Toiling along with the rest of the losers in the HITS cesspool are two bona fide rock critics, Roy Trakin and Bud Scoppa. From time to time, we poke these two old timers in the ribs, and as they awaken from their naps, they convulsively spew out their opinions, while we nod politely with feigned interest. Just as they share an office, we thought it fitting that Bud and Roy should jointly occupy the virtual space below.

ROY'S RUMINATIONS
GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD
Who'd have thought we'd be longing for the good old days of the 20th Century just one year into the 21st? But you can't blame us for trying to put 2001 to rest. This has been the worst year for the music industry since the early '80s, before a combination of MTV and CDs spawned two decades of unprecedented growth and boom times. The problem isn't one of content—there's actually more vital stuff than ever before...but not enough ways to cut through the genre fragmentation to reach a mass audience.

ALBUMS
Pre-Sept. 11, I would've said The Strokes' Is This It (RCA) was my favorite record of the year, but—though I still love 'em—their snotty in-joke petulance seems downright quaint right now. On the other hand, Bob Dylan's jokey, laughing-in-the-dark Love And Theft (Columbia) takes on prescient overtones since its Sept. 11 release. Still, Pete Yorn's musicforthemorningafter (Columbia), R.E.M.'s Reveal (WB), White Stripes' White Blood Cells (Sympathy for the Record Industry), Ryan Adams' Gold (Lost Highway), Travis' The Invisible Band (Epic), Old 97's Satellite Rides (Elektra), Mercury Rev's All Is Dream (V2), Sigur Ros' Agaetis Byrjun (Pias America/MCA) and Weezer (Geffen) all showed there's still some life in rock's beleaguered bones.

SINGLES
D12's "Purple Pills" was probably the most irresistible, grab-your-collar, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" single track of the year, though Alicia Keys, like Ichiro Suzuki, was not only the music business' rookie of the year but its MVP as well, with "Fallin'," by any accounts an odds-on favorite to sweep this year's Grammys. Staind's "It's Been Awhile" vied with Moby/Gwen Stefani's "South Side," Crazy Town's "Butterfly," Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On," Weezer's "Hash Pipe," Travis' "Sing," John Mellencamp's "Peaceful World," Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood," Afroman's "Because I Got High," Janet Jackson's "All For You," Michael Jackson's "You Rock My World" and Bubba Sparxxx's "Ugly" for songs we never got tired of.

MOVIES
Steven Spielberg's A.I., his masterful homage to Stanley Kubrick, moved me like no other film this year. Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World captured the current dead-end pop culture zeitgeist with unerring black humor, while Ben Stiller's Zoolander, Andrew Adamson & Vicky Jenson's Shrek, the Farrellys' Shallow Hal, Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, Jerry Zucker's Rat Race, Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm and Howard Stern affirmed the importance of comedy in times of turmoil. Jack Nicholson as a man at the end of his rope in Sean Penn's The Pledge and Denzel Washington's corrupt, cock-of-the-walk LAPD cop in Antoine Fuqua's searing Training Day were the best male performances, while Thora Birch's cynical, yet vulnerable turn in Ghost World was the year's best female performance.

BOOKS
The best fiction I read this year was Jim Crace's unsparingly clinical Being Dead, about the mental and ultimately physical deterioration of a longtime marriage. Charles Cross' Kurt Cobain biography, Heavier Than Heaven, David Browne's tragic tale of Tim and his son Jeff Buckley, Dream Brother, and Stones manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldham's oral history, Stoned, were the standouts in music journalism.

LIVE
U2 at both the Anaheim Pond in April and Staples Center last month stand out as arena-rock at its apex. Also: Roxy Music at the Greek (Virgin's reissues were the year's revelations), Bob Dylan at Staples Center, Ryan Adams at L.A.'s House of Blues, Reflections of the Rat Pack at the Flamingo Hotel in Laughlin, NV, Tool at L.A.'s Wiltern Theater, the Who at The Concert for New York City, the Lawrence Middle School Concert Band (featuring my son Taylor on clarinet) and watching my 11-year-old daughter Tara play soccer every weekend. Let's hope 2002 will be a better year for all of us.

