent Diaspora in local rap introduced M.anifest to a young Kenyan MC named Baraka, a small step towards East Coast/West Coast unity among local Africans. Meanwhile, there's the thoroughly white-American playboy ironist Ice-Rod, with a priceless compilation track comparing his bad self to a naughty puppy. The metallic Kwang are nearly as funny: You don't have to get the local references to glean the anti-snobbery behind "Well, we don't sound current and we can't get a gig at the Triple Rock—like we care/We can play over there/Baby, come and see what we got in store/On the other side of town, rocking out at Station 4."

It might take a local to know that the band name Pert' Near Sandstone is a nod to the very Minnesota phrase "pert' near," which means "pretty near," and to the town of Sandstone. Along with Trampled by Turtles, this outfit is leading a generation of freaks into straight-up bluegrass rather than the watered-down jam-band kind. Even if every other city on earth has hippies, few, if any, could close things out this lovely.

Peter Scholtes is a freelance writer in Minneapolis.

This year, everybody's taste was suspect. What you like is never just what you like: your aesthetics reflect your ideology, and my aesthetics, I know, reflect mine. But Jesus, did you see what Idolator said? More to the point, did you see what they didn't say? Pitchfork gave that record a 4.3—but, you know, what do you expect from indie-rockers? Rolling Stone, of course, keeps pushing the Rolling Stone stuff, and Blender is hyping up the Blender¬-y things. And the blogosphere! And the radio! And Williamsburg! Who is paying Williamsburg off? So you can decide for yourself how much my favorite songs of the year represent my own dubious hidden agendas; note, in particular, how exhausted, bitter, and petulant most of them are.

One legitimate complaint against this mix—and this is a complaint I have about my own taste, too—is that a lot of it is firmly planted in familiar styles. Dizzee's dis is so old skool he's reusing the "It Takes Two" Lyn Collins loop, Life Without Buildings are Velvets revivalists, the Fiery Furnaces retread Zeppelin, Franz Ferdinand covering LCD Soundsystem is 1981-meets-1981. But there was barely anything that sounded genuinely new to me this year, or even like a considerable leap forward instead of a not-yet-totally-worn-out configuration of old ideas. In the year that Ike Turner died, it would've been some kind of poetic justice for some young genius to have a huge hit with her own equivalent of "Rocket 88," but no such luck.

I'll also disclose some of the specific biases behind the songs I picked here. I'm really fond of do-it-yourself impulses (and have never hated the decaying remains of the music industry as much as I did this year), and the Schema's yacht-rock bonbon "Those Rules You Made" was a hit—on YouTube, anyway—that was produced by former art-punk type Rhodri Marsden as an experiment to see exactly how far he could go with a homemade recording and no record label. Sharon Jones' "I'm Not Gonna Cry" is present because she and the Dap-Kings put on the best show I saw all year (and the Dap-Kings were the secret ingredient on Amy Winehouse's record and various other Mark Ronson productions) and because I'm a vinyl fetishist and was delighted she put her best song of the year on a 7-inch instead of her album. GusGus's "You'll Never Change" is on the mix because it sounded amazing at a volume higher than I'm ever likely to hear it again. Also, two songs involve artists whose records I've released in the past.

Finally, Sylvia Hall's "Don't Touch That Thing" is on there because it was the track I played most this year—a glorious little song against sex that jumped out at me from Cult Cargo: Grand Bahama Goombay, a compilation of early-'70s funk that had never previously been heard outside the Bahamas. In the old music-biz era (before everything that's ever been a hit got reissued and global music recycling got a lot more fluid), I'd probably never have been able to hear it myself. But it also occurs to me—and this is just a hypothesis, so please set me straight in the comments if you think otherwise—that something as ephemeral, amateurish (in the best sense), and specific to its place as "Don't Touch That Thing" would be much less likely to get recorded now. There's barely such a thing as a "local scene" anymore, or an environment where a new band can spend a couple of years playing for 200 people while they're working out what they're doing, and maybe put out a handful of singles, before they have to start worrying about backlash or filling out an album or selling themselves to 2000 people or 20,000 or everybody on the Internet. Not coincidentally, that's the kind of environment that spawned most of my favorite music.

Douglas Wolk is the author of Live at the Apollo (Continuum, 2004) and Reading Comics (Da Capo, 2007). He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Lucinda Williams didn't make a standout album this year, and I'm not just saying that because she got the mag I work for (and, by extension, the piece I'd written about her) vociferously boooooed! at a concert I attended last fall. What I think is one of her finest songs is near the top of my mix, and here's a confession: Including it has been kinda therapeutic, because doing so upends a geezered-out bias that's been ruining the MP3 Age for me. Put simply, I'm still so into the idea of albums and the creative scope they're s'posed to signify that at first assembling a year-end mix made me feel dirty. This guilt is palpable in other ways, too: After acquiring a receiver with a fancy USB input this year, I later bought a turntable—the deck being my first in over two decades. Realized two things: 1) how much I miss cover art that's larger than a coaster, and 2) that the one saving grace about that mega-large band I hate enabling its fans to pay anything or nothing for its latest snoozefest is that the buzz seemed to keep the idea that the whole is much, much more than the sum of its parts on the table.

OK, so of the 15 things here, only five came from albums strong enough to make my Top 10 (M.I.A., Gogol Bordello, Amy Winehouse, the Romanian brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia, and Juan Carlos Cacéres, the ringer from a wonderfully idiosyncratic tango compilation). Frankly, I don't know what they say about anything in the music industry, but I will offer that M.I.A., Gogol Bordello and Amy Winehouse are the line-up's patron saints, primarily because each made albums that seem globalist, beat-conscious and expansive enough to be compatible with jazz and whatever else I wanted to throw in. (I'm still kinda floored by this kitchen-sink rundown of Kala's sources.)

Elsewhere, special shout outs to Jack White for channeling the real Led Zeppelin in order to thumb his nose at anti-immigrant sentiment; crooner Curtis Stigers for allowing me to rethink Stephen Merritt; Fanfare Ciocarlia, for assembling a veritable European Union of Gypsies; and the assorted jazzers for continuing, against all commercial odds, to push that rock up the hill with such grace.

K. Leander Williams is a staff writer in the music section at Time Out New York, where he has covered various creative and performing arts. He has contributed to numerous publications, among them Rolling Stone, Blender and The Nation.

Jeez, you've all been listening to Amy Winehouse, LCD Soundsystem, Kanye West, Justice, and Arcade Fire, and you want more? Sorry, no can do. I'm not being a snob: I do love big names and big pop—I just don't respond as much to what's popular in the U.S. There are some very mainstream songs on my compilation, except they're not mainstream in America.

My three favorite albums of the year all come from the U.K. and all represent commercial pop at its finest. (Also, not a guy in sight, but that really wasn't on purpose.) Girls Aloud, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, and Róisín Murphy each collaborate with songwriters and producers to achieve their goals. It's no wonder Girls Aloud's "Fling" is at the top of my list: Xenomania's songwriting and production chops on it make my head spin. How, for instance, could they come up with a bass line that's both pounding and melodic? (I left out Sophie from this comp because I couldn't pick one song from her album, and because I decided that more people needed to hear the super-cheesy, super-cheap, super-satisfying disco-house of Booty Luv—also my fave band name of the year.)

More Brit charm for my shot of '60s flair, except I opted for Candie Payne's retro-futurism instead of Amy Winehouse's neo-soul stylings. Payne's album, made with Noonday Underground's Simon Dine, is a marvel of Swinging Liverpool charm, and Dine's production is, as usual with him, a textbook example of crackly density.

