Are they really so juvenile as to believe a pop song is going to bring down the CCP? Are millions of people going to take to the streets of Beijing singing Chinese Democracy and demanding sweeping political changes?

Ah, is it December already? That means it’s time for ten best lists. Every magazine, newspaper, TV station, web site and stinky beancurd cart is busy sharing their opinions, informed and otherwise, on the artistic (ahem) achievements of the year.

Faithful readers probably know that I generally steer clear of doing these kinds of lists, in part because in past years I’ve thought that listing just 10 albums I like is too limiting, while listing 50 (as the UK music magazines do) is just plain silly. When you’ve got to list 50, you end up having to include frontline artists even if they made less than stellar recordings in the past year, like Oasis or Coldplay, just to fill up the slots.

This year is different – I’m not listing the ten best albums of the year because I can’t come up with ten new releases this year that I thoroughly enjoyed and am still listening to.

It’s easy to say that’s because my tastes are skewing old now and that I’m out of touch with popular music but with the exception of certain genres, I don’t think that’s true. I think I’m as open to new sounds and new artists as I ever was; it’s just that so much of what I’m hearing sounds too much like stuff I’ve heard before.

Also, being old, I have a hard time remembering what albums were released within the last year. I start to fumble around coming up with titles and find that most of the ones I’m thinking of came out in 2007. So I turn to those lists already published, hoping to use them as a guide, a memory refresher and even as pointers to things that I might have missed.

The first thing I noticed is that so far, no one has included Guns n’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy on their year end list. That might be because it was released so late in the year that the lists were already compiled. Or it could be because people just don’t seem to like Axl Rose.

I could never tell you that Chinese Democracy is a great album, at least not with a straight face. But this ten-years-in-the-making non-epic is quite okay and better than anyone could reasonably expect, with several hummable melodies, dense layers of production and shredding pop metal guitar all over the place.

But the best part of this album is that the Chinese Communist Party feels so threatened by its very existence, as well as the fact that the title song name checks the Falun Gong. The Global Times has declared, as reported in Variety, that this album is part of a plot by westerners to “grasp and control the world using democracy as a pawn.” Are they really so juvenile as to believe a pop song is going to bring down the CCP? Are millions of people going to take to the streets of Beijing singing Chinese Democracy and demanding sweeping political changes? I think it’s more likely that the Interscope label bribed them and that the attack is merely a viral marketing stunt to help push sales of a record that will probably never earn back its massive production costs.

Axl Rose may have taken 17 years to follow up his last album of original tunes, but it’s been 19 years in between albums for Grace Jones, who also reportedly scrapped a couple of albums in progress before finally coming out with Hurricane this year. I’m a huge fan of Jones’s 80’s albums recorded at Compass Point. Warm Leatherette, Slave to the Rhythm and the others were extremely influential and while she may be best known as a model and Bond villain, her versions of songs as disparate as La Vie En Rose, Demolition Man and Private Life came close to being the definitive versions of those songs. (I also knew her during this period and, contrary to her public image, I found her to be not only incredibly sexy but also very warm and sweet, though she’d probably hate for people to know that.)

So it’s nice to be able to report that this new album, an all-star affair recorded with Brian Eno, Sly & Robbie, Wendy & Lisa, Wally Badarou, Tricky and others, is every bit as strong as her older work. And for the first time, Jones has co-written every song on the album, making it a truly personal affair.

Meanwhile, the album that I would probably say was my favorite of the year, Real Animal by Alejandro Escovedo, hasn’t appeared on any of these lists yet. Here’s a guy who’s been consistently making great music for decades, 57 years old and putting out one of the best if not the best album of his career and six months later it’s been forgotten by the so-called taste makers. Feh.

So that’s what’s not on the list. What made it? I’ve got 42 of the 50 albums on Q’s top 50 list and I’ve tried to listen to all of them at least a couple of times. (Don’t ask me where I find the time. The short answer is, sleep is over-rated.)

But as I said, I’ve found most of 2008’s new bands to be a pretty uninspiring crew. As one example, Seattle’s Fleet Foxes’ debut album ranked pretty high for a lot of list makers. They’re number 1 on Mojo’s list and number 2 on lists from Q and Rough Trade. Rough Trade calls them “Seattle’s answer to CSNY” but seriously, is that a question that anyone in their right mind was asking? I’ve listened to it a couple of times and thought they had a good sound but I didn’t hear great songs. Perhaps I’ll give them another shot.

The truth is, most of the albums released this year that I really enjoyed came from veterans. People like Nick Cave, Randy Newman, Portishead, Goldfrapp, James Hunter, AC/DC, Lindsey Buckingham, Jenny Lewis, Emmylou Harris and Al Green, among others.

Reissue of the year for me was very likely going to be the 5 New Order albums released in two disc definitive editions for gathering up all the non-LP singles and some of the key remixes and B sides. But there are huge problems with the remasters, especially on each of the 2nd discs – some music blogs have noted over 300 different audio problems on the discs, leading the record company to announce that they plan to clean this up and then reissue the reissues, absurd as that sounds. Why didn’t anyone bother to listen to these before they went out the door?

So instead I’ll tag Tell Tale Signs, volume 8 in the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series. This 2 disc (or 3 discs in an overpriced collectors version that, yes, sigh, I bought) consists mainly of alternate takes of songs from the past 20 years. The reason I like it so much is that it makes the case that if Bob Dylan didn’t exist until after Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks, he’d still be Bob Dylan – one of the most important writers and performers of the 20th century.

At any rate, even if 2008 wasn’t a great year for music, it wasn’t a completely bad year either. Bye bye 2008, here’s hoping 2009 is better.