I’ll see you all back here when the snowplows and elves have come and gone.

Watching this video, you will wonder, briefly, if Chris Dane Owens “means it.” This is an ungenerous thought—dismiss it. You may also wonder why “Shine On Me” is modelled on early ABC and Spandau Ballet and padded out with an unnecessary layer of loud guitars. Irrelevant. What you need to know is that Mr. Owens will live forever—until the dragons rule the earth again (or the first time, whatever)—and that you are going to watch this video more times than you can imagine. You may dream of this video, but the dream won’t be as good because it won’t be this video.

If you thought I was exaggerating the influence of the Strokes when I mentioned them in my best of 2008 whatsit, I offer The Takeover UK as evidence that the Strokes have become a meme of the aughts just as Pavement was a meme of the nineties. Even if bands don’t mean to, they imitate the Strokes. (The only good thing about the Takeover UK is that they’re not English, making their name a reasonably funny riff on the history of legally mandated name changes, e.g. Dinosaur Jr., etc.)

On "808s and Heartbreak," Kanye West chooses the flutter of Auto-Tune to be the sound of his sad robot and—by the transitive power of popularity—our winter. I am absorbing the album now, and it keeps reminding me of a song by Robyn.

If you’ve read this blog in the last year, you know that I like to post about Robyn. If I could nominate her for something, I would.

Oh! No need. Robyn’s self-titled album—which was released over three years ago—has been nominated for “Best Electronic/Dance Album” in the fifty-first Grammys. I am thrilled by this news, and will be the first to call for a recount if anyone other than Robyn (or Kylie, who should have been nominated in 2003 for “Body Language”) wins.

But why Robyn now? “Robotboy,” a track from “Robyn,” expresses heartache through machines, while discussing the heartbreak of machines, a move that West seems to be attempting. There is now a TV series called “Robotboy,” which débuted after Robyn’s track was released, so I do not think there is a direct link. (My readers will assist me if I am mistaken.) Below is a user-generated video that fuses Robyn’s track and Robotboy imagery. I, predictably, endorse all of Robyn’s official videos.

I posted recently about the songwriter Steve (Static) Garrett, who passed away at the obscenely young age of thirty-three this year. Vibe has posted a four-part oral history of Garrett.

Two things jumped out at me. There is only one quote from Timbaland, and it’s a dud: “Static was a humble, nice guy—creative and talented. I always knew he was going to be big because he worked hard.” That’s it? Timbaland obviously knows Garrett died—the verb tense makes that clear. No sentiment? No superlatives for the guy who wrote “Are You That Somebody?”

Shortly before his death, Static worked with Lil Wayne on his hit “Lollipop.” Wayne also contributes a single quote about Garrett to the oral history, and it is the inverse of Timbaland’s—funny and self-deprecating: “His initial intention was to help. He’s definitely to blame for my newfound success.” Perhaps humility, paradoxically, helps you to become biggest rapper in the world. Wayne’s predecessor, Jay-Z, knew how to do a humble interview. Just an idea.

When I was six, I wrote lists on scraps of paper and kept them in a Blue Diamond almonds can. The scraps were a rising millefoglie of yellow and blue that I never examined.

My process has improved slightly. I have kept a “best of” list on my site since 2003. The list changes over the course of a year, sometimes several times a day, sometimes not for weeks at a time.

My list for 2008 is finished and fixed. I wanted to annotate a few choices, especially in those cases where I haven’t written anything about the artist in question or don’t yet have plans to.

Anyone writing a term paper on the “unreliable narrator” should read Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains Of The Day” and google Noel Gallagher, of Oasis. Speaking to the NME, Gallagher described former rival Damon Albarn as a “great artist,” while acknowledging that the two had never managed to get along: “There’s always been something between me and him, and I don’t know what it is.” One of those pronouns makes sense—“me.” Gallagher does not generally say anything nice about anybody, so I am not sure what Gallagher means by “something,” unless it is a synonym for “a person who isn’t a member of either Oasis or the Beatles.”