Non-English songs fared well, too. I didn't include tracks from High School Musical 2 because I couldn't pick one that I loved more than the others, so I went for "Dhun Teri Hai Saanson Mein," a Hindi cover of Sharpay's version of "You Are the Music in Me." We also have Yelle's hilarious "Dans ta Vrai Vie," and jack of all trades Bertrand Burgalat shows up twice: he wrote and produced a duet for comedian-actress Valérie Lemercier and Christophe Willem (winner of Nouvelle Star, an Idol-like French TV show) and he got Robert Wyatt to sing "This Summer Night" on his own Chéri B.B. album. German pop? Check as well.

Think local, buy local? Not so much for me then. The only New York band on the comp is Escort. I saw the sprawling Brooklyn combo twice in 2007 and was ecstatic both times. These guys play classic disco, and with 15 of them on stage, they do it the way it should be done. We're not talking Kid Creole caliber but it's getting close at times.

The rock front is represented by two distinct styles: total aggro and total bombast. On the aggro side, Philadelphia's Clockcleaner, Birmingham's Anaal Nathrakh, and Acid Eater, the garage project of Japanese noisenik Masonna. Two of my fave tracks of the year embody bombast, except that each appropriately clocks in at around 15 minutes and including them both would have eaten up a third of my alloted time for this comp. So I traded Nightwish's "The Poet and the Pendulum" for the band's shorter "Bye Bye Beautiful" and left out Litmus' space-rock epic "Under the Sign" altogether.

Nôze's "Remember Love": What a weird track, wistful and awkward at the same time. But old-school house is the best way to say goodbye.

Elisabeth Vincentelli is the arts editor of Time Out New York. Her essay on the Eurovision Song Contest is included in Best Music Writing 2007 (Da Capo).

If I had one complaint about 2007, it's that there weren't enough songs about making babies. (And I don't mean songs about sex, where the possibility of babies lurks in the background, unspoken and terrifying, for fear of killing the mood.) Leave it to the stand-up comedian to lay the scientific foundation for this life-spanning mix.

In certain circles, the birth lands you in a baptismal pool, and no one had ever depicted the dunk in a way that a heathen like me could understand prior to Eamon Hamilton's explanation (it somehow involves Scarlett Johansson). If that hasn't scared you off water forever, to the bridge! Revel in an afternoon of fishing, while Maya Arulpragasam provides some unsettling foreshadowing about skipping town because there's no money to pay the bills. But for now, whatever income you can scrounge goes straight to MAC and L'Oreal (or, if you don't have a record deal, Wet 'n' Wild and Bubblicious).

You're safe and loved and living rent-free, but all that must come to an end. In regards to leaving Florida, wise man Isaac Brock says, "far enough, far enough wasn't far enough," which is precisely the sentiment expressed by everyone I know who's lived there. It isn't just Florida. Some indescribable force will drive you away from everything you know and you'll take solace in your introduction to reckless, sleepless, and possibly lawless nights.

While we're talking about maturing, it makes sense to incorporate some adult themes. You can't get to the singing-in-the-streets love song without muddling through some romantic rivalries and dreadful breakups. (Bat for Lashes' Natasha Khan's wrenching account of breaking someone's heart cuts so deep it somehow makes the receiving end the enviable position.) But once you're done with all that you get to experience one of the happiest days of your life (provided you're not, you know, gay). Still, the reception sucks because you can't keep the party going for three straight days anymore. And when the parties fizzle out, people disappear. (Pardon the track-listing creativity—not cheating—that brings the first of two James Murphy songs to the table. The guy just tugged harder on my heart than anyone else this year.)

Hopefully you've abandoned your friends with good reason. Brother Ali performs the old "kid, your ma and I split, and I spend a lot of time on the road, but I swear I love you" track that's never surprising but always manages to get me. And Ween accompany the sort of soiree that oozes with grown-up accomplishments (wealth! sophistication! social status!) despite being utterly ridiculous. You've come a long way. Indulge in some tri-colored pasta.

Of all people, who would've thought that it would be Kanye who delivers the ultimate—and strangely modest—declaration of complacency that marks a successful life? In the end, if you've done it right, you'll leave someone wondering why your sudden absence hasn't worsened the taste of coffee. Really, what more could you ask for?

Lindsey Thomas is an editor for MTV News. She is a former music editor for Minneapolis' City Pages, and her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Spin, and The Village Voice, among others.

The century's biggest bout to date started in '07, with a rabbity one-two that left the deliverer more dazed than the target. First, NBC yanked most of its content from YouTube. Then the doddering behemoth announced that, in partnership with Vivendi property Universal and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, it was launching an on-demand, online service—Hulu—that also offers video sharing. Yippee! You can hear the execs now: "Focus-group results indicate that that YouTube's allure lies largely in its double-vowel. Let's just replace those nasty consonants with something more suggestive of our master, Cthulhu."

Even given the consortium's partnership with outlet-mall dot-coms AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!, it doesn't stand a chance of dominating the market. After all, we've been letting YouTube owner Google data-mine us for years. Why switch now, especially given YouTube's swelling legion of remixers, whistle-blowers, and cranks, not to mention the tireless researchers who brought us the likes of the dancer from Minsk and the Filipino prison-inmate interpretation of "Thriller"? YouTube's inclusiveness swings both ways, too—especially in music. While most of this mix's videos skew big-budget, its subjects make for exceedingly down to-earth-bedfellows.

The only Top 10 track by a Canadian band last year, Finger Eleven's dance-rock hit "Paralyze" subverts the ubiquitous club-as-locus-of-fun trope more effectively than any song since, uh, ever, with Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" riff as a point of departure and lyrics both quantum and tantric. Director Barnaby Roper wisely shot the video outdoors in daylight, adding yet another twist and revealing that singer Scott Jackson could easily pass for Idolator mixtape contributor Peter S. Scholtes's younger, taller brother.

Speaking of looks and tricks, coming back from the dead (for real) has worked wonders for Nikki Sixx's songwriting powers. "Life Is Beautiful" hints at what Radiohead might have become had they seen "Paranoid Android" as a career map rather than just another in an endless succession of dalliances. Consequence and Rhymefest reveal that Joe Lunchbox rap is alive and struggling furiously, even as friend and colleague Kanye finds himself awash in futuristic glamor and Daft Punk's front-loaded, kidney-punch beats. Justice's face-concealing "D.A.N.C.E." takes the opposite tack, driving our attention to the constantly morphing designs on the duo's T-shirts.

Less glamorous still—even with an elaborately painted face—LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy sits motionless for the entirety of "All My Friends," letting sidepeople, lighting, and abstract squiggles (huge in '07: Sixx and Justice have 'em, too) take care of kinetics while he does his best to look like an insurance adjuster in the midst of asking his wife for a divorce. Kamelot's mildly disturbing "Ghost Opera" soars entirely over the top, enhancing the Florida-based power metal quintet's classically influenced bombast with a robed and masked orchestra and choir, a spectacular dancer, and a perfectly circular plot. "Paper Planes" makes good on its title while suggesting that Maya's finger-markswomanship harbors nearly as much room for improvement as Hulu in its current "Americans-only" beta state. Dude from Minsk would never be so stupid.

Rod Smith is a writer and teacher in Minneapolis.

I was reluctant to peg this mix to music from Baltimore, the city I live near and work in, since I cover local music exhaustively year round—I'd hate to come off as monomaniacal, like I didn't listen to music from everywhere else this year, too. But considering that Idolator readers mostly know me for regularly defending Finger Eleven, I decided to go ahead and rep for my home turf.

Aside from the New Flesh, a trio of dudes making wonderfully hideous sludge-rock, the indie rock selections here reflect the fact that most of my favorite bands around town these days are co-ed combos where at least one of the singers is female. Avec's Shawna Potter even explicitly addresses the life of the token rock chick with "In Character" ("Everybody likes to guess which boys in the band I've kissed"), one of the best tracks from the slinky, seductive math-rock band's second album, Lines.

