This is Ridiculous

For the past couple of weeks, I've been deciding about whether or not to renew my Entertainment Weekly subscription when it expires in February. I generally love the magazine, the articles are usually well-done and actually stick to entertainment matters and doesn't fly off the deep end with political crap (unlike another certain "entertainment" magazine). Sure, it's "Greatest Ever" lists generally suck, they did devote a tad too much coverage to Stephenie Meyer and Twilight over the past year and I'm really tight on money right now. Needless to say, I was on the fence and had no clue what to do...that is, until I received this week's issue in the mail a couple of days ago. It's the year end issue, covering the best and worst of 2008. I flipped to the music section to check out their critic's Top 10 lists and I was so shocked and outraged by what I saw that I decided then and there that I wasn't going to renew my subscription. Any magazine that thinks that this is the second best album in any year...

...and thinks that this is one of the five worst of the year...

...is not a magazine that will be getting my money anytime soon. I can understand if Duffy isn't your preferred style of music (Lord knows that I have my blind spots as well) but calling Rockferry "strangely blank" and Duffy "a pretty doll propped up by opportunistic industry shills" is horribly out of line. Didn't Nickelback release an album this year? Surely that must have been more devoid of well-crafted songs than Duffy's album. And if the words "strangely blank" were to be applied to any album from 2008, wouldn't it be I Am...Sasha Fierce? Don't people realize that between the two discs there are only two songs ("Single Ladies" and "Radio") that are above average? The rest of the filler tracks range from dull to simply God awful. How anyone can find this the second best album of the year is simply beyond me.