Once again, Da Capo Press has assembled the best of the best of the collected music stories of the year. The pieces have been culled from Pitchfork Media, New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, LA Weekly, The New Yorker and many other essentially mainstream publications. Many of the writers here are recognizable - Ann Powers and Chet Flippo, to name a few—and others are typically regular contributors to the bigger journalistic outlets.

Editor and New Yorker music critic Alex Ross writes, "Just as we would not want live in a world that adhered to one language, one political system, or one mode of religious belief, we would not want to live in a world that imposed a single musical taste." To that end, the pieces here cover everything from Michael Jackson and Duke Ellington to Lady Gaga and Beethoven.

If you're an aficionado of who's writing what as well as what's being written, you'll enjoy this 2011 volume. James Wood writes a piece on The Who drummer Keith Moon and brings up some interesting points, but he fails to note that Moon was virtually the only drummer ever to play without hi-hats, and that kind of diminishes his entire theory.

But this is music journalism at its finest. Read these pieces and see if you agree. If you don't, that's okay, too—writing is for the reader and not the writer.