150 Best Albums of 1998

You can often tell the years when music critics are stuck looking backwards instead of forwards by how much they gravitate toward folk-rock, or sounds in that general genteel vicinity. It happened in 2002, when the top three vote-getters in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll were Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Beck’s Sea Change and Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots — if not the dullest win-place-and-show in history of the P&J enterprise, then definitely way up there. It might arguably have happened in 1982 (top three: Imperial Boredom, Shoot Out the Lights, Nebraska) or even 1975 (Springsteen, Neil Young and two Dylan LPs in the top five, none particularly mellow I guess and Patti Smith’s Horses at #2 is an even bigger stretch.)

But 1998 just might take the cake: Americana heroine Lucinda Williams’s only gold record and unchallenged career peak review-wise Car Wheels on a Gravel Road at #1, Dylan going electric after playing acoustic on a Manchester stage nearly a third of a century before at #3, Billy Bragg and Wilco turning half-century-old Woody Guthrie poems into songs that (except for the undeniably pretty “California Stars”) would be more gripping with Woody singing them at #4. Which left Fugee and neosoul heroine Lauryn Hill’s first and last solo studio album at a very close #2 (named on nine more ballots than Lucinda but allotted fewer points), and while she may not have been quite as Americana-friendly a hip-hop act as Arrested Development (#1 P&J in 1992 in case you forgot), she was still close enough to fill their niche.