Best of 2022: Television Critic Top Ten Lists

Re: "2022 was a spectacular year".

I am glad you feel that way. I don't know how old you are. I am guessing old enough to like Beach House from when they were young, which would make you roughly 35 or something. But maybe I am wrong.

Anyway, I am glad to hear that for you 2022 has been "perhaps the strongest of any year I can recall". Maybe you are correct at least insofar as it is not as bad as I imagine it to be.

For me the strongest year for awhile is 2019: i.e. Ariana Grande's Thank U, Next; BLɅϽKPIИK's Kill This Love EP; BTS's Map of the Soul: Persona EP and BTS World Original Soundtrack; Camila Cabello's Romance; The Chainsmokers World War Joy; Charli XCX's S/T; Chris Brown's Indigo; Doja Cat's Hot Pink; Ed Sheeran's No.6 Collaborations Project; Harry Styles' Fine Line; J Balvin's Oasis; Julia Michaels Inner Monologue, Pt. 1 EP and collaborative single, "If the World Was Ending" featuring JP Saxe; Lana Del Rey's Norman F*****g Rockwell!; Lil Nas X's 7 EP which includes "Old Town Road" Remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus; Lizzo's Cuz I Love You; Maren Morris's Girl; Meduza & Goodboys "Piece Of Your Heart" and "Lose Control"; Megan Thee Stallion's Fever; Miley Cyrus's She Is Coming EP; Natti Natasha's IlumiNATTI; Normani's Motivation; Pop Smoke's Meet the Moo; Post Malone's Hollywood's Bleeding; Roddy Ricch's Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial; Summer Walker's Over It; Taylor Swift's Lover; Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride; and Young Thug's So Much Fun.

I honestly think that there is not a single album released in 2022 that can be compared as an equal to almost any of the above albums. Thus, 2022 is so bad a year from my perspective that the best album released this year, by Bad Bunny, would roughly be the 10th best album in 2019.

To judge from my Apple Music library -- which it is ordered both chronologically and alphabetically as smart playlists -- after a very strong year in 2019, when popular music was arguably near or at its peak, there is a clear downward trend that begins in 2020. This is presumably related to the Covid-19 lockdown, though it is plausible that it is not caused by the economic lockdown per se, and rather is caused by the BLM protests, because the decline doesn't become clearly evident until the following year, and 2022 is clearly by far the worst year in the history of popular music since roughly the 1990s.

If the decline was caused by the economic lockdown, then popular music should have recovered this year as it takes about a year to produce an album. But instead the charts seem so dominated by "gangsta" rap -- by which I mean rap artists who mostly have been in prison at some point in their lives, whose music has no "mainstream" appeal because of the use of expletives including the "N" word to describe themselves and the "B" and H" word to describe their partners -- that "mainstream" pop such as was clearly dominant in 2019 has to a large extent collapsed in a heap, and might not recover for several years or more, and might never recover.