BUD'S BATCH
ALBUMS
1. Ryan Adams, Gold (Lost Highway): The fatal flaw of most attempts to recapture rock & roll's past (particularly in the case of acts that worship and seek to emulate the Beatles and Beach Boys) is an overabundance of studiousness, which results in music that approximates the details but not the spirit of the original. Adams, the onetime bad boy of alt country, has no such problem. He doesn't study his record collection, he plays with it like a little boy playing with toy soldiers—and it's this sense of uninhibited delight that animates Adams' magnum opus, an effortlessly ambitious and seductive 70-minute epic of an album (90 minutes if you include the limited-edition "Side 4"). Taking as his primary references points the Band, Dylan and the Rolling Stones circa Exile on Main Street, Adams continues his fruitful collaboration with Ethan Johns (son of legendary producer-engineer Glyn Johns), who not only nails the sounds of late-'60s/early-'70s recordings but also drums behind the beat like Charlie Watts and revives the lost art of rhythm guitar. With another second-generation ringer, Stephen Stills' boy Chris, on lead guitar, this inspired little combo adds Stax/Volt horn lines here ("Touch, Feel & Lose"), Left Banke harpsichord there ("When the Stars Go Blue") and Music From Big Pink textures throughout, while impersonating the Keith Richards-Mick Taylor guitar tandem to startling perfection on the rawkin', raucous "Street Walkin' Blues." While he's at it, the kid also comes up with a fever dream of an art song in "Sylvia Plath" that recalls Leonard Cohen at his most romantic and Randy Newman at his most cinematic. Gold secures Adams' place in the post-millennial rock pantheon and contends for consensus album of the year.

2. Bob Dylan: Love And Theft (Columbia): Destiny seems to have singled out the wily, enigmatic Dylan yet again by corresponding the album's release date with the first day of the rest of our lives. Love And Theft is the album we had to have at this shadowy crossroads, with a post-millennial hellhound on our trails. At certain times on this expansive work, the still-brilliant 60-year-old artist comes off as a charlatan with a painted-on moustache; at others he's a fabulist who puts Romeo & Juliet in a '65 Mustang; but in the album's most profound moments, I'm compelled to believe this guy possesses the gift of prophecy. On Love And Theft, Dylan intimates the mortal dread that plagues our sleep in troubled times, but he also reminds us of the enduring comforts that sustain us through our lives' most difficult passages. The sense of dread in "High Water (For Charley Patton)" chillingly connects to the times we're living in, while the timeless "Po' Boy," slyly celebrates what's really important: true love, home cookin' and knock-knock jokes.

3. Pete Yorn, musicforthemorningafter (Columbia): With its offbeat juxtapositions of classic songcraft and aural adventurousness, the striking debut from this one-man-band is a record you just want to keep playing, because it continues to surprise while deepening in seductiveness. At the very least, Yorn's record is the year's best debut, and it just may be the early-'00s equivalent of Matthew Sweet's early-'90s classic, Girlfriend. "Strange Condition," "For Nancy" and "Just Another" set the pace on the hookiest album of the year.

4. Lucinda Williams, Essence (Lost Highway): In contrast to the panoramic Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, the aptly titled Essence observes human intimacies in spare language set off by melodies of lovely simplicity. Uncharacteristically relaxed, Lucinda coolly references Lou Reed, the Doors and Roxy Music, stepping back to give her masterful band all the time it needs to smoke some super-tasty grooves. Highlights: "Out of Touch," "Essence," "Blue."

