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5. The Undownloadable
Beck has always been an innovator, bending the boundaries between pop, rock, and hip-hop in ways that seem utterly unlikely for a milky-skinned Scientologist from L.A. This year, he made another wonderfully eclectic record, The Information, and then gave us a reason to visit one of them old-fashioned record stores—by including with the CD a design-your-own-cover-art sticker pack and a DVD of homemade videos for each of the album’s fifteen songs. Beck’s love of serendipity and craft makes most of his peers seem like accountants in tight pants.