Top 10 albums of the year 2001

Looking back over the year, I have mixed feelings of 2001's music. We had the bloody great (the White Stripes, the Strokes), the usual crap (Atomic Kitten, Blue and yet more Britney) and the downright awful (DJ Otzi, stand up and take a bow). The phrases "the new Rolling Stones" and "deserve to be bigger than the Beatles" were thrown at the Yank feet of the Strokes and the White Stripes. And although I give the Strokes two years at the most, its nice to hear a band that lives up to the hype (except the Rolling Stones part). However the two best and most hyped bands of the year paved the way for a host of new bands which rock to greater or ...

...and all but one under £10 too! I nearly wet myself when I noticed this category. You see it's a combination of two of my favourite pastimes - music and deliberating! You see I'm a Libra, constantly striving for equilibrium, or at least a new CD! Anyway, back to the task - picking my ten favourite CDs from 2001. From a list of at least 40, I managed to throw some away, as they hadn't been released in 2001. This meant kissing goodbye to Esthero, Jill Scott, Mr Scruff, Red Snapper, Nu Yorican Soul, Lemon Jelly, Kinobe and the Nightmares On Wax amongst others. Of course, I argued with myself about this as they had been my favourite CDs during ...

It's not as though we need another top ten list, is it? Television in 2001 was full of 'em - from movies to television families and back again. And yeah; they're boring, most of the time. Everybody knows the winner's either gonna be Star Wars, Homer Simpson or John Lennon's 'Imagine'. Lists suck. They're easy, lazy, and in television, cheap. That's why there's so many of them, then. Obviously. But 2001, a year, for so many, of heartbreak and fear, did, elsewhere, redeem itself. Indeed, it was a year when popular music underwent yet more change - suddenly Nu-Metal and Punk were back to the forefront of youth awareness; ...