In keeping with a relatively new tradition I established myself, my contribution to the Reader‘s year-end issue collects a few of my favorite happenings in the music world in 2011, not however many of my favorite albums. This is partly just to do something different with the year-end list and partly because I don’t enjoy the process of ranking and sorting records the way that a lot of other critics seem to. But I do like a lot of records that came out this year, and after the jump you can find 50 of my favorites, in no particular order.