2010 End of the Year Awards:
“The Endies”

Yes, boys and girls, it’s that time of year again when we dust off the envelopes and gold painted statuettes (well, not really) and the Professor hands out what we’ve come to call “The Endies” (I know, cute aint it?) That hodge-podge collection of what we’ve deemed fit to qualify as the best stuph of the year 2010.

This year, in order to keep things trundling along, I figured I’d post the awards one at a time. That way, if I start to get lazy, people won’t notice if they don’t see a post for a few days while I go flake off, as usual (y’know, what’s often responsible for my not posting the Endies’ winners until, like, February, if ever (admittedly, I’ve skipped posting winners a year here or there, if I didn’t have an outlet, or the time, or the motivation). Maybe this’ll also garner me a little time for some of the categories that are hard to decide--and any of y’all who have followed this before know there can be a lot of categories.

Okay, here goes…

Artist of the Year: Lady Gaga. First things first, I don’t really even like Lady Gaga all that much. I don’t dig on her music, I’m completely uninvolved when it comes to her videos most of the time, and to be honest, she’s basically the 21st century version of Madonna. So why is LG my choice then? Because even a 21st century rendition of Lady Madge is still considerably more original and culturally viable than most of the other folx out there. This is coming from a guy who usually hates re-makes, too. But few performers, no matter what their medium, have earned the sobriquet of “zeitgeist” like this dame has. People talk about her songs, people talk about her performances, her videos, and, perhaps most of all, her freaky-ass getups. And maybe we’ll be wrong, but right now, I don’t see her going away, as far as the social cultural awareness thing goes, anytime soon.