5. John Mayer, Room for Squares (Aware/Columbia): The songs on the debut album of this Atlanta-based youngster tumble out affably—but with a hint of Nick Drake-like melancholy—on lilting, nearly jazzy grooves, banks of burbling acoustic and electric guitars and disarmingly intimate lyrics ("My stupid mouth/Has got me in trouble/I said too much again"). Over repeated listenings, the details connect, revealing a young artist of wit, style, substance and admirable restraint. Among the delights are "Your Body Is a Wonderland," which playfully meshes languid eroticism and puppy-dog eagerness; the sparkling, painterly "Neon"; "The Great Indoors," which sounds like some great lost Police classic; and the wistful closer "St. Patrick's Day."

6. Pernice Brothers, The World Won't End (Ashmont): Wearing his orchestral-pop hat again, the prolific Joe Pernice employs a four-piece string section to deepen the nostalgia quotient of such grandly bittersweet beauties as "Our Time Has Passed" and "Bryte Side." The album's teeming with lump-in-the-throat passages that evoke the unabashedly romantic pop of the mid-century—"A Summer Place," anyone?

7. Various, I Am Sam (V2, 2002): This project—which doubles as the first truly high-profile tackling of the Beatles songbook—amounts to a general quest for a rock-era interpretive milieu. A gratifying number of these efforts bear fruit, from down-to-the-bone acoustic approaches keying on vocal inflection and prevailing guitar figures (Sarah McLachlan's "Blackbird," as pristine as Ella Fitzgerald revisiting Cole Porter; the Wallflowers' rousing "I'm Looking Through You") to obsessively detailed revisitations (Ben Harper's "Strawberry Fields Forever"; the Vines' "I'm Only Sleeping"). To my ears, there are two milestones here, one from each methodology: Paul Westerberg absolutely owns "Nowhere Man" in a take that sounds as if his life depended on it, and Ben Folds isolates the intimate power of "Golden Slumbers" from the thrilling climax of Abbey Road with a performance that finds equal resonance in Paul's piano line, Ringo's drum fill and that heart-wrenching McCartney lyric. We don't live in a perfect world, but if we did, this album would be the O Brother, Where Art Thou? of 2002.

8. Grant Lee Phillips, Mobilize (Zoe/Rounder): Like Yorn, Phillips is self-contained and well-equipped, playing all the instruments, deftly mixing acoustic and electronic sounds, and his slyly elliptical songs pack enormous depth. His melodies are so quicksilver, his changes so tightly woven, his lyrics so elusive, that Mobilize comes at the listener like a musical Stealth bomber—play it three or four times and you find yourself captivated without any recollection of how or when the record got to you. At that point, you realize the title track, with its war-between-the-sexes central metaphor, mid-century-horror-movie Theremin and dadaist chain-gang accents, is insanely clever. You're also startled to discover that, with the overtly cinematic romantic epic "Beautiful Dreamers," this sly devil has stolen your heart.

9. Various, America: A Tribute to Heroes (Interscope): The Sept. 21 telethon was unquestionably the defining musical moment. of 2001. This extraordinary set of performances provided a new context for the experience of listening to music in the wake of our collective shock, while revealing how powerful that listening experience could be. Neil Young, Alicia Keys, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and U2 provide some of the numerous moving moments on this historic collection.

10. R.E.M., Reveal (Warner Bros.): Rather than descending into self-parody, as they'd threatened to do on the deeply unsatisfying Up, the venerable band has reinvigorated itself with a record as summery as the Beach Boys, Reveal's most apparent inspiration. It's lush, languorous and purdy as all get out—my fave R.E.M. LP since '91's Out of Time. Highlights: "Summer Turns to High," "Beat the Drum," "I've Been High," "I'll Take the Rain."

11. Old 97's, Satellite Rides (Elektra): In a series of taut, unfettered rock & roll songs that recall the Replacements in their prime, Rhett Miller and his mates draw emotional complexity from the simplicity of conversational language and familiar chord changes as they ponder life's choices: a quick thrill versus enduring romance ("Designs on You"), self-belief versus self-loathing ("King of All the World"), being in the moment versus running out of time ("Am I Too Late").