R&B singer Mario Barrett is just about the only Balitmorean currently on the main radar, although given his failure to land any major hits since 2004's chart-topping "Let Me Love You," his career is in danger of going the way of Sisqo's. Still, his recent third album Go is a solid effort, with several uptempo tracks like "Skippin'" that I've taken to much more than the prim ballads he tends to release as singles.

As passionate and involved as I am in the local hip-hop scene, I have to admit that Baltimore rap kind of had an off year. Most of the big names laid low, occasionally jumping on big posse cuts like "Just Us" with a newfound sense of unity, and while there was plenty of good music coming mostly from lesser known artists, it already looks like 2008 will be more eventful. The just-released official soundtrack to HBO's The Wire features several rappers from the city the series unflinchingly depicts, including Tyree Colion's "Projects," which was released this year on Darkroom Productions' excellent double album Hamsterdam Vol. 2.

To say that 2007 was a breakout year for Baltimore club music, the city's frenetic, decades-old strain of hip house, would be a hollow repetition of a line equally applicable to 2006, 2005, 2004, etc. Rather, the genre just inched a little further into the national spotlight than it had previously, largely thanks to club music's resident weirdo, DJ Blaqstarr, whose "Crazy Leg Wit It" is that other song featured in his popular "Shake It to the Ground" video.

But more than even Blaqstarr, the biggest darling of the newly Baltimore-infatuated blog world was Dan Deacon. Of course, six or seven years before Dan Deacon became an indie household name for making spastic IDM records and spreading his gospel with sweaty live shows heavy on absurdist stage banter, his friend Rjyan "Cex" Kidwell had pretty much the exact same schtick. In the past couple of years, Kidwell has retreated into Baltimore's under-underground of cassette-only limited edition projects. But one of those limited releases, Sketchi, actually made it to CD, and features serene instrumental techno reminiscent of his early albums, including "Oregon Ridge," an ode to the Baltimore County swimming hole where I spent many a summer day as a kid—as did, I imagine, many of the artists on this mix.

Al Shipley contributes to the Baltimore City Paper and maintains the Baltimore music blog Government Names. He has also written for Scratch and Stylus (R.I.P. to both), and writes the Corporate Rock Still Sells column for Idolator.

Techno takes a lot of flak for tropes that many listeners deem clichés: chief among them, the genre's insistence upon emphatic buildups and breakdowns. Make no mistake, those things can indeed be depressingly programmatic—think of the stock snare roll used to animate lackluster "progressive house" tunes, cuing the dutiful hands-in-air response from all and sundry. (Drugs, of course, play no small part in this equation.) But when used right, these rushing, buzzing waves of intensity can feel like a perfect marriage of form and function, which might be another way of saying form and fun.

Dancing doesn't have to be "fun," of course; it's arguable that "blog house" or "new club" or whatever it's supposed to be called has swung too far towards an insistence upon thrills that wear their thrillingness on their sleeve. But given techno's immersive qualities—head down, locked into a groove, lost in time—the buildups and breakdowns lend an essential sense of dynamism to the music's streamlined form. They're the eddies against which the river's flow can be measured, the white-knuckled passages that turn a DJ set from a smooth ride down the Autobahn into a hair-raising roller-coaster ride. Especially as techno has tilted towards the lackadaisical, these moments have become even more important—adrenaline shots to jolt the ketaminimal body back to life.

Another possibility is that I'm just a cheeseball. Even when they're schlocky as hell—especially when they're schlocky as hell—I can't get enough of these Cape Canaveral caterwauls, these screamingly obvious moments of launchpad lunacy. In 2006, Radio Slave's remix of Chelonis R. Jones' "Deer in the Headlights" was my go-to jam for cheap thrills; in 2007, that track seems to have launched a cottage industry, to which this compilation is dedicated. Radio Slave's contribution to this mix is actually far more restrained: avoiding obvious moments of rupture, he slots into the groove and rides it for eight-and-a-half minutes. A wild pitch-style string ostinato soars high above, like a flying carpet offering out-of-body joyrides; what the tune shares with the rest of the selections here is its glissando attack, hoovering up notes like a hummingbird gulping down nectar. Again, drugs play no small part in the equation: Ecstasy accentuates music's mercurial properties. Emphasizing that silvery ripple by foregrounding wailing sirens and nervous oscillations, these tracks all reflect the jaw-clenched hedonism of club culture circa 2007. Fortunately, at least to my ears, they sound thrilling on their own. The agent that really makes them come alive is community: catch any of these while standing in a frenzied crowd and just try to stay stone-faced.

A note on the format: in their natural habitat, as it were, these tracks would be mixed seamlessly, but I've simply strung them together sequentially, to better abide by the 80-minute CD-R format of the project. And ideally, a DJ probably wouldn't mix all eight together without taking a breather in between. Well, I might, but I've always been fond of peak-time overload. Prepare to flash . . . .

Philip Sherburne is a columnist for eMusic, The Wire, Pitchfork, and others. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.

I'm a sucker for the gradual intro by Los Campesinos here, but there's a lot to jam in, so we've got to fade this delectable froth right after the line, "I can't dance a single step." Go to Amerie, Puritan work ethic pureed through the funky cultural polyglot, with the sexiest "give it to me!" ever recorded. Flip to Prince, "Chelsea" edging out "Guitar" and "The One U Wanna C" from Planet Earth because the opening Sly cop matches Amerie's opening Sam & Dave cop, because we get horns instead of purple keys, and because the female vocalist maintains the ongoing vibe. There could have been a half-dozen tracks off the Rihanna, the year's best dance record. Everyone else will tab "Umbrella," so give me "Shut Up," the inverse of blue-eyed soul: brown-skinned Nashville.

Time to exhale: Ruthie Foster, theoretically covering Lucinda Williams but dead-ringing Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," so gorgeous and bucolic. Then a wet spot of adult baby-making music courtesy of Jill Scott and Common—and what a fine, soulful child that pair would produce.

The swamp fuzz-funk guitar of Charlie Hunter makes the deft bridge over to jazz. Here's where I lose a lot of you, but while your M.I.A. discs will grow as dusty as Beck's five years from now, the serpentine sinew of Michael Brecker (R.I.P.) and the cavernous ivory thunder of McCoy Tyner will divulge the same sharp citrus decades down the road. Pardon the cliché (not to mention the lecture), but it's America's classical music, the basketball of sonics.

Dee Dee Bridgewater and her African band reprise Nat Adderley Jr.'s "Compared to What," sliding from straight-no-chaser jazz into funky-joyful-angry politics. A good segue into the guy hiding behind a tree on Penny Lane, clutching a serrated spoon and laying in wait: "You got no fear of the underdog/That's why you will not survive." And why should he? "North American Scum"!—and LCD owes David Byrne a beer.

As a baby boomer who has watched my peers ruin this nation, I'm obligated, and grateful, to point out that many of us are putting our queer shoulders against the wheel (as Ginsburg once put it) in ways both nimble and catchy (the Fogerty) and stern and sermonic (the Springsteen). Both help sustain me—and steel me for the coming apocalypse. Ditto, the sentiments of "The Pretender" work much better if you imagine Dave Grohl and company addressing government leaders instead of ex-girlfriends (but it's kick-ass either way). I had to get Ghostface's "Walk Around" in, the perfect companion to my favorite film of 2007, No Country For Old Men, and the linchpin of the triptych of insanity that culminates with Ministry's "Let's Go." If you're really pissed off at the daily headlines—like, if you read—Al Jourgensen lances the boil almost every time.

Sap that I am, I couldn't end it with a fireball, so we do the I Ching bit and finish at the beginning with Kanye's "Good Morning" (again, I assume "Champion," "Stronger" and "The Good Life" will be well represented). The last thought I want left in your heads is Brother Ali's ode to his son. Cherishing your kids is square one, and the only solution.

