What a long, strange trip it’s been to this moment in music. The headlines are all too familiar – major labels are dying, download this, download that, blahblahblah… All the hubbub over technology and filthy lucre has obscured what is becoming increasingly clear: 2009 may be the best year for music in a decade – a veritable golden age, if you will, captured in a twelve-month period.

Actually, that point is a little debatable: a look back at the music considered incredible in 1999 suggests this might be an even better year than almost anything in nostalgia’s past. Sure, Dr. Dre dropped 2001 that year, and Eminem made his debut; Moby’s Play made electronic music a viable commercial proposition and scored a zillion TV commercials; Flaming Lips put out the great Soft Bulletin; Basement Jaxx’ Remedy still holds up, and personally I find Midnight Vultures to be my fave Beck album. We also, alas, had Kid Rock’s superstar ascent and Santana’s evolution from guitar maestro to fromage collaborator with whomever was the hitmaker of the day; much of the rest of the class of  ’99 seemed important in the moment – Fiona Apple, anyone? – but hasn’t aged particularly well. 2009, though, appears to be the year that musicians are really going for it – if you didn’t release a stone-cold classic this year, it was hard to stand out. And while CD sales have proven to be as negligible as they’ve ever been, the passion for music seems to be greater than ever.

Two moments really crystallized the greatness of 2009 as a music year: Speech Debelle’s controversial win of the Mercury Prize, and the Beatles’ dazzling reissues. Now, Speech Debelle was never my choice for the Mercury Prize (that would be Bat For Lashes). But the fact that an almost completely unknown underground female hip-hop artist signed to an indie label, who sold not so much and made nary a blip in the media, showed that sales and popularity were no longer the yardstick for what makes a musical artist a success. It was a sign that an underground artist, one without popular support, can still triumph – and may, in fact, be preferable to whatever the corporations want to shove down our throats. The Beatles’ reissues proved an interesting flipside to this phenomenon. As it becomes clear that this is the final moment to wring any cash out of CD sales, major labels are rushing out reissues of their biggest artists to catch those who might care about such a thing before time runs out (EMI’s desperate Radiohead repackages, done against the band’s will, are just one example, among many). But the Beatles reissues were something different. One could slap the Beatles’ name on anything, and it would move considerable units. Instead, these albums were re-approached with the ultimate care and consideration: the audio was properly remastered and re-mixed, sparing no expense. The result was that even the biggest Beatles fans heard this music that changed pop music forever in a completely new way: this was the most familiar music ever to a music fan, but with the reissues it was finally heard anew, as it was truly meant to be. This was not a crass commercial proposition, but a true artistic one, and its rapturous reception demonstrated without doubt the voracious passion that listeners have for music today.

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Make that “good music.” The new albums released in 2009 were dizzying in their sheer quality: I don’t like to toss around the word “classic” lightly, but this year’s releases from Fever Ray, Yacht, Fuck Buttons, the Horrors, Animal Collective, Bat For Lashes, Dam-Funk, Atlas Sound, Dirty Projectors, SunnO))), Nosaj Thing, Passion Pit, Phoenix, The Big Pink, The Delta Mirror, Circlesquare, the XX, and Doves all earned that distinction in my opinion. And that’s a partial list – just what I could come up with on deadline! Never in my recent memory have so many epic, genre-expanding, forward, adventurous albums been released. I have a pet theory about all this: now that album sales and radio airplay are no longer crucial markers for success, artists are just going for it. Timelessness now seems like a lot better option than pop success. Bat For Lashes received tons of hype, sure; however, her vivid and haunting album Two Suns was packed with artful, surprising songwriting and sounds, and she made elaborate art videos that have more to do with Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney than the cinematic oeuvre of, say, Miley Cyrus. Jack Penate tossed aside his “male Lily Allen” shtick for an adventurous, confessional, exciting 180 degree turn. Diplo brought humor and fat bass to everything he touched. The Horrors is one of 2008’s emblematic success stories. The band’s first album was all marketing and image – black winklepickers and Goth imagery ideal for Hot Topic t-shirts.  The second Horrors album, Primary Colours, fit no marketing plan, with its long Krautrock shoegaze meditations and raw, challenging sounds. It’s only marketing plan was that it was a great album. The rise of a band like the XX is another example. This was music made for a relatively small label, by a group of unknowns, yet it’s connecting on a mass, global level seemingly because it’s simply great music; that the XX and bands like Grizzly Bear actually cracked the album charts stunned some, but it just seems like part of a trend – good music is prevailing where corporate marketing and forced ubiquity once did. Just waiting to see what new side project, stunt or gambit Jack White will foist on us unexpectedly has become the new cliffhanger; that it’s usually somewhere between really good and great is a nice byproduct of his prolific nature. It’s just thrilling to see someone screw with the boundaries with such force – with role models like White, such individualistic behavior is finally becoming the norm.

