Suffering from both year-end-list fatigue and FOMO? Let us make this year’s instant-nostalgia process easier for you.
Like an army of elves trying to fill Santa’s big invoice before C-Day, critics around the world spend the final weeks of December furiously toiling away at compiling end-of-year lists for everything from Best Gaga Outfits to Worst Film Cameo. But after you’ve read 30 or 40 lists of the best indie-rock albums, the selections tend to blur together. Rather than add to the pile, we’ve picked out some of the most interesting Best Of lists currently flooding your Twitter feed. Enjoy.
10. Buzznet’s Moratorium on Fashion Trends of 2011 is a pretty good reminder of all the looks we shouldn’t have tried to pull off.
9. Despite the fact that even my mom knows how to use Adobe Illustrator, high paid designers still manage to make some barf-tastic movie posters. Fortunately, New York magazine gives us the good and the bad with their 10 Best and Worst Movie Posters.
8. If there is one musical act who deserves their own end of year list (other than maybe Odd Future), it’s Oklahoma City psych-rockers The Flaming Lips. Free from their major-label contract, they spent the year collaborating with everyone, pushing songs to impossible lengths and sticking music inside gummy things—some of which are detailed on Exclaim’s Top 5 Highlights from the Flaming Lips’ Wild Year.
7. New York City’s esteemed alt-weekly, the Village Voice had the good sense not to run these best-of lists, but to turn their collective rejection into an even better list: 10 Discarded Ideas for End-of-2011 Lists.
6. Pitchfork’s Year In Photos list would have just been pretty okay, except for the inclusion of ANIMATED GIFS!
5. Leave it to Gawker to find the 10 Least Fascinating People of 2011.
4. While it’s sort of just a advertising gimmick for Ask.com, the website’s Top Questions of 2011 list is also a good gauge for what we’re curious about.
3. Buzzfeed’s 45 Most Powerful Photos of 2011 is worth at least 45,000 words.
2. The most creative list of the year isn’t even really a list, but a montage: Namely, Matt Shapiro’s year-in-movies montage, which he calls The Cinemascape.
1. It’s kind of like putting a mirror up against another mirror, but NPR’s 20 Unhappiest People You Meet in the Comments Section of Year-End Lists is a hyperspecific look at our obsession with listmaking that yields some hilarious observations.
