Best Albums of the 2010s

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One of the big themes about entertainment in the past decade is the incomprehensible explosion of available content in every medium. While this may be a recent development in cinema and television, it’s been the case for music for centuries, or even millennia. Since humans have been banging on rocks and clapping their hands, really. Of course, it was a little more recent than that when recorded music became readily available.

This is all to say, I of course haven’t listened to every album of the past ten years that made its way onto SoundCloud or Spotify, or even all the Billboard chart-toppers. But I did listen to enough of them to be able to assemble a vibrant and varied soundtrack of my life in the 2010s. Here are the musical collections of the era that I just haven’t been able to stop pushing play on.

[4/2/20 2:00 PM UPDATE: This post originally mistakenly included Justice’s , which came out in 2007.]

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SNL Recap January 31, 2015: J.K. Simmons/D’Angelo

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SNL: J.K. Simmons Monologue (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)

This review was originally posted on Starpulse in December 2015.

J.K. Simmons is the presumptive Oscar favorite this year for Best Supporting Actor.  It is appropriate that he is in the Supporting field, considering that he has spent a few decades as a character actor, elevating the quality of his projects, no matter what the size of his role.  Interestingly, though, his role in “Whiplash” is prominent enough that it could be considered a Lead.   He certainly has the talent and charisma to be a star, but this episode mostly kept him confined to the supporting roles that he is used to.  He was perfectly fine in them, but he could have done more.  And in the few moments when he was given the chance to do more, he really shone.  Meanwhile, this show continued Season 40’s heavy focus on original material, with the only recurring characters appearing on Weekend Update.  That originality was a little inconsistent, but very welcome when the proceedings got weird late in the night.

Super Bowl Shutdown – “SNL” once again proved that it has been paying attention to the major stories of the week.  Richard Sherman and Marshawn Lynch have been flipping the script on Super Bowl coverage, and this cold opening … acknowledged that.  Lynch’s propensity to repeat the same stock answer is amusing, but it proved difficult to build a sketch around.  The talk show format, while a tired one, was helpful here, as it masked some of the holes in the premise. B-

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