2011- THE YEAR IN REVIEW

2011, you were a year. And in that year I blogged about you. From Nicki Minaj to Feeling Like a Plastic Bag, to X-Friends to Girls Love Me, it's been wild ride. Here is the list of everything I liked from the year Twenty aught Eleven, all the stuff I missed, and all the stuff we can look back on and say, "how did we let that happen?".

ALBUM OF THE YEAR
Fleet Foxes- Helplessness Blues

The problem with folk music is that folk music is our parent's music. Blowing in the Wind and If I had a Hammer and Like a Rolling Stone caused some real change in world back in the days. It was popular music; it had a message. Ever since O Brother Where Art Thou?, folk has come back to it's roots, with spirituals and old timey songs about farmers. But the time was dawning for the young people to have a folk zeitgeist moment.

Flash forward to 2011. How will this year be remembered?

Protests.

And like in the protests of old, we needed folk music.

Helplessness Blues effortlessly weaves together old timey folk songs, songs about barns (The Shrine) and the night sky (Blue Spotted Tail) with songs about hipster girls (Bedouin Dress) and the song that explains why my generation is protesting.




The lyrics say it

"I was raised up believing I was somehow unique, Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see. And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me."

After years of being told we were all unique, all we really wanted to do was be "a functioning cog in some great machinery". And when the going got tough, the great machinery called us to Facebook and Twitter, and then to the streets of Cairo, Tripoli, and New York. Fleet Foxes called it.

MOVIE OF THE YEAR
X-Men First Class

The original X-Men is a great movie. X2 is one of the smartest action movies of all time.
X-Men The Last Stand was disappointing at best.
Wolverine had me randomly yelling at the sky I was so upset.

But they were making a new one, and I felt like I was the only one who was excited. So, how were they going to make it better.
#1- Preboot. Not a reboot, because it's the same continuity, but we're gonna just start over when the old characters were young.
#2- Mad Men. Everyone loves Mad Men. Let's put it in the 60s! Let's get fucking January Jones to play Betty Draper with super powers!
#3- Get Michael Fassbender to play Magneto right before he becomes Academy Award Nominee Michael Fassbender.

The movie's a hit, and more importantly, people who hated X-Men 3 and Wolverine are talking about how they're excited for the rest of the X-Men movies.
This is X-Men 5, by the way, and now the franchise has life.

Strangely enough, this isn't the first part 5 to breathe life into a franchise this year...

Everyone complains about Hollywood making too many sequels. But apparently, you just gotta hold on through 3 and 4, because 5 will be worth it.

SONG OF THE YEAR
LMFAO- I'm Sexy and I Know It




Ever since 2008 when Lady Gaga told us to just dance, it's been four on the motherfucking floor. Every single song on the radio has had a four quarter note bass drum pattern to the point of every car with the bass turned up sounds like a gay bar in 90s Brooklyn.

No song since the advent of four on the floor radio has simultaneously tried to parody yet sincerely pay tribute to the radio sounding like a gay club better than  this song. whose refrain is simply "I work out". It's awful, it's beautiful, it's joyous, it's the reason you listen to pop music.

MUSIC VIDEO OF THE YEAR
Tyler, the Creator- Yonkers



It's in black in white. He eats a bug. He pukes. His eyes are fucked up. He kills himself.
Then, we all got online. We found out he's 19. He lives at his grandma's house. He gives away his albums for free on tumblr. And now, thanks to that fucking awesome video, he's a star.

THAT'S THE NEW ARTIST MODEL IN ACTION. IT WORKS. FUCK YOU, LARS ULRICH.

TV SHOW OF THE YEAR
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Let me explain.

The Hub is a TV network owned by Hasbro. They play shows like GI Joe and Transformers and Pound Puppies and anything else that was a toy and could be a show. In 2010 the Hub got Lauren Faust of Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends to develop a new My Little Pony show. It went by unnoticed... until somebody freaked out and said it was "the death knell for creator driven animation".

