Goodbye, 2008.

Lists! Lists are everywhere!

And you thought you were done with them.

But lists are a bad habit. They appeal to the worst in us. In music fans, who look for ways to validate their tastes, either by feeling good or angry about published picks. And in music writers, The Stranger's not included, who feed off, for the most part, ugly instincts for dishonest, one-of-each-genre variety and an attempt to find quick credibility with their readers and peers.

Lists have also become ineffective for the way they seem to increasingly need someone to apologize for the entries' faults, with writers often explicitly trying to brush away the problems like they didn't matter. If "Best Albums" lists, for example, were accurate, they'd be called "Most Interesting Albums" — which isn't a bad thing — and a look back at previous years' choices generally leave you with a sense of embarrassment or of being cheated.

Part of this clearly comes from the itch to look at the history of music through a series of albums, or the invention of the CD itself, when the album idea lost its A/B-side dynamic and musicians began to indulge themselves with 74-minute quantity-over-quality, and mp3s made it even worse. But that's a blah-blah-blah story.

This, then, is what we remember of 2008.

Which might look like a list.

Wahey!

Pop : Out-Of-Breath
After last year's onslaught of pop music, nothing in the last twelve months was as good as Kylie's X — potentially the album of her career — or Siobhán Donaghy's lush and left-field and beautifully astonishing Ghosts. While there was a classic girl-pop album between 2008's efforts by Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Britney Spears, and The Saturdays, none of them could gel quite enough to give a thrill.

And where's the Robyn follow-up?

Dubstep : Flatlines
Bigger than ever, dubstep lost its touch with the sour-faces of Distance, Silkie, Martyn, and Likhan. But it also went hardcore (Caspa's "Where's My Money" remix), ridiculous (Joker's "Snake Eater"), and universal (Benga & Coki's "Night"). The bass of RSD's "Over It" knocked molecules out of the air, while Chase & Status's "Eastern Jam" brought life back to the idea of incorporating sounds of the developing world. There was The Bug's London Zoo as well, an excellent and brutish, full-length descent into unexpected ragga-fried dubstep. At a Skream set in London, and later in Seattle, we leapt around like a monkey with mobs of people as a load of worries for the genre melted away, grateful that the man from Croydon remains the scene's leading light.

Indie : Going A Bit Bald
Indie music continues its 21st century descent into bullshit cool and self-parody.

Don't think of The Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name" and the way its many-songs-in-one exponentially improves with each second, layering itself into a manic ultra-climax. Don't think of Mystery Jets' "Two Doors Down" for being the least obnoxious and most addictive track '80s kitsch has given us to date. Also don't think of Kaiser Chiefs' "Like It Too Much" for being a glowing anthem of chemicals and British pop, Crystal Castles' "Alice Practice" for its traumatic use in a heartbreaking scene in the television series "Skins", Primal Scream for inventing sunshine Krautrock, and Hadouken! for recovering the dialogue between white guitar music and black dance-culture.

Think, however, of earnest, over-orchestrated, vaguely melodic indie music that continues to dominate the genre — Coldplay, The Editors, Arcade Fire, and everyone they've inspired, from M83 to The Helio Sequence — which wants to be epic and important, but ends up sounding like afternoon specials with Bryan Adams running in an allergy-medication field of the human spirit.

Green Gartside of Scritti Politti writes:

What I hear in is an agglomeration of mannerisms, clichés, and devices. It's monotonous in its textures and in the old-fashioned, nasty, clunky '80s rhythms and eighth-note basslines. It isn't, as people are suggesting, richly rewarding and inventive. The melodies stick too closely to the chord changes. [The] voice uses certain stylistic devices — it goes wobbly and shouty, then whispery — and I guess people like wobbly and shouty going to whispery, they think it signifies real feeling. It's rather flat and unlovely.

Indie music has been in creative panic for a while, a mid-life crisis, and engaging in generic post-punk revivals (U.K.) and add-instruments-until-someone-notices (U.S.) will unfortunately never be anything but a red sports-car.

Sophisticated, Feminine Electro-Pop : Back
You could have had a good time arguing with friends about the individual approaches of Annie, Ladyhawke, and Parralox — all coming off like modern, somewhat fresh riffs on Blondie and the Pet Shop Boys — and it'll be interesting to see where the next year takes us, with the likes of Little Boots and Lily Allen going for the same gold.

Shit '80s Keyboards : Fashionable
Now more than ever, welcome in everything from cheap 8-bit local bands (Truckasauras) to celebrity mallternative (Metro Station). But usually end up as D.O.A. attempts for irony or innovation.

Grime : Lost Its Mind
Dizzee Rascal and Wiley broke into the electro-grime club with their first massive, runaway, mainstream hit singles, and JME reasserted the scene's original significance with Famous? ("123", "Boogiedown Bass"), while bassline — the latest in the acid house, jungle, 2-step, dubstep continuum — grew in the corner with Dexplicit and A1 Bassline, watching, waiting, for its time in the British, working-class, future-paving dance-culture spotlight.

James
Back after seven years. A Top 10 celebratory comeback.

A burst of white-light and Mancunian guitars — and dedicated to Tony Wilson.

Hey Ma is more fascinating and beautiful than it has any right to be.

We sang "boys in body bags" in our bedroom and in front of them in England, a line from the new album's title-track, one of the band's best achievements and one of the only euphoric protest songs ever written.

Uncool. Unfashionable.

Impossibly good.

This is, whatever it eventually means, the 2008 that springs to mind.

Not horrible, not spectacular, but a year of sounds in transition.

A year of mixed-messages.

Things can only get better?