Welcome to Sound of the City's year-in-review rock-critic roundtable, an amiable ongoing conversation between five prominent Voice critics: Rob Harvilla, Zach Baron, Sean Fennessey, Maura Johnston, and Rich Juzwiak. We'll be here all week!

Please, this holiday season, spare a thought for these millionaires.

I'm a zombie with no conscience. But if this trip 'round the mulberry bush has got me thinking about anything, it's evangelizing. We all champion the artists that feel precious and reject everyone else's narrative. Rich positioned the much-hyped Robyn as the invalid child of the dance-pop elité, propped up as a paragon of fortitude and invention, before doing the deep-dig on some great dance music I'd not heard at all this year. Zach crawled into the depths of his youth to make Superchunk the cool Aunt and Uncle of the game, the kind who let you smoke and watch R-rated movies when you slept over their house. Maura made the last-minute battle cry for R. Kelly, a conflicting but righteous choice, while closing the book (for good?) on the American Idol Generation. Rob repped for Robyn in the face of dismissal, defied me (!) on Taylor Swift, found evenhanded things to say about the hegemony of Arcade Fire, but ultimately couldn't even muster a joke about the Black Eyed Peas. And then there is Zach's reminiscence on a moment we shared in my living room (you're all invited to come and see the weird mirrors some time soon) that involved Pusha T and Kanye West. During a VMA live chat with Ryan Dombal for this very blog, I wrote, quickly, after the performance, "Feels really good to see the two rappers I've been most invested in for the last 10 years closing the VMAs. Frivolous, but weirdly important."

He'll cut you. Pics by Richard, more below.

Better Than: A full-semester course in American Studies.

"For whom the bell tolls," announced Van Dyke Parks as he sauntered over to the upright piano he manned for an evening as richly encoded with allusions as that first tossed-off remark. A pretty amazing album akin to, say, electric saxophonist Eddie Harris' The Reason Why I'm Talking Shit could/should be cobbled together from Parks' free-associative song introductions. "This is just far enough away from the progress of profit to maybe mean a god damn," he said by way of introducing "Orange Crate Art," title track to his 1995 album with Brian Wilson ("Heroes and Villains" arrived later). "Because there's something to be said for supreme irrelevance," he added. "And yet the song is the most portable piece of cultural goods that we have. It's the thing that we don't have to carry with us when we leave. It contains the memory, and melody. It's wonderful."