Here at Rhapsody we've spent a lot of time ruminating on all the great music that came out this past year--here's our comprehensive, genre-by-genre guide, in case you missed it. So now there's only one thing left to do: Officially name our 2011 Artist of the Year. Some years this is a tough choice. Not this time.What did you hear when you turned on the radio in 2011? Sleek, club-friendly production. Wispy, purred vocals. Songs designed for blowing up places, being sexy and knowing it, and dancing 'til the world ends. And of course, beats, beats and more insistent, persistent beats. And we kept hitting repeat-peat-peat-peat-peat on all of it.
And then there was Adele.
Since the January 2011 release of her sophomore album, 21, the preternaturally talented British singer-songwriter has been absolutely everywhere, from the top of the charts (where her smash single "Rolling in the Deep" remained perched for seven weeks) to Glee. Yet she often seemed like an anomaly, an old-soul oasis in a desert of dance-pop that stretched as far as the ear could hear. Amid frenetic booty-shakers stocked with '90s dance music, dubstep and house references, Adele proffered vintage R&B, dusty country grooves and '70s singer-songwriter gold. The frostier every other ice queen got, the more her own lusty, husky hot toddy of a voice alternately warmed and broke us through her gorgeously exposed songs. Even her physical presence, sensual and adamantly earthy, seemed in polar opposition to the otherworldly robo-waifs around her.
By now you've had time to absorb the hundreds of albums Rhapsody's editorial braintrust recommended as part of our 
It's the most wonderful time of the year: list season! Music obsessives of all stripes spend December painstakingly compiling their favorite albums and singles of the past 12 (or so) months, and we here at Rhapsody are no different. So please enjoy this absurdly huge Best of 2011 blowout. We've got staff-compiled lists of our 50 favorite albums and singles (in which everyone from James Blake to Nicki Minaj vies to fight off Adele), individual genre lists for everything from hip-hop to metal to Christian to Latin, and playlists galore. It was a fascinating, bizarre, wildly divergent year. We've made our best attempt to summarize it below.
What a year this has been! There have been so many global watershed moments that helped define the year, from the serious (including the natural disaster in Japan and the lousy economy) to the frivolous (the end of All My Children, Charlie Sheen's meltdown). There were good moments as well. Thank you Navy Seals for a job well done! Rock on, Gabrielle Giffords! And 2011 definitely proved fairy-tale weddings still have the (somewhat repulsive) power to wrap your "should know better-ness" in a taffeta Vera Wang and make you go all silly in the head. Oddly enough, this is true whether you are a real-life prince and princess (William and Kate), a Hollywood tabloid wannabe princess (that's you, K-Dash), or a soon-to-be princess of the night (hello, Twilight).
We live in an obscenely media-saturated age. It seems as if every single record ever released since adorable little Nipper stuck his cocked head inside Edison Bell's cylinder phonograph has been reissued, repackaged and resold thrice over. Still, some years are definitely better than others when it comes to boxed sets, remasters, expanded editions, anthologies, greatest-hits collections and archival curiosities. I'd say 2011 was a most excellent one.
Man, what a year. Electronic dance music officially broke into the mainstream in 2011, with Vegas being touted as the new Ibiza and Kaskade causing riots in downtown Los Angeles. Former screamo frontman Skrillex helped usher dubstep into the spotlight by giving it a face (or at least a haircut) and a fresh, poppy, post-everything perspective. And Tiësto marked dance music's entry into the ranks of the one percent with an interview in the Wall Street Journal where he estimated his annual salary to be $20 million. 
The year in hip-hop was a strangely disorienting one. As I leaf through the year-end summaries appearing on websites and in magazines, all echo the same thing: the genre is no longer chained to the traditions (some would call it stasis) that we knew before, when the mainstream belonged to self-described thugs like 50 Cent and the Roc-A-Fella crew, while the underground belonged to "backpackers" like the Definitive Jux and Rhymesayers camps.
This was an eventful year for Latin music. That's kind of a generic statement (isn't every year an eventful year since, well, events happen?), but we mean it quite seriously. Take, for instance, two happenings that started off the year with a bang before leading into two of the year's most exciting albums: In Feburary, Los Tigres del Norte threw a big party onstage in California, invited everyone they knew and wound up recording a genre-jumping smash hit of a live album. And in March, young narcocorrido singer Gerardo Ortiz made news for not-so-happy reasons when his entourage was shot at outside of Colima, resulting in the deaths of his manager and his driver. Ortiz came back swinging from that tragedy with Entre Dios y el Diablo, an album that pinpoints the internal and external struggles he and many narco singers deal with.