Britt Robson is a writer in Minneapolis.

This track list is my best recollection of the songs I listened to and enjoyed most in 2007. I undoubtedly have not scraped every last crevice of the bottom of the barrel to bring you the full, accurate list, but this is at least a decent sampling of what was rattling around my head this year. I should mention, as I did on my Idolator Pop Critics Poll ballot, that I have not yet listened to at least 99% of the albums put out in 2007, so this list is skewed a bit toward radio favorites and the random new releases that somehow did manage to make it through my industrial strength anti-new music filter. (The secret bonus track is that Feist song from the iPod commercial. I never listened to it outside of that context, but I admit that I also never switched the channel during that ad because I thought the song was pleasant.) If you notice some sort of glaring omission, chances are I just plain haven't heard it yet.

I recently (like 20 minutes ago) realized that Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable" is actually from '06, but since I was hearing the Spanish language version of it on Houston's Mega 101 ("Latino and proud!") well into the summer months, I'm counting it for this year. I might have even declared it Most Pervasive Song of the Year if not for "No One" which, despite being put out in the last two months of the year, managed to be the most explosive thing to happen to radio in 2007, overshadowing even Sean Kingston's evil and awesome "Beautiful Girls."

The best musical moment of '07 is without a doubt Lil Wayne's entrance into DJ Khaled's "We Takin' Over": "I AM THE BEAST," he declares, and then proceeds to quote the infamous "No, it is not a tuuumah" line from Kindergarten Cop, proving once and for all that there is a place for Arnold Schwarzenegger in hip-hop.

I was reluctant to include Rilo Kiley because I am a very vocal opponent of their new album, a collection of flat, gimmicky and/or just plain boring songs with absolutely no relation to anything they'd previously done. Except for "Silver Lining," the one track on Under the Blacklight that serves as a glimpse into where they really should have taken their sound. And the lyric, "I never felt so wicked as when I willed our love to die," is literally the only line on the entire album that sounds like Jenny Lewis wrote it.

I already feel guilty about putting the admittedly kind of bland Band of Horses on my list, but to be honest—and this is a secret, so don't tell my bosses at the music website—I kind of have a tin ear. I like easy listening and boring stoner music, and when I heard "The General Specific" I was immediately drawn to its amiable jangling piano and stompy percussion. Plus I like the line, "Gonna wash my bones in the Atlantic shore," because I often have the urge to wash my own bones in the familiar muddy waves of the Gulf Coast.

As for other things on the list . . . well, we all know Kanye put out a damn decent album, and "Champion" is my favorite track because of the neat little synth riff in the chorus. Spoon put horn sections to marvelous ends this year, and their fellow Texans Okkervil River continue to produce thoughtful, jangly rock music. Poor Mike Jones had a hell of a time getting his album out, but I thought "Mr. Jones" was just as decent as any of the singles off Who Is Mike Jones? Rihanna would have been R&B queen of the year if it weren't for that meddling Alicia Keys. As for the rest, I have no excuse or explanation. I likes what I likes, and what I likes is often rather unimpressive (see: that Illinois song). I make no apology, though I do often feel shame.

Kate Richardson is Idolator's beloved intern.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened this year: Was I truly unenthused by most of the new music that I heard, or did I just hear so much of it that the law of averages just beat me down? I'm suspecting the former and hoping for the latter. Either way, these are not necessarily the best songs of the year, but they're the ones I was most eager to play for other people:

1. A perfect spoken-word intro track, and one that proves that our culture-wide onslaught of '90s nostalgia has yet to hit its peak. In a year in which numerous Midwestern college professors dressed up as robots and harangued ex-presidents, this was really the best of the lot.

2. A throat-grabbing album-opening track, "Motion" sounds like a local-news theme co-written by Bernard Herrmann and the Left Behind authors: overwrought to the point of near-comedy, but scary as shit.

3. Amazingly, it's available at karaoke joints all over Japan. It's really hard to appreciate the joys of that chorus until you've double-teamed the vocals over a tinny MIDI track.

4. I'm going through a guitar-rock Master Cleanse at the moment, in which I diminish (or at least minimize) my auto-pilot acceptance of any U.K. group with three power chords and eleven songs about girls. But those base instincts take a while to sweat out, and when I hear this song's "oh-wooo-hooo" backing vocals, I allow myself to escape over the walls and climb into a getaway car, where I also play some of the latest Ash songs.

5. New Wave is easily my favorite album of the last two years, and here it was abandoned by everyone: By the label, which couldn't sell this record to new listeners, despite having at least four potential singles; by its own fans, many of whom complained about the band's major-label move without actually listening to the thing; and by the music blogosphere/cabal/what-have-you , whose members slackened to the point of paralysis this year, choosing to instead to plug the likes of Under the Blacklight (if you've ever wondered what the Sleeptytime Tea bear wanks off to after celebrating his 30th birthday party, it's Rilo Kiley). Anyway, this song is heartbreaking and tough, and I really thought it was the woman from the Paybacks singing when I first heard it.

6. Same thing with Art Brut, but substitute "ba-da-bah" for "oh-wooo-hooo."

7. Supposedly Rick Rubin is going to let this whole album sit on the shelf until 2019, when the long-expected '80s-revival revival will presumably make it safe. When did everyone start thinking this guy was an irrefutable genius? I have just as many half-baked ideas about how to save the music industry, and I won't waste half the day meditating on the hood of a Ferrari and wondering why nobody "got" 12 Songs.

8. According to my iTunes, I played this song 21 times this year. What? Who? I have no idea how this happened, especially since the version I had was from one of the treble-bumpin' Tapemasters Inc. mixes. It's a pretty stupid song, I admit, but I'm a sucker for anything with springy synthesizer lines and lyrics about being addicted to groupies.

9. A phenomenal no-you-din't duet, one that I'm amazed hasn't been released as a single, especially since it's so much better than that Rihanna track. Most joint-artist songs I've heard in the last two years sound as if the vocals were traded back and forth over a dedicated server, but this must have been recorded together; if you listen closely, you can actually hear Hudson glaring at Ne-Yo from behind the glass whenever he tells another fib.

10. I've listened to that threatening ticking-clock guitar line a zillion times, and I'm still surprised when it opens to a bleak, beautiful chorus. Absolutely spectral.

11. Chicago pop-punk does Chicago V. I can't help myself sometimes.

Brian Raftery is the former editor of Idolator and a contributor to Spin; he is currently (still) working on his karaoke book.

I spent a sizable chunk of 2007 listening to records made before 1935—trawling university archives, sinking loads of cash into eBay auctions, pleading with 78 collectors, popping up at suburban yard sales and patiently sorting through stacks of scratched Dan Fogelberg LPs before walking away, tired and empty-handed. When I wasn't acquiring ancient songs, I was bickering with myself, trying to nail down the cultural and musical distinctions between bluegrass and old-time, Delta and Hill Country, Appalachian folk and country, America and Americana. At night, when I curled into bed and closed my eyes, I still heard crackles and pops. Everything smelled like dust.

When I started listening to new records again, I found myself craving things that sounded old and rickety—it wasn't so much that I yearned for revivals (more the opposite, really), it was that I wanted, desperately, to hear songs that sounded as tenuous and weird as the slabs of shellac I'd since come to covet.

