In the Village Voice last month, some brief thoughts on Jay Farrar, Annuals, The Budos Band, 50 Cent, and Tortoise.

I’m part of a really cool Yearbook project over at eMusic — they asked ten writers to submit essays about musical trends during one year from the last decade in an attempt to sum it all up. We were basically given carte blanche with regard to possible angles and approaches, so what resulted is an intriguingly varied set of reflections on and refractions of the last ten years, both musical and otherwise.

For example, my piece zeroes in on retro R&B and soul label Daptone Records, which put out some of its strongest in-house records thus far in 2007 while simultaneously helping coax out chart-topping releases from Amy Winehouse and Jay-Z. (This was actually the second time I’ve had a chance to shoot the breeze with Daptone head Gabe Roth, the first being the technically-oriented interview [PDF] I did for Tape Op that year inquiring about his production techniques.)

The other essays are all very much worth your time too, though. I suppose I’ve already done quite enough gushing over eMusic’s editorial crew, but it bears repeating briefly here — these are all writers whose work I’ve been following for years, so I’m delighted to have made the shortlist for this.

• 2000: Slate‘s Hua Hsu on the awkwardness of technological puberty
• 2001: Rolling Stone‘s Melissa Maerz on New York’s rebirth after September 11th
• 2002: The A.V. Club‘s Michaelangelo Matos on the role of DJ’s
• 2003: Magnet Magazine editor Matthew Fritch on the Canadian indie rock invasion
• 2004: Needs-no-introduction Douglas Wolk on geopolitical unrest
• 2005: Living legend Chuck Eddy on the last gasps of major label hard rock
• 2006: Pitchfork‘s Jess Harvell on emo’s maturity or lack thereof
• 2007: Yours truly on old-soul funk as the anti-Radiohead
• 2008: The Village Voice‘s Christopher R. Weingarten on the election as the end of days
• 2009: eMusic editorial director J. Edward Keyes on erasing elitism