This year proved that rock will never go out of style as a platform for Christian musicians: from the modern approach of Switchfoot and Needtobreathe to the experimentation of Gungor to the hardcore sounds of Blindside and Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, rock still rules. Not that there isn't room for others in our 2011 Top 25 albums. Gospel greats like Mary Mary and Kirk Franklin were shoo-ins, and releases by singer-songwriters like Laura Story, Mat Kearney, Sara Groves and Jill Phillips were literally music to our ears. We also welcomed the return of old friends like Burlap to Cashmere and Leigh Nash. Read on to explore our entire Top 25 and see who made the cut.
World music is, by its very definition, hard to pin down. We are talking about the whole freaking world, after all. On the other hand, there are still trends, clear-cut paths and identifiable currents of buzz, and 2011 boasted several of them. So here are the biggest trends contributing to our own personal Top 25:
First, caveat emptor: if you're still obsessed with metal being as "brutal" or "extreme" as inhumanely possible (i.e., if you didn't start looking elsewhere when said ugliness turned into the most tedious cliché on earth, like, 20-plus years ago), there's a good chance you'll find plenty to disagree with amid the selections below. Ditto if your idea of metal "innovation" is undie rockers playing shoegaze snooze really loud (which was maybe an interesting idea for a couple months a decade or so ago, until the first time I saw Isis live and wished there were chairs to fall asleep in). On the other hand, if you enjoy metal that actually, you know, rocks -- with songs and riffs that'll stick to your innards when the album's over, no less -- you've come to the right place. 
There were few predictable patterns in indie music in 2011, other than a lot of great newcomers, two of whom top this list. There were some curious trends sprinkling the landscape though, from all that sassy saxophone (check out our 
At times, 2011 felt like one unending dance mix -- at least, it did if your year was consumed with listening to pop music. This was the year when everyone and their uncle (at least in LMFAO's case) dispatched themselves to the dancefloor and planted four oh-so-firmly on the floor, drowned their sound in dubstep, and coated everything they touched in a sleek, icy, clubbed-up sheen. 
Maybe 2011 was the year of the vibraphone. Or the year of the piano trio. Or the year of Brad Mehldau or Paul Motian. Or another year of Miles. The best jazz records of 2011 are a varied bunch, but there are certain strains that float through the year's favorite recordings. The sheer diversity and strength of the offerings prove that the genre continues to expand boundaries with creativity, vision and bold sonic experiments. 
Looking back on 2011, ears attuned to classical releases were given a wealth of exhilarating discoveries; in new music, young musicians and rediscovered historical scores. It was also the 200th anniversary of the birth of composer and virtuoso Franz Liszt, which all but required commemorative Liszt recordings from A-list pianists bent on proving themselves worthy of his thundering musical legacy. Hip young composers like Matt Haimovitz and Nico Muhly turned an eye on the indie market with collaborations and crossovers, while early music fans were treated to discoveries and premiere recordings of newly unearthed Renaissance works. But it was the string soloists who stole the show: the troupe of young violinists like Charlie Siem, Hilary Hahn, Mikhail Simonyan and Nicola Benedetti dominated the musical conversation with one stunning performance after the next.
When I took over the Soul/R&B section from Pop, Latin and World editor 
Making this list is never easy. Most of the difficulty stems from a perennial question that chews at the back of my brain as I contemplate each pick: Good record, but is it rock? Such a question vexes me because it seems as if marketing and the vagaries of popular taste have forced most of the best rock music these days to be labeled as something else. You can see this all up and down the list below: Kurt Vile is an indie darling even though Smoke Ring for My Halo sounds as if the kid from Philly was weaned on Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen records. Mastodon are modern metal gods despite the fact that half the gargantuan riffs and rumbling grooves on The Hunter contain the stank-ass aroma of the 1970s: Zep, Mountain, Sabbath, Cactus, Deep Purple. Wilco are labeled all manner of things, from indie to alternative to alt-country, when in fact they're an arty pop rock band. Then there's Radiohead. Fans just love calling their heroes "experimental" and even, uh, "electronica." But let's face it, they're a modern progressive-rock band. Pink Floyd 2.0. 
And here we are. After a year of obsessive listening and (surprisingly!) intense conversation, here are the 50 songs we here at Rhapsody can (tentatively!) agree upon. A mix of popular hits and idiosyncratic personal favorites, this encompasses everything from regional Mexican jams to megawatt pop smashes, surly country songs complaining about hip-hop to surly hip-hop songs complaining about, well, lots of things. From Adele to LMFAO, M83 to Skrillex, Pitbull to Frank Ocean, this is what thrilled us in 2011. The list is below; listen to 'em right now via our