Some of the connections here are obvious: Dust-to-Digital's latest box, The Art of Field Recording: Volume 1, is stuffed with previously unreleased field-recorded Americana gems from archivist Art Rosenbaum's personal collection. Sister Fleeta and Rev. Willie Mae's rendition of traditional spiritual "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down"—which opens the first disc—is chilling, transcendent, perfect. I've hollered along to this song hundreds of times before, but this particular version, sung this way, is still the best thing I heard in all of 2007. Bonnie "Prince" Billy's cover of Merle Haggard's "The Way I Am" feels so delicate and bare you can practically see through it; Iron and Wine's "Resurrection Fern" features one of Beam's most heartbreaking acoustic melodies (when the pedal steel bits pipe in, I invariably buckle). Other tracks included are less overtly archaic, but still wobbly and bizarre: Old Time Relijun's "Indestructible Life!," Pissed Jeans' "People Person," M.I.A.'s "Boyz," and Bjork's "Earth Intruders" all sound like they were dug up from holes in the ground—there might not be banjo involved, but these tracks are just as vivid, just as serendipitous, as anything else I heard this year.

Amanda Petrusich is the author of Pink Moon (Continuum). Her second book, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music, is forthcoming from Faber and Faber. She writes about music for Pitchfork, Spin, Paste, ReadyMade, eMusic, and The Oxford American.

I wanted to fill this CD with all 18 versions of "Crank Dat" off the mixtape I copped this summer, but there was too much good shit this year to fuck around. It wasn't as triumphant a year for independent Atlanta rap as '06, when I subsisted on nothing but Big Shug and snap music, but talent spread across every hood to make up one of the richest 12 months in hip-hop since the crowded, brilliant mosaic of the late '90s.

Soulja Boy may rep Atlanta, but how many 13-year olds could tell you that? Summer tourism runs GA rap, and what's going on right now isn't exactly post-snap—it's just that snap infiltrated every other genre and cross-pollinated with Kilo/Shy D-style bass rap. Now there's lover-man snap, rock music snap, house snap, soul snap, whatever—all snap all the time. And the trap shit isn't even hot in ATL like the snap shit was—Jeezy and T.I. blew up. Any trap-rapper is on the rapping-about-rapping tip now—just as the darkness of Ready to Die lurked underneath Bad Boy's shiny-suit era, the bleak precision of the trap took a backseat to stadium coke-rap. Still, ATL was all over the map—from Jeezy's crew USDA dropping the unexpectedly reflective "Live My Life" to Eastsider B.O.B.'s frantic "Haterz Everywhere," a trancey, E'd-up post-Timbaland rave cut with Juvenile and Rick Ross.

In the underground, you had Big City, dudes from the Beatnuts making fake H-Town shit with some chick who sounds like old Junior M.A.F.I.A.-era Lil' Kim; Charon Don, an underground cat from Pittsburgh who somehow got Digga and Scrappy to drop verses on his joint; and Army of the Pharaohs—nine Philly MCs, ranging from nerd-ass braggadocio cats to hardcore Islamic philosophers, rocking it like "Protect Ya Neck." As for O.C., I just love some O.C.

Mims, the Alliance, Hurricane Chris, and Shop Boyz all dropped jams I played out, but the only one-hit wonder who was still fresh enough to me was the dude Rocko with the late fall ridin' joint, "Umma Do Me." It's testament to the fragmented nature of third coast rap that Miami's DJ Khaled had banger after banger with like 50 guest spots all over the map. "I'm So Hood" had every rapper you could name in the video—from Too $hort to Bushwick Bill—and almost as many dudes on the song. And some of the hottest songs of the year came from Mobile, Shreveport, and . . . Baton Rouge? Louisiana's Boosie and Webbie win every time, especially when kicking what might as well be "I Need A Hot Girl '07": "She cook, she clean, never smell like onion rings."

Ethan Padgett writes the Mean Muggin' column for Idolator. He lives in Atlanta.

As I write this, the Billboard country Top 20 sports only six female voices, and one of them belongs to Miley Cyrus (delivering dad and duet partner Billy Ray's biggest hit since 2000—this kid is owed some serious Christmas loot). Modern mainstream country is entirely dominated by men because the modern mainstream country audience is entirely dominated by women, who apparently would rather be serenaded by a dude.

This gender inequity is one reason country radio is such a bore at the moment. It's increasingly difficult to tell one guy singing about how proud he is to be a redneck from some other guy singing about how proud he is to be a redneck, even for someone like myself whose business it is to parse these fine distinctions.

My mix CD is meant as an argument that women, unbound by the expectations placed on men to hew to a set of non-negotiable country clichés, are producing more interesting work in mainstream country than their bepenised counterparts. A few of the year's best country albums were made by guys, but women cornered the market on the kind of emotional complexity that has always been the genre's most underappreciated resource.

Some of these women are internationally famous, and some are obscure. Some lean toward the pop-country end of Music Row, while others hew squarely to the traditional. But they all have something country could use more of right now: balls. Hence, our overture.

1.. Musically, Florida native Elizabeth Cook is grounded firmly in traditional country (she made more than 100 appearances on the Grand Ole Opry before releasing her first album). Even this cheeky tune sounds old-school—check out the priceless way the line, "She makes a mean lasagna," is followed by a cheerful "Mmm!" from the background singers.

2. Lori McKenna's major-label debut was co-produced by country superstar Tim McGraw, and the friction between the intimacy of her detail-oriented songwriting and the propulsive sheen of the sound makes for compelling listening. The title track celebrates the ordinary joys of family life with more authenticity and warmth than any of the endless number of recent country hits that attempt to do the same.

3. Lauren Lucas's self-released debut EP is bursting with songs that could be hits with some marketing muscle, but "Riverstone" isn't one of them. That's because it's a worthy addition to the great country tradition of murder ballads, which the genre has rejected in favor of fetishizing blameless death (preferably that of a child, ideally from cancer). But the lyrical image of a naked woman with a Bible in one hand and a whiskey bottle in the other? As a wise man (well, David Allan Coe, anyway) once sang, "If that ain't country, I'll kiss your ass."

4. This is a bit of a cheat—it's one of three new songs tacked onto the new "deluxe edition" of 18-year-old Taylor Swift's 2006 debut. But this tale of first-time heartbreak perfectly illustrates the reason she's attracted an army of fans in her age bracket—while teen singers usually pose as either prodigy or jailbait, she writes honestly and straightforwardly about how it feels to be a young person learning about the world.

5. Roly Salley's "Killing the Blues" is a magnificent little slice of melancholy that was finally given a wider public hearing when Robert Plant and Alison Krauss recorded it for their recent Raising Sand album. But Wendy Newcomer had already beaten them to it, and her version simmers and sways with a solitary ache their version (lovely as it is) can't touch. Every time she reaches up for that last "swingin' the world by the tail" my heart breaks all over again.

6. Broadway star Laura Bell Bundy made her first country album this year (apparently misplacing her last name in the process), and she brings an intriguing approach to music that's quite a ways from her day job in the onstage version of Legally Blonde. The loping, Bobbie Gentry-ish "Texas" is playfully sensual in a genre lacking in both playfulness and sensuality.

7. The days of Toby Keith's war-boosting "boot in your ass" are long gone even in country music, replaced by more contemplative fare like this impressionistic, elliptical portrait of a military funeral. "Just a Dream" works so well because it never tells you what to feel—it just paints a sad, sorry picture and lets you do the rest. Plus Underwood sings the almighty hell out of it, which always helps.

8. Rissi Palmer recently became the first African-American woman in two decades to appear on the country chart when "Country Girl" eked out a No. 54 placing. Does this mean country's long, shameful aversion to minority inclusion is ending? Nah, probably not. But she's only one of many young, talented black singers right now whose love for country music has yet to be returned in kind. Anyway, this is one catchy-ass song.

9. Remember what I said earlier about modern country's abandonment of murder as a narrative device? Another exception is Miranda Lambert, who threatened immolation on "Kerosene" and now depicts herself waiting around to blow her abusive beau's head off as soon as he gets out of jail on "Gunpowder & Lead." Is it just me, or is there something sexy about a woman willing to use deadly force?

