Benoit & Sergio: Finishing 2011 strong, poised to rule 2012.

​The debate between digital digging and its analog analogue is the same useless arguing as the one pitting digital playback against the analog kind. In 2011, if it sounded good, it was worth listening to. The resulting stew was a mix of past and present where classic house met nu-disco and created a future sound of the old school.

The rules guiding the making of this list of the year's best 12-inches are quite simple: If a release was pressed onto flat, somewhat circular vinyl that could to be played on a turntable sometime during 2011, it was eligible, whether official, unofficial or reissue. The local leanings of the list are unintentional; New York may have quite a past, but it just also happens to know how to look toward the future.

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​The increasingly tentacle-extending social-networking site Facebook has released Memology 2011, a quantification of popular topics discussed on the service. Amy Winehouse's death in August was the seventh-most-discussed news topic of 2011, right behind the royal wedding and ahead of the new Call Of Duty game. Also, lots of people discovered and subsequently discussed the emo-gone-brostep musician Skrillex, apparently; as Facebook data scientist Jonathan Change helpfully explains, "Although Skrillex has been around for several years, his 2011 tour, a collaboration with Korn, and record label launch prompted a 76-fold increase in the number of people mentioning him in their status updates on Facebook." No word on how many of those mentions were positive or negative or just links to that Tumblr with women who have his haircut, alas. (Related: Even though my initial impression of it was not good at all, listening to "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" made me giggle my way through a migraine last week. Seriously! I was trying to reverse-engineer my way out of it, and while it didn't quite work, the laughing was at least pleasant.) The ten most-listened-to songs on Facebook Music—you know, that part of Facebook where you get to spy on what your friends are listening to via Spotify, Rdio, and other music services that aren't iTunes—below.

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Surely some enterprising writer can find a way to link these three records.

​20. Tom Petty, Into The Great Wide Open

19. Skid Row, Slave To The Grind

18. Teenage Fanclub, Bandwagonesque

17. Prince & The New Power Generation, Diamonds & Pearls

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​As we've already informed you, just about all of the shows that you were planning on attending this weekend have been called off. In other words, no Afro-Punk, no Ted Leo, no P.S. 1 Warm Up, and no Dave Matthews Band. After we collectively begin to pull ourselves together, put away our hacky sacks and fill our bathtubs up with water, we're going to need a new set of tunes to get us through to Monday. So, as an alternative to the Bob Dylan and Scorpions YouTubes that have been filling your newsfeeds for the past 24 hours, we've pulled together ten of our favorite rap songs that maintain some sort of connection to this weekend's storm, ranging from The Click's ode to Hurricane Malt Liquor to a Beastie Boys collaboration with DJ Hurricane and Jadakiss asking, "What if Manhattan was hit by Hurricane Katrina?" Enjoy these tracks while you still have power, and don't hestitate to remind those co-workers that "Hurricane" is one of the weak links on the mad underrated Desire.

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​It's way too early to have a critical judgment on Watch The Throne; didn't you read the rules? But since Kanye West and Jay-Z's colossal collaboration plopped into the raging waters of Internet opinion early Monday morning, I've been watching for ripples. Here are ten new things that Watch The Throne might bring to music and the music industry in the near future.

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​Today marks the publication of SOTC local-music/lousy-music enthusiast Christopher Weingarten's Hipster Puppies, the blog-gone-book that pairs adorable photos of dogs with withering critiques of American youth culture circa, well, now. (Here are some online merchants selling it, or you can just head to your local bookstore and pick up a copy.) Chris was inspired by his daily life as a freelance writer/rabblerouser to write more than a few of the book's captions, and here he shares with us five of the captions spurred by his time in New York City.

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NB: This is not how bloggers generally dress.

​Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Duplass brothers—the siblings behind last year's cutesy indie Cyrus—were shopping a script for a thriller in which the mother of a recently deceased indie rocker seeks vengeance on a blogger who had snarked in her kid's general direction. The brothers are hoping to get Susan Sarandon for the mom role and Cyrus Jonah Hill to play the blogger, but the really important name is the one of the site where the mean mau-mauing appeared: Pitchfork. Since the brothers have already stolen my idea, I might as well show you some of the "indie thriller" treatments I'd been working on:

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​About a year ago, I was putting a book about Bob Dylan to bed. Since I was looking at year's lead time, my plan was for Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (Yale) to be released on Dylan's 70th birthday, for obvious reasons. I learned early on at my grandfather's funeral the biblical significance of threescore years and ten. Add two thousand years and the development of modern medicine, and you could say that yesterday's threescore years and ten could be today's fourscore years and ten, give or take--in other words, in twenty years, Bob Dylan might very well be Betty White. Still, 70 is a mighty powerful benchmark, and it officially puts the baby boomers, Dylan's original and most fervent demo, on notice that they are either officially old or, with the aid of the Facebook equivalent of 2031, could help snag Dylan a Saturday Night Live hosting stint.

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Joey Ramone would have been 60 years old on May 19. This week, in celebration of the birthday of the Queens-born gone-too-soon punk legend, Sound of the City will run a series of features on his life and his legacy.

​The Ramones may have shouted their last four-count 15 years ago, but whether you see the band as idiot savants spitting out rudimentary songs at machine-gun pace as best they could or as avant-pop deconstructionists of Phil Spector and The Beach Boys, there's no denying the stain they left on generations of punks to come in their wake. Here's a guide to a few bands that are chewin' out the three-chord rhythm on their bubblegum.

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​Kool Herc plays the genesis figure in hip-hop's fable; the first party the Jamaican-born, Bronx-raised DJ threw in the recreation room of his building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in 1973 is credited with formalizing the genre. From behind two turntables Herc spun the short, percussive sections of (often) soul and funk songs; on the dance floor in front of him, kids would kick moves that eventually became known as breaking. Before hip-hop's holy old school trinity of Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizard Theodore, there was Herc. As Herc puts it today, "That's the reference point for hip-hop right there."

Backed up by the might of his Herculoids crew and a sound system comprised of a gargantuan wall of speakers, Herc continued to hold down the key DJ position during the period of hip-hop history that unfurled before the first rap records were released in 1979. Herc excelled in a creative playground of high school gymnasiums and local nightclubs, not the recording studios of corporate record labels that would scramble around to try and monetize hip-hop. In advance of his appearance at fellow old-school giant Melle Mel's 50th birthday party at BB Kings tomorrow--which will have a lineup spanning several rap generations--Herc looks back on his three most notable old-school hip-hop venues.

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