It’s been a tumultuous decade-plus for the music industry, with technology enabling more bands than ever to create and distribute their recordings, and more fans to listen to more music than at any time in history. With that as a backdrop, a number of trends emerged in 2010 that could have a major bearing on what comes next. Here are a few of the most prominent:

The Twitter bug: Increasingly, artists are usurping traditional media and going direct to their fans to break news, and you can’t get much more direct than Twitter. In 2010, artists ranging from Kanye West to the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne opened accounts and immediately attracted tens of thousands of followers. Rhymefest used the instant messaging network to announce his candidacy for 20th Ward alderman in Chicago. From behind his drum kit at “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” the Roots’ Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson punched out quips, critiques and behind-the-scenes details of daily tapings. And West turned tweeting into his own 140-character art form, whether providing blow-by-blow descriptions of the studio sessions for his latest album; musing about fashion, women and art; or venting his instant reaction to controversies such as his “Today Show” interview about former President George W. Bush.

Android chic: Futurism is in and pop entertainers are up to their bionic eyeballs in it. Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Janelle Monae, Robyn and Christina Aguilera all did variations on sci-fi themes and sexy robot characters on recent albums and tours. Black Eyed Peas hopped around like outer-space invaders on their latest arena jaunt. The trend goes hand-in-hand with the continued prominence of Auto-Tune on countless pop hits, which turns human voices into Hal, the robot from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For many of these entertainers, it’s just an opportunity to play dress-up. But for Janelle Monae, the concept of “The ArchAndroid” has been part of her creative thinking for several years. “The android to me represents ‘the other’ in our society,” she says. “I can connect to the other, because it has so many parallels to my own life – just by being a female, African-American artist in today’s music industry. I have gone to predominately white or black schools, and tried to represent individuality, whereas some of the people around me were not. Whether you’re called weird or different, all those things we do to make people uncomfortable with themselves, I’ve always tried to break out of those boundaries. The android represents the new other to me.”

Photos: Top albums | Top Box Sets

Here are my favorite albums of 2010:

1. Janelle Monae, “The ArchAndroid” (Bad Boy): The Atlanta singer’s boundary-busting debut album has ambition to burn. It’s a self-empowerment manifesto couched inside a futuristic “emotion-picture” about an android’s battle to overcome oppression – got all that? The music is equally adventurous, touching on everything from lounge jazz to hard funk. A star is born.

2. The Besnard Lakes, “The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night” (Jagjaguwar):  The Montreal band perfects its marriage of Brian Wilson-like melodic splendor and My Bloody Valentine-worthy guitar roar. While the lyrics are a bonfire of earthly espionage and anxiety, the music shoots for the heavens.

3.5 stars (out of 4)

    It’s sometimes easy to overlook given Kanye West’s notoriety as a celebrity who can’t seem to go three months without being portrayed as a jerk, but he has made some of the last decade’s most resonant, ambitious pop music.

    On his fifth studio album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam), he owns his contradictions. What makes him so off-putting – his almost pathological allegiance to expressing his emotions, unfiltered – is also what makes him so compelling, a curious mix of bravado and vulnerability. Because of West’s let-it-blurt bluntness, he is definitely not getting a Christmas card this year from either Taylor Swift or former President George Bush. But that same transparency makes “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” a terrific album.

    Only West perhaps could turn all the hatred that has been directed at him into “Runaway,” a surreal nine-minute anthem. In an elaborate video for the song, West positions himself at an upright piano between an opulent banquet table filled with guests dressed in white and a group of ballet dancers in black tutus. He hammers out a few notes, then stands teetering atop the piano, while asking his guests to raise a glass: “Let's have a toast for the douchebags … Let's have a toast for the scumbags,” he sings, before advising, “Run away as fast as you can.”

3.5 stars (out of 4)

“Man on the Moon: The End of Day,” the 2009 debut album by Scott Ramon Segring Mescudi, a k a Kid Cudi, presented the Cleveland rapper came as the hip-hop answer to Pink Floyd, a lonely stoner adrift on the dark side of the moon. On the sequel, “Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager” (G.O.O.D./Universal Motown), Cudi crooned a bit, rapped a little more, and oozed dazed melancholy, if not despair. As hip-hop existentialists go, Cudi had the top tier all to himself.

Though Kanye West (on his 2008 album, “808’s and Heartbreak”) and Drake also can play the brooding loner pretty persuasively, Cudi takes the persona several steps further on “Man on the Moon II.” The five-part narrative follows a character who tries to act like the hip-hop star he has become. So he plunges into a world of bravado and after-parties, with their endless supply of drugs and women. The music struts (and flirts with crossover acceptance, ala OutKast or West); it flashes rock guitars (“Erase Me,” “Mr. Rager”) and samples indie-rock queen St. Vincent (“Maniac”).

But the decadence collapses into a Gothic house of mirrors in which keyboards toll and strings send shivers, while Cudi slurs and murmurs about “so much liquor in my liver” and contemplates his death. As dire as that sounds, the music is as consuming and intoxicating as the lifestyle Cudi describes. On two albums, the stoned-and-alone rapper has created a world built for one.

greg@gregkot.com

In the ‘70s, Gil Scott-Heron bridged jazz, soul, protest music and poetry into a singular sound, one that anticipated hip-hop and influenced everyone from Chuck D to Michael Franti. But in the last 25 years he has released only one studio album, while battling drug addiction and serving two prison sentences for cocaine possession and violating a plea deal. “I’m New Here” (XL), released 40 years after his debut, finds the 60-year-old artist sounding not just world weary, but exhausted.

In contrast to the politically charged material that defined his finest recordings, the new album is meditative and introspective, laced with reminiscences about his childhood and his personal struggles. Producer Richard Russell frames Scott-Heron’s ravaged voice in a variety of settings, all of them sparse: spoken word over a snippet of Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights,” an electro-thump loop, undulating acoustic folk. This music is all shadows and flickers, distorted voices and static-encrusted vibes, interspersed with spoken-word interludes that sound like decaying voicemail messages. There are interpretations of Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker blues, a Smog cover and a reworking of a Bobby “Blue” Bland ballad.

Indeed, this is a postmodern blues album as conceived sometime between closing time and sunrise, a dark-night-of-the-soul lament in which the artist tosses and turns while mumbling and slurring his words. On originals such as  “Where did the Night Go,” “Running” and “New York is Killing Me,”  the artist testifies to a life without rest or solace, a kind of eternal sleeplessness where everything is blurred and anxious. After a career steeped in baritone authority, “I’m New Here” is startling for the vulnerability and fragility it reveals. The 28-minute length of this album adds to the impression that this feels more like a demo, a collection of fragments woven by Russell into a cautionary mood piece, rather than a major comeback.

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