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According to a rather impressive number of critics, an album called "Welcome to Mali" by Amadou and Mariam was the number 1 music album of 2008. Please raise your hand if you have heard this album all the way through.

See, that's the problem. "Welcome to Mali" may be the most critically lauded album of 2008, but is it really the best album of 2008? This is a subjective call that we've got to make, but it seems rather unfair to only consider critical raves and to completely ignore what the general populace has to say.

So in order to make a good judgement here, let's quickly make a list of the most popular albums of 2008. This list is culled and averaged from Billboard, Amazon.com, and Blender.

#1. Santogold by Santogold

#2. Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes

#3. Death Magnetic by Metallica

#4. Tha Carter III by Lil Wayne

#5. Vampire Weekend by Vampire Weekend

#6. Viva La Vida by Coldplay

So here we have 6 albums that were released in 2008 that were wildly successful, as well as having received good reviews from those in the know. Surprisingly, AC/DC's "Black Ice," which they released through an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart. Initial sales of this album were stellar, but it just didn't have the staying power to be able to be on the top 6 list, or indeed, any top 10 list this writer could find.

At this point, we probably want to move on and choose the best album of 2008. In order to do this, let's define the rubric by which we're going to make this call. Rubric is a fancy nancy word for guidelines, by the way, for those readers who don't appreciate this writer's pretention.

Let's say that for the album to be the best of 2008, it has to be by an artist that has shown some staying power. This will eliminate any flashes in the pan that may be skewing our judgement. Thus, even though Fleet Foxes is a remarkable debut, we have to eliminate from the running. Santogold needs to be eliminated for the same reason, although she is a good talent. Vampire Weekend needs to be bumped as well, for the same reason.

Now we have three established artists: Metallica, Lil Wayne and Coldplay. Now we need to decide if we want to only consider mainstream artists. If we did that, we'd probably have to eliminate both Metallica and Lil Wayne, leaving us with Coldplay's "Viva La Vida."

Great! We did it!

Okay, maybe not. The truth is that Lil Wayne's, "Tha Carter III" is an apotheosis of hip-hop/rap. Creative rhymes, rhythms and all around solid work makes this album a far better offering than either Kanye West

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