12. Chris Whitley, Rocket House (ATO/BMG): Ten years and six albums later, the gifted but perplexing Whitley has finally fashioned a proper follow-up to his auspicious debut, Living With the Law. Rubbing his sultry vocals and tactile slide, dobro and banjo lines against the scratching and electronics of DJ Logic, the percussive keyboards of Stephen Barber and the sinewy drumming of producer Tony Mangurian (Luscious Jackson), Whitley makes music that relies on friction as much as substance for its emotion. "To Joy" clatters along amiably like a jalopy on a dirt road, "Say Goodbye" howls lustily at the moon and "Radar" is a widescreen ballad in the grand tradition of the Stones' "Moonlight Mile."

Honorable mention: Weezer, Weezer (Geffen); Minibar, Road Movies (Universal); Kevin Tihista's Red Terror, Don't Breathe a Word (Division One/Atlantic); Whiskeytown, Pneumonia (Lost Highway), Travis, The Invisible Band (Independiente/Epic); The Sopranos: Peppers & Eggs (Columbia/Sony Music Soundtrax)

TRACKS
The newfound perspective enabled by the performers of America: A Tribute to Heroes figures prominently on the first compilation I've attempted since August. As the sequence grew, it started to suggest to me that the acts of reaching out and looking in are as interlinked as breathing. Initially, I'd planned to take the strongest stuff from a late-summer compilation I'd made on the occasion of Ivana's 40th birthday, but when I revisited it the other day, I found that the sense of nostalgia I'd originally tried to convey had deepened considerably. So I decided that that disc, which I'd titled The Invention of Clouds and whose cornerstones were the Pernice Brothers, R.E.M., Joe Henry and Ron Sexsmith, would serve as half of my annual soundtrack. The batch below, which mixes recent stuff with tracks from early in the year, makes up the other one. Yes, it's still predominantly white guys with guitars doing midtempo tunes, but collectively they seem to celebrate the ups and downs of everyday life, which in recent weeks have come to seem so precious. Special props to old-timers Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan for sounding as relevant as ever, to Sheryl Crow and Ben Folds for singing their asses off, to Kevin Tihista for concocting a truly inspired seduction song and to young turk John Mayer for coming off like an old soul. Finally, as I perused my picks, I noticed that seven of these 21 songs are covers, and seven were written by John Lennon and/or McCartney. Whaddaya know...

The Great Indoors
01. Paul McCartney: Heather
02. John Mayer: The Great Indoors
The TV is your windowpane, the view won't let you
down...
03. Pete Yorn: Strange Condition
Read me the letter, baby, do not leave out the
words...
04. Ben Folds: Still Fighting It
Everybody knows it sucks to grow up...
05. Matthew Sweet: Every Night
I just want to stay in and be with you...
06. Shelby Lynne: The Killing Kind
I didn't mean to hurt your feelings—that was so
careless of me...
07. Stevie Wonder/Take 6: Love's in Need of Love Today
Don't delay—send yours in right away...
08. Chris Whitley: To Joy
Make my presence felt by all the innocence you
would destroy...
09. White Stripes: We're Going to Be Friends
Teacher marks our height against the wall...
10. Kevin Tihista's Red Terror: Lose the Dress
What's it gonna take for you to lose the dress?
11. Sheryl Crow: Who Will the Next Fool Be?
After you get rid of me, who will the next fool be?
12. Bob Dylan: Po' Boy
Time and Love has branded me with its claws...
13. Ryan Adams: Somehow, Someday
I wish that we were stumbling fast down on Irving
and 14th Street...
14. Wallflowers: I'm Looking Through You
Your lips are moving, but the words aren't clear...
15. Sam Phillips: Taking Pictures
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be...
16. Minus Five: Dear Friend
...what's the time? Is this really the borderline?
17. Grant Lee Phillips: Humankind
It's hard to love your fellow man; however, I can help
myself...
18. Neil Young: Imagine
Imagine all the people sharing all the world...
19. John Mayer: St. Patrick's Day
No one wants to be alone at Christmas time...
20. Ben Folds: Golden Slumbers
Once there was a way to get back homeward...
21. Hem: Polly's Dress