So like any overreaction on the internet, 4chan decided to troll it. It can't be that bad right? I mean everyone loves the Powerpuff Girls?

Suddenly, a flame war erupted. Half of 4chan were pony haters, and the other half were Bronies. The Bronies tried to share the message of love and friendship and seriously the most well rounded female characters on TV since Buffy but they just happen to be ponies.

Skip to 2011. Now in it's second season, the show knows who it's target audience is. And now it does stuff like this:



and this



and not to mention has a character named "Derpy Hooves"

Basically, if this show had direwolves, it would be perfect. Speaking of which...

BEST TV MOMENT
Game of Thrones: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Seriously, if you haven't seen Game of Thrones, DON'T click the link. It will ruin the whole season.
SPOILERS
 But if you have:
WHAT THE FUCK, DID THAT JUST HAPPEN?!?!?!?! WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK?!?! THEY JUST DID THAT?!
#winteriscoming

PERSON OF THE YEAR
Charlie Sheen

(YEAH IT'S THE WHOLE FUCKING VIDEO!)
We know the catch phrases: winning, tigerblood, Vatican assassin Warlock. And suddenly, an unemployed crazy person became our hero. Everything he said became a catchphrase and we let him get away with it. And honestly, why not? He had the bravado to actively fail and call it "winning".

But behind the highly enjoyable train wreck, there was the haunting message of a quote that slipped by, the true moral of the ballad of Charlie Sheen:
"I was people pleasing for too long."
The point of this man's cautionary tale: live for yourself and be your own person, or you'll be on 20/20 talking about your Adonis DNA while the world laughs at you.

VIDEO GAME OF THE YEAR
Portal 2
After a while, Hollywood decided it was easier to adapt books into movies rather than writing them and get CGI Transformers rather than actors. It's working, because I just described the top two films of the year. So where are the top actors and writers going to now?

Easy, video games. If Hollywood is losing its cred as art, video games are gaining major cred. Take this scene from Portal 2, a conversation between a dying man via his recorded journals and a woman-turned into a computer- turned into a potato.



This is where America's real creative talent is going. And I like it.


YOUTUBE VIDEO OF THE YEAR
Friday



you know Friday. But do you know story of Friday?
Clarence Jey and Patrice Wilson, producers at Ark Music Factory realized that there's an easier way to make money than with hit songs.

#1- find rich parents who want their kids to be famous
#2- charge $2000 up front to write a "hit single"
#3- write a terrible song so that they will fade away and not worry about royalties.
#4- ???
#5- PROFIT!!!

So they wrote Friday. Nothing rhymed, it was about getting dressed, and they pitch corrected her until her pitch was incorrect. And they put it on the internet. And they walked away with $2000 dollars.

UNTIL...
The Daily What posted this on March 11
By March 17th, it had been viewed 10 million times.
March 18th was a Friday. And everyone started posting it again.
We all unanimously hated it, but we couldn't stop watching. It became the biggest youtube hit of the year.
And then Rebecca came to Patrice and Clarence and asked where her royalties were.

Basically, this happened:



The Producers happened in real life. But the world saw it in the scope of a week, and it was a bigger hit than Springtime for Hitler. But it just gets better.

 After a while, we realized we kinda liked the poor kid. I have friends (coughcough Chris Welch) who listen to Friday unironically. Tyler, the Creator and Odd Future, the most amoral, anti-establishment rappers in the game opened their Boston concert with a Friday dance party

the most popular show on TV performed it without irony

and Katy Perry, who had the most hits on one album since Michael Jackson, gave her the guest treatment, bringing her onstage with her and having her guest star in a video for a number one hit, "Last Friday Night".


Yeah, that video rocks now.
Friday will go down as a hit, and proof that in the digital age, overnight sensations actually happen overnight.

And finally
PHOTO OF THE YEAR

It gives me great solace to know that the British aristocracy doesn't know how to dress.