10. Tammy Cochran is another major-label refugee who now has to bust ass just to let her old fans know she has a new album out. Where I Am focuses mostly on the sort of ballads that were her specialty during her brief hitmaking period ("Angels in Waiting," "Cry"), but "As Soon as I'm Over You" is a cool mid-tempo groover in the Dusty in Memphis vein.

11. Deana Carter rethinks Loretta Lynn's 1966 hit, casting its protofeminist (post-feminist? anti-feminist?) lyric in an undeniably modern setting with just the lightest dash of hip-hop. Drum machines have infected country music to ill effect, but Carter uses hers to make a point.

12. You know how every waiter in L.A. is really an actor? In Nashville, every waiter, diner, bartender, hostess, and busboy is a singer and songwriter. Hell, the hobo outside the restaurant probably has a demo in his pocket. "Next Big Nothing" is a wry commentary on the near-total certainty of obscurity in a place like this—something Sunny Sweeney thankfully seems likely to avoid. Extra points for squeezing three syllables out of "Opry."

13. Gretchen Wilson's 2004 debut, Here for the Party, was a quintuple-platinum blockbuster that seemed destined to usher in a new golden age for women in country. Didn't happen. The female acts inevitably signed in a rush after her breakthrough mostly have faded already, and Wilson's own follow-ups have offered diminishing returns both commercially and artistically. One of the Boys is a leaden disappointment overall, but the soulful "Pain Killer" (sadly, not a cover of the Judas Priest song of the same name) and a couple of other tracks offer a reminder of why she once sounded like the genre's savior.

14. Carolyn Dawn Johnson is still a star in her native Canada, but she appears to have hit a wall in the States—her label is in no rush to release her third album, Love & Negotiation, south of the border. That's a shame, because Johnson has a terrific knack for crafting catchy, smart pop-country tracks like this effervescent number.

15. Sarah Johns is a hardcore honky-tonk girl from the wilds of Kentucky, but little of her natural flair came across on her oddly restrained debut album. Big Love worked best in small doses, like this memorable gripe about a time-honored country-music quandary: the difficulty of loving a drunken asshole.

16. Michelle Branch abandoned pop stardom and defied skeptics to pursue a country career as half of the Wreckers, and it worked out splendidly—two Top 10 hits, platinum album, the whole deal. Now it appears they're already splitting, a shame given the way their debut, Stand Still, Look Pretty, injected country tropes with pop hooks and tart lyrics. "Damn That Radio," one of three new songs on their somewhat premature live souvenir, suggests the formula wasn't exhausted just yet.

17. LeAnn Rimes seized an unprecedented (for her) level of artistic control on Family, and it turns out she can do just fine for herself—it's easily her best album yet, and by far the most coherent. "Nothing Better to Do" is a jaunty ditty so infectious you might miss its knock-around storyline: Girl meets boys while hitchhiking, boys steal beer for girl, boys fight over girl, girl steals car.

18. Nashville is fickle as hell. Kellie Coffey's debut was a big hit, but when the leadoff single from her planned sophomore effort stalled at No. 24, the album never saw the light of day. Five years later she returns on her own label—and, defying the common image of the artist whose artistic sensibilities are stifled by corporate suits, the album she made on her own doesn't sound too different from the album she made for a division of the mighty Sony BMG empire. "It" is a charming, chugging number that's a little more up-tempo than Coffey usually dares.

19. I had convinced myself that Keith Urban's cover of Sarah Buxton's "Stupid Boy" (recorded after hers, but released before it) was superior to the original, by dint of a whip-ass guitar solo and a nifty gender-switch perspective change from third-person to implied first-person. But I take it all back—this is better. Buxton's voice is a grit-and-grace wonder that elevates everything she sings, and I'll gladly trade off that guitar solo for the little "So . . . " she inserts before the second verse.

20. After more than a decade establishing herself in the bluegrass field, one of America's greatest songwriters (and canniest businesswomen) now sets out to reconquer mainstream country. Like several other women here, she's doing so on her own record label; unlike the others, she has a gazillion dollars to make it work. "Better Get to Livin'" is the kind of reflexive meta-narrative only someone as universally recognized as Dolly Parton could get away with—when she sings about herself, everybody knows who she's talking about. Don't miss that "Dolly Lama" joke, by the way.

Chris Neal is the Nashville-based music editor for Country Weekly magazine and a regular contributor to Performing Songwriter, The Nashville Scene and American Profile, among other publications.

When Matos made the rule that our mixes had to contain 2007 tracks only, I got to thinking about how slippery release dates became this year—and no demographic suffered more than the female pop act. Hence this collection of songs that were either leaked in 2007 and then postponed by their respective labels, or released in Britain and forced to prove themselves before getting a release here—in some cases, as in the various songs by Sugababes and its many soloists, never seeing U.S. release at all.

Among the sad stories here are the ever-beleaguered, big-in-Japan Amerie; the stuck-in-limbo Lauryn Hill, with a soundtrack song that clearly should've been on her apocryphal third album; the much-debated, now-forgotten Kelly Clarkson (how I wish Clive Davis was proved wrong, but he wasn't); and Lil Mama, whose huge pop hit somehow didn't give her label enough confidence to release her all-but-completed album. There are totally uncontroversial stories here, too, like the evergreen Kylie, whose "2 Hearts" will see U.S. release in February; the unstoppable M.I.A., delayed but not defeated by customs; and a certain very wealthy, Michigan-born über-diva whose next album is slated for mid-'08. Among my omissions are Beyoncé's released, then pulled cover of Des'ree's "Kissing You" (didn't really fit the theme); anything by B's former Destiny-mate Kelly Rowland; and, most obviously, the heavily hyped Nicole Scherzinger, none of whose aborted single releases inspired even a shred of interest in me.

I placed dueling Brit divas Allen and Winehouse back-to-back; the selection by the latter is the alternate take that accompanied the U.S. release of Back to Black, featuring a Ghostface rap commissioned by a label nervous to break Winehouse in America (they needn't have worried). I lead off the mix with a 2005 Robyn song just seeing official U.S. release as '07 closes, and I end with the most infamously delayed diva of all, one Curtis Jackson, arguably the only "bitch" here.

Chris Molanphy is a freelance music critic and Idolator columnist ("Canon Fodder," "100 and Single") whose work has appeared in CMJ and Billboard and on RollingStone.com.

If there is a theme to my CD-R, it's that these are the songs I listened to more than others—songs I simply, compulsively immersed myself in. I tend to listen to one song over and over again, never forgetting the Fall's three R's. And thanks to iTunes software, what I do this with is pretty easy to divine—the listening I do via computer, anyway. But I also decided to skew my list towards music that perhaps people haven't heard, songs that might have been overlooked, like the amazing and all-too-brief intro song, which comes from a Table of the Elements compilation of new music from New Zealand.

A few of the songs on this CD-R, as well as on my best songs of the year list, are kind of awful. I initially had "Chocolate Rain" and "Bartender" on the CD-R list, but I realized that you should be able to see those words printed here on your screen and have the songs play in your head automatically. Unless you've never heard them, of course—which might not be a bad thing. "Glamorous" was so oversaturated this year, first on the radio and then as the background music to all kinds of crap on TV—who isn't sick of it by now? It's a diabolical song, a perfectly-crafted mash-up of pop clichés from soundtrack sounds to Ludacris' rap-by-the-numbers, which was likely written on the back of a Whopper wrapper. The whole thing sounds written by committee, but I can't help but love it.

Why am I much less embarrassed to include an R. Kelly track, when both are in their own way united in our imaginations by urine? (Fergie in a way that is simply embarrassing and Kelly in an alleged way that's far more threatening and really, really uncool.) I suppose I continue to buy into the idea of Kelly as some kind of a genius—if not quite the way Kelefa Sanneh does, then surely close to it. "Real Talk" was a revelation—how can there not have been a song quite like this before?