I wrote about Lady Sovereign here more than three years ago. Since then, the tiny British rapper signed to Def Jam had a minor hit, and left Def Jam. A new song, “I Got You Dancing,” is available for free download at her Web site, and will be released on her own label, Midget Records, distributed through EMI. I think Lady Sovereign’s song is dance music. Maybe. I can imagine few investments less sturdy than a record label run by Lady Sovereign and distributed by EMI, one of the most troubled music conglomerates. Maybe a Plaxico Burress song. No—somebody would buy that.

“I Got You Dancing” uses lots of Auto-Tune, as does the No. 1 album in the country this week, and “Woods,” a song on the new EP by Bon Iver, “Blood Bank.” (There may be a new record that does not use Auto-Tune, but I can’t lay hands on it right now.) Bon Iver plays Town Hall this week—will he go for the live Auto-Tune option?

I recently wrote about Pink, and mentioned a song of hers called “Stupid Girls,” a failed if honorable attempt to decry a certain strain of female celebrity. Lily Allen has a new single called “The Fear,” which does everything “Stupid Girls” couldn’t do. How? The unreliable narrator. This “Lily Allen” is not exactly saying what Lily Allen thinks, which you’ll figure out pretty quickly. The song embodies the self-loathing and pain involved in being one of those “stupid girls.” (Corollary lesson for Pink and others: nobody likes a scold.)

My only feelings about the singer Sia concern two events from this year. One is her performance on “You’ve Changed,” an excellent song by the dance-music producer Lauren Flax. (Hear it on Flax’s MySpace page.) “You’ve Changed” is a melodic house song that reminds me of the genre’s peak (or one of them, at least), in the late eighties and nineties, when a four-on-the-floor disco beat and verse-chorus-verse songs were not mutually exclusive (cf. Soul II Soul, Ten City, Deee-lite, Black Box, Electribe 101, and dozens of others). O.K., chorus-bridge-chorus. I’m not that hard to please.

I also feel positively about Sia’s recent performance on David Letterman. (See below.) I don’t care at all about the song, but I love three things Sia did: a) brought her own decorations to the “Late Show” set, b) painted her hands, and c) provided a sign-language translation of her own song. I imagine that singing on national TV could make a person wildly nervous; more singers should consider sign language. It provides an excuse to move your hands while performing and provides a minor public service.

That will teach me to futz.

When I posted a video of Flying Lotus the other day, I wrote that he was operating a controller. Then I got it into my head that he was playing an Akai sampler—not a controller—and changed the post.

For what? For naught! Steve Ellison is operating a controller in this video—the Akai MPD24, to be precise. (Pause the video at about 0:04 if you want to fact-check my belated fact-checking.) The upside of all this microscopic tomfoolery, besides upholding the virtue of facts, is that now we have a really concrete example of what a controller is and what it does. The pads on the MPD24 are triggering samples that live in that Apple MacBook Pro sitting to the left of the controller. If you did not understand this kind of thing before, now you do.

Here is a short video produced by photographer Evan Hurd, the man responsible for the excellent picture accompanying my Flying Lotus column, in last week’s issue. In this clip, you will see Steve Ellison, Mr. Lotus, moving around and working in the home studio described in the piece and captured in Hurd’s photo. Hurd’s footage will give you an idea of exactly how “soft-spoken” Ellison is. You will see him operating a controller, which may help those who were wondering what exactly a controller looks like. Ellison is hitting the pads on a small, square object that also has a row of sliding faders—that object is a controller. In this case, the controller is part of an Akai MPC sampler that contains the sounds being controlled, but Ellison also uses an M-Audio Trigger Finger (which looks a like the Akai) that controls audio software and samples stored elsewhere, most likely on a laptop computer.

In Hurd’s video, he is manipulating the heartbeat sample of drum & bass, The Winstons’ “Amen, Brother.” (Click on that link for one of my favorite Web films ever, an eighteen-minute explanation of the “Amen” break.) This segment is a small red herring, as Ellison rarely makes music that sounds as frantic as drum & bass, and I’ve never heard him use the “Amen” break on one of his own tracks. But, then, he has made a bazillion tracks, so it would be easy to miss.

I cannot understand how Hurd filmed Ellison without also filming at least one weed-smoking apparatus in action.