It's that time of year again. Best of the year time. I'm starting with albums, because I doubt any new release between now and 2011 will disrupt the top ten I've been compiling in my mind the last few weeks (I'll be exclusively listening to Christmas music for the next few weeks in any case). So here are my picks, in reverse order.

But auto-tune is just one of many digital enhancement tools in the air-brush arsenal of the Photoshop world. The irony of auto-tune's disposition as the joke of Y2K remix culture is that it's really no worse than any of the other digital tools we have at our disposal to, for example, take clips from TV and turn them into re-edited assemblages ripe for viral video glory.

I’m pretty sure that Kanye West and Joe Wilson have nothing in common. Kanye is a swaggerific hip-hop fashionista who wears Alexander McQueen suits and Yohji Yamamoto gloves, and whose vanity is only eclipsed by his ego. Joe Wilson is an extremely white, Southern Republican congressman who has never heard a Wu-Tang Clan song and who once voted against the removal of the confederate flag at South Carolina’s capital. But West and Wilson do have one thing in common: Both men are tactless, disrespectful opportunists.