If I had more energy I'd decry the anti-reissue criteria imposed on this virtual mixtape. (Temporalism is totes the new rockism! OK, maybe not.) In order to reflect my taste in '07 releases, Omar Souleyman's Sublime Frequencies release Highway to Hassake: Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria would have to be featured, as well as a number of records from Dust-to-Digital, Bear Family, Collectables, Numero Group, Honest Jon's, and other fine people who release old sounds that are new to me. Yes, I'm now one of those weird old guys who listens predominantly to music from, like, 80 years ago—not quite a Steve Buscemi in Ghost World sort yet, but give me a couple years. (And a few dollars, please—record collecting is expensive.)

So much great music is never released in the first place, of course—not legitimately anyway—which is why I'm psyched there's a particularly salient Basement Tapes outtake here, courtesy of Todd Haynes' fractured, occasionally brilliant paean to Bob Dylan of the same name. (The clumsy dialogue and the easy-out of splitting the multi-faceted dude into separate creatures like some fuzzy Gremlin had me wishing Haynes were either more of a fan, or less of one.) But just hearing this one song previously buried on tape and CD bootlegs resurrected and cleaned-up a bit was a revelation for me; I'd somehow never zeroed in on this particular number. How can a song seem totally thrown-away and some brilliant relic at the same time? Such is the question that listening to the Basement Tapes always brings out, for me.

I was glad to see so much attention go to Tinariwen this year; I love their records and am totally thankful to the lovely snobs at Other Music for turning me on to them. But the best group in the Tuareg guitar revolution that I've heard has to be Group Inerane, whom I first encountered in one of Hisham Mayet's awesome films—that tranced-out snaking guitar style just fucking kills me, and the ululating backing vocals are so ace, especially since they're used sparingly. I can appreciate the stark and scholarly aesthetic of early Nonesuch recordings, but I'm partial to my "ethnic" releases recorded in the red, the guitars distorted on market stall portable amps maxed-out into glorious fuzz. Give me Sublime Frequencies and Yaala Yaala and Konono No. 1, please, thank you.

I heard a lot of complaining that 2007 was one of the worst years in music everrrrr, but that's not how I experienced it. It helps that I love so much of the music coming out of Portland, OR, where I live, as well as continuing to find so much awesome forgotten stuff reissued with love. This mix ends with a beautiful piece recorded in tribute to Sun City Girls percussionist Charles Gocher, who died earlier this year after a long battle with cancer. I miss the fuck out of him, and that band.

Mike McGonigal has written about music since 1984, when he started the fanzine Chemical Imbalance. McGonigal lives in Portland, OR, where he oversees editorial for Yeti publications and has two books of his own in the works.

"No reissues." That's what everyone else contributing to this part of our year-end survey was instructed. But since there's a much longer actual-2007 mix with my name on it coming up in this morass of love and data, and because those of us who think about music for a living configure the past as passionately as we do the present, and as constantly, I totally cheated.

For this all-reissues mix, I chose songs I was either unfamiliar with or that hit me in a new way over the past 12 months. With "Misdemeanor," that simply meant "hit me all over again"—a decade after encountering it, the track remains equally confounding and entrancing, its rhythms so slippery it's a wonder it holds together. Must be that great kid-soul vocal. The elusiveness that remains the calling card of "I'm Not There" is a blessing in another year saturated with yet more Dylan pondering. The Grant McLennan song always sounded good, but hearing it lead off his half of a joint solo best-of with fellow Go-Between Robert Forster clicked it into place, hard. As for Miles Davis, his ridiculously over the top, stupid-expensive reissue of the year (says me, whether the electorate agrees or not) laid open an era I already revered to reveal more depth, whimsy, grandeur, chaos, and sheer magnitude than even a fan like me could have imagined. This selection ends where the box begins—as a gateway into so much more.

Sometimes I avoided "more": see the J Dilla and Ennio Morricone cuts, snippets I couldn't resist that together total under two minutes. But more often I embraced it: see Tabu Ley Rochereau, who for 9:40 threads through three separate grooves, the second of which may be simultaneously the most audacious and subtlest James Brown takeoff I've ever heard, from horns to beat to the singer's expert vocal punches between the horns' dip-dip-dives; and the Wedding Present, who hammer three jittery chords into the ground for eight transported minutes. Early '70s Brazilians Novos Baianos out-rock the Wedding Present, flaunting congas even funkier than Rochereau's trap kit—though not as funky as J. Walter Negro's Latin-R&B-disco-rap ode to jacking into the city's water supply, or Canadians Punkin' Machine, whose bluntly libidinal bass-guitar tandem was dug up from the crates by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy and Pat Mahoney for my favorite DJ mix (and album) of the year. Los Hijos Del Sol and Charlie Aldrich groove a little, too, though the former is here for its tune and the latter because it's funny, as is most of the wonderful comp from which it, er, springs.

Then there are the cuts that beguile for their golden-aura haze. "Love Makes the World Go Round" is the most minimalist selection here: falsetto harmonies, timekeeping kit, sub-sea-level bass, and that's all, folks. But rather than bringing everything into severe focus, the results are as elusive—and arresting—as the smeared Dylan track. Ditto Bokoor Band, whose loping groove sounds like it's perpetually coming at you from the middle distance, without actually getting any closer, even when a mixed-high harmonica whines its simple, simple refrain. And the harmonies of the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet's a cappella gospel hymn are so trickily laid out they can be repeated for ages while just barely eluding the listener's grasp. It makes you want to go back—back to the beginning of the song, back to when this stuff was made—to see what else you missed. In another decade, I wager I'll still feel that way about this entire mix.

Michaelangelo Matos is Idolator Pop 2007's editor.

Compiled from the detritus of unraveling major label mergers, Live Nation muscle-flexing, Radiohead-Williams-Reznor marketing experiments, and lo-fi hip-hop dance novelties, 2007's best-of music lists are full of tunes that wouldn't even have made anyone's Top 100 in a less tentative year. Inspired musical statements seem increasingly harder to find in an increasingly cluttered marketplace populated by uncertain pop aspirants and jaded superstars.

Dennis Ferrer's dank and eerie electro-stomper "Church Lady" made Saturday night dance floors feel like Sunday morning, while retro synth-dance tracks like Simian Mobile Disco's hallucinatory "Believe" and Roisin Murphy's mellifluous "Let Me Know" are much groovier than they have any right to be.

Donnie's The Daily News is the year's most profound album. Defiantly rejecting post-9/11 cynicism and pessimism on songs like revisionist "Atlanta Child Murders" and sassy War on Drugs retort "Over the Counter-Culture" (featuring a wisened rhyme by Little Brother's Phonté), The Daily News is stankin' gospel-funk agitprop, the sort not heard since, well, the Voices of East Harlem. To all the customer reviewers on amazon.com who had dilemmas processing Donnie's startling lyrics while shaking their groove thing: if you want revolution, you better be able to think and dance at the same time, to paraphrase Ntozake Shangé.

Pharohe Monch and K-OS gave us eclectic, visionary records that succeeded artistically where will.i.am's flimsy Songs About Girls or Kanye's overpraised Graduation could not. Catastrophe-generating superstar Britney Spears delivered the pop album of the year (Danja-produced future-stripper-classic "Get Naked" is a superb emulsion of Euro-house and Baltimore voguing music) and how she continues to solicit next-level electro-pop production in the midst of unprecedented personal melodrama is the stuff of mystery (and legend).

Hard to choose just one Timbaland single from the urban assault on pop that was Shock Value, but the pulsating "The Way I Are" sounded like nothing else. Teaming up with Tim and Danja, Justin Timberlake finally created a worthy successor to anything on M.J.'s Off the Wall with his string-laden "Lovestoned/I Think She Knows."