The “new music industry” indeed got many kicks in the pants this year, largely coming from the artists themselves. Downloads proved more viable than ever: The Big Pink gave away “Dominos” – the song that was to be their uber-hit single a la “Wonderwall” – for free.  Bands like Radiohead and Bloc Party demonstrated that the single is still a viable medium, dropping them whenever they deemed it a creatively viable idea, rather than as a cog in a corporate album-release machine. Just for the hell of it, let’s give props to “I Will Come Back” by Holy Ghost!, one of my candidates for single of the year; Dizzee Rascal’s, well, dizzying blur of poptastic hits also startled in the best way. The remix also got a new lease on life: Tara Busch made one of the best with her kaleidoscopic revision of Bat For Lashes’ “Daniel,” Alex Metric’s re-rub of Phoenix’s “Lisztomania” damn near eclipsed the original, as did Skream’s epochal remix of La Roux’s “In For The Kill,” which added emotion and excitement that the initial version only hinted at (if anything, Skream’s version was the one people remember). Per the Beatles’ example, many reissues seemed to be about re-asserting the greatness of past releases rather than just profiting from them. REM’s early albums, re-mastered with such grace and precision, made us hear Murmur and Reckoning in new ways, reminding why this band proved so innovative and startling. The Jesus Lizard’s reissues reminded that this is a band that belongs with the greats, and DFA’s bringing back the great Amerindie band Pylon with sonically impeccable reissues connected the dots for much of today’s neo-punk funk with rich aplomb.

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Pop seemed flaccid in 2009 for the most part – much of it just desperate stabs by a failing major-label system to justify its existence – but there were signs of hope

VV Brown hopefully will become the Beyonce with flair, a bold, British female version of OutKast’s color-blinding, genre-defying hitmaking infused with Karen O’s outrageousness. And the soundtrack for the new Twilight film could’ve been another commercial emo redux, but instead they led with Thom Yorke, Bon Iver, and St. Vincent, hardly teen chart staples. Miike Snow also provided true pop thrills in its almost shamelessly clinical hooks, but did so with a core of what seemed like genuine strangeness. Hip hop was largely dead in the water outside of brilliant iconoclasts like Doom and Ghostface, although “Day And Night” by Kid Cudi

did provide a great idiosyncratic pop moment, however; hopefully someone will come around in 2010 and turn rap on its head. Dance music, on the other hand, has never seemed more multi-dimensional than now. From the dubstep of Hyperdub to the various strands of techno to the neo-disco massive and beyond, this is a moment where tempo and genre stratifications prove ultimately meaningless in the face of whether a groove connects with a crowd (or a blog); this multifaceted, celebratory vibe recalls the heyday of acid house, where Derrick May and My Bloody Valentine would mingle in the same DJ set at the Hacienda, and the crowd just danced and danced regardless of their tribe.

If anything, 2009 reminds me of the moment in the ‘80s when absolute masterpieces by the likes of the Cure, Husker Du, Big Black, and Echo and the Bunnymen were released, and no one noticed beyond a devoted cult. Of course, those albums would go on to the generational markers, classics in the canon and in the record collections of fellow nerds. People talk about looking forward to the time when the music industry will start making money again, but if the richness of great music that we enjoy today is at the expense of bloated corporate fat cats who never gave a damn about quality in the first place, then hopefully that day will never come.