Triple Trouble

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2004 IN REVIEW

News

• The Rainier Bear and death by Lava Lamp. By Rick Anderson
• Goodbye, or good riddance, to the dearly departed. Mossback, by Knute Berger
• Ichiro, the Storm, Sonics. By Mike Henderson
• National media follies. By Geov Parrish

Music

• Two CDs' worth of what we think are the best local tracks of 2004.
• Seattle Weekly critics pick the year's best music overall.
• An MP3 CDR of reissues.
• 273 songs, 22 hours of 2004's best music.By Michaelangelo Matos

Film, Stage, Classical

• 10 best films of the year. By Brian Miller
• Local theater had something for everyone. By Steve Wiecking
• Classical triumphs. By Gavin Borchert

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• What's a Better Deal: $10 a Month to Listen to 13 Million Songs (Rhapsody), or $2 to Hear the Music You Already Own (iTunes Match)?
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• Napster, Digital Rights Management, and Lawsuits Against 12-Year-Olds: 10 Defining Moments in Digital Music History
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• The Head and the Heart's iTunes Session Offers Disciples a Peek Into the Band's Evolving Sound
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More About

• Apple iTunes
• Kanye West
• Ludacris
• Hip-Hop and Rap
• Dirty South

For 2003's Year in Music issue, I began putting together my year-end CD-R MP3 playlist in late November and limited myself to 101 songs—about seven and a half hours' worth of music, enough for six audio CDs. This year, I started keeping track in March, and included as much as I wanted. As a result, the 2004 edition is three times as large as last year's, filling three MP3 CD-Rs and 15 audio CDs (17 if you include the bonus tracks). Each paragraph below represents a single disc's worth of material, which is how I assembled them.

As before, a few caveats apply. These are not "ranked" lists—they're playlists meant for listening. I limited myself to one song per primary credited artist, though there are exceptions—hip-hop's bread and butter is the guest spot, which means a lots of rappers appear more than once. Jay-Z is on here five times as a result of Black Album remix mania—in all but one case, the remixer got the artist credit, which I honored; Kanye West and Common's "Better Than Yours" (a mixtape freestyle over Kelis' "Milkshake") fudged its way in as a collaboration-not-artist-plus-guest.

All of which makes what follows a little unfair, strictly speaking. Lousy albums with one good song automatically gain parity with great CDs I had to struggle to choose only one track from. And I missed and/or overlooked plenty; feel free to send your lists care of the Weekly. But, hey—life is unfair. It's also a lot of fun—and to my ears, so is what follows.