The year's club bangers include Too $hort's barely-heard "This My One," L'il Mama's audaciously narcissistic "Lip Gloss," Rihanna's well-sung "Umbrella," Beyoncé's ultra-campy remix of "Get Me Bodied," Mario's neo-classical-meets-video-game "Kryptonite," and Lloyd's minimalist ode to Technotronic, "Get It Shawty." Given no love by critics at year's end, T-Pain is hip-hop's commercial success story artist of '07 (and probably '08). Tallahassee's crunked-out Muslim Vocoder freak spins a heart-on-your-sleeve pop soul yarn on "Bartender" that surprises with genuine moments of vulnerability.

Rahsaan Patterson will never receive his full due in an industry where urban audiences remain preoccupied by staged album release battles between insecure multi-platinum hip-hop moguls. But operating under the radar has allowed Patterson to release a consecutive string of masterful albums that place him squarely as the true heir to Stevie Wonder's artistic legacy.

Tay Zonday's "Chocolate Rain" is for sure the song of the year, a dissertation-worthy indictment of global racism that somehow managed to get multi-millions of views on YouTube. OK, it wasn't officially released, so it probably shouldn't count for this mix. But given the people-have-the-power social-networking era in which we live, isn't it time we rethink the meaning of the 'officially released' single?

Jason King is the Artistic Director and founding full-time faculty member of the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at New York University, where he teaches classes on record producing, branding and marketing, hip-hop, and R&B. A longtime journalist for magazines like Vibe, Blender, and the Village Voice, he has produced multi-day conference events at NYU such as "Sylvester: The Life and Work of a Musical Icon," and "The Making of Public Enemy's 'It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back.'" His company, the Superlatude Music Group, works with independent and major label recording artists to develop brand strategies. Jason serves on the advisory board of the R&B Foundation and has completed his first book, Blue Magic: Spirit and Energy in Popular Music, for Duke University Press.

Every year, dozens of films are scripted, shot, and then promptly scuppered, victims of fickle studio heads. Some of these films are true turkeys, the bread-and-butter of the direct-to-video market. Some of them, though, are masterpieces. The Rob Schneider vehicle Bill Becomes Law is the latter.

I saw Bill when I was covering the Little Venice Film Festival for the blog ClingFilm. Little Venice, for those of you out-of-the-know, is a small town in South Dakota, famous for its triangle ice cream and "toxic clouds." Bill Becomes Law screened only once, to four people, but every one of those people went on to make movies of their own. (I'm halfway through mine as we speak.)

The premise of Bill is simple: Schneider plays lonely postman Bill Williamson, who lives alone in a grimy studio apartment in Huguenot, Mississippi. He has no friends, no family, no prospects for an interesting future. One day, while on his rounds, a limo pulls up alongside him. A window opens, and an old man says, "Reginald, is that you?" As it turns out, Williamson has been mistaken for billionaire playboy Reginald Law, who's recently gone missing. He's whisked up to the Law mansion where his life changes almost immediately: he's pampered with gifts, he has his choice of 27 sports cars, and he enjoys the affections of Law's longtime girlfriend Alexis (Tara Reid, in the role she was born to play).

This presents Bill with a problem: he's started to genuinely fall in love with Alexis, but he can't bear living a lie. Should he tell her about the mix-up, and risk losing everything, or should he continue the charade? Complicating matters: Law disappeared because he was rubbed out by a member of the Rotola crime family after welching on several million dollars worth of bad debts. A member of the family spies Williamson at the Law mansion and assumes the hit man failed to carry out his mission—a mistake he immediately sets out to correct. With a gunman at his heels and his lavish life seconds from disappearing, how can Bill possibly wriggle out unscathed? You won't believe what happens (or so claims the movie's poster), when Bill Becomes Law.

This film is never coming out—I've already heard several people refer to it as the "Mr. Arkadin of Rob Schneider movies"—but I did manage to get a copy of the soundtrack, which makes canny use of many of 2007s biggest hits. What I'm attempting with my year-end mix is to reconstruct the soundtrack to Bill Becomes Law, so that perhaps, through its music, you can experience the film's glorious wonder.

1. Does any song say bottomless despair better than this one? We open in Bill's squalid apartment. We follow him alone all day on his route, we watch him eat dinner off a card table in front of Press Your Luck reruns. The Fray song both establishes the tone and raises a potent question: how do you save a life? We're about to spend 87 minutes finding out.

2. When the Law limousine pulls up alongside Bill for the first time, just seconds away from changing his life forever, this is what's playing on the car radio. Can you say "foreshadowing"?

3. Bill arrives at the Law mansion, jaw hanging open. It's enormous—full-on marble columns, arced ceiling, stuffy butler, thousand-dollar silverware you throw out when you're done, and five nameless ladies batting a beach ball around in the swimming pool. Something tells me the fine folks of the 350-750 block of Rider Avenue in Huguenot aren't going to be getting much mail this week!

4. This song's first few chords are looping the first time Bill lays eyes on Reginald's girlfriend Alexis. They hold each other's gaze for ages, she thinking her long-lost boyfriend has finally come home, he realizing the stakes have just gotten much, much higher. "What you do to me," indeed.

5. Who cares that lyrically it's not the best fit? This pop-punk confection (trademark, please!) is the perfect accompaniment to scenes of Bill zooming around the mansion on a neon Segway, reorganizing the Law's filing cabinet for them ("Where did he learn to file that way?" they ask) and playing basketball against the L.A. Lakers on the Law's regulation-size court. That it's intercut with scenes of Alexis laughing giddily makes it so much the better. Message received: being a lonely postal worker is, like, so whatever.

6. No, Bill, don't give laxatives to the Weimaraner!

7. Another weird choice lyrically, but the song's foreboding atmosphere is the perfect accompaniment for the first time a member of the Rotola crime family catches Williamson galavanting around the Law mansion and wonders if perhaps hit man Shorty "Tall Boy" Middler hadn't "finished the job."

8. Bill, continuing his filing project for the Law family, comes across Reginald's financial records and realizes, to his horror, why it is that Reginald has "disappeared." He also now understands the source of those strange late-night phone calls, the purpose of that guy in the trench coat who keeps turning up, and the reason that black Cadillac has been parked across the street for weeks.

9. The showdown: the Rotola crime family arrives in full at the Law mansion, ready to rub out Reginald (or so they think) once and for all. Little do they know that they're arriving in the middle of the Law's annual full-family dinner party. The scene is a delicious burst of chaos, complete with flying bullets, screaming children and the requisite food fight. (Oh no! Who let Grandpa Law near the tiramisu?!) It ends when Bill, now realizing the full impact of what he's done, clambers up on a table and hollers: "STOP!"

10. The jig is up. In front of the entire Law clan, the head of the Rotola crime family and—what's worse—a tearful Alexis, Bill admits to the scam he's been running. "How dare you," steams an outraged Sylvia Law, "how dare you lie to my family, betray our trust and play on our emotions just to get to our money!" Looking meaningfully into Alexis's misty brown eyes, Bill softly responds: "It wasn't for the money." And with that, he turns around and walks out.

11. Bill is back at the Post Office, back in that ratty uniform, looking pale and glum and more hopeless than when we met him. But, wait—what's that you say? There's a new girl starting work at the Post Office today? We sense her before we see her: Alexis, showing up for her first day on the job. I ask you, have the postal blues ever looked sexier? Slowly, Bill and Alexis make their way toward each other, dumbfounded, thrilled, overwhelmed. And then, just as the song hits that magnificent chorus, they meet in the center of the sorting room and sink deep into a passionate kiss. Every postal worker in the room with them, without really knowing why, bursts into applause. Roll credits: masterpiece accomplished. I'm getting choked up just writing about it.

J. Edward Keyes is the managing editor of eMusic.