Ann Powers' Top 20 Albums Of 2022
2022 feels like the right time to make some basic inquiries about popular music. What is a song now, when the listening experience for millions has shifted toward algorithm-driven, fragmented viral sounds, or their opposite, the seamless vibe flow that makes tracks indistinguishable on streaming services? Why make albums if so few people even bother to listen beyond the first track that pops up in their playlists? These questions are hardly new; yet this year I felt a greater commitment to exploring them among the artists whose music lingered in my memory. Albums veered into the realm of ideas, even when they weren't "concept albums," per se. Track by track, they laid out powerful narratives, or web-like, explored particular themes, or formed self-portraits in layers of melody, rhythm and verse.
Today we experience so much noise, and often without thinking turn it into an infinite soundtrack. I wake up to my alarm's little snippet of Joan Shelley's "Amberlit Morning" and head to the kitchen, where the smart refrigerator beeps and the coffeemaker zings. I walk outside, and Bad Bunny plays on a worker's truck radio as I walk the dog, while the groan of the garbage trucks mingle with the whoosh of the accordion bus and a train whistle in the distance. At the gas station, a tiny television on the pump shouts out the deals in the quick-mart; downtown, electronic billboards blare and tailored-to-retail playlists chase me from door to door. All of this competes with and feeds the sound-bit memory loops in my own head: the song that lingers from that movie I watched last night, that anthem the band
