Triple Trouble

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.