While it's well known that as one gets older, one tends to find changes in the world at large unsettling, confusing, fucking irritating, a rebuke to one's very existence, it's generally not a good idea to make a career out of saying so.

7) "The Filth and the Fury -- A Sex Pistols Film" soundtrack (Virgin)

Everything of the pit (and I don't mean the mosh pit) you can hear in the theater -- the unknowable, the unspeakable -- is translated into clean speech by the magic of digital housekeeping. The sound isn't bad, it's evil.

8 & 9) Rian Malan, "In the Jungle" (Rolling Stone, May 25, www.rollingstone.com) and Solomon Linda's Original Evening Birds, "Mbube" on "Mbube Roots -- Zulu Classical Music from South Africa, 1930s-1960s" (Rounder)

From Malan, the capitalist odyssey of a 1939 song its creator sold for "about one pound cash" and which to this day has made tens of millions for others: the song generations of campers know as "Wimoweh." In the annals of theft and fraud that make up at least half the story of popular music, what's astonishing is not that Linda (1909-62) reaped so little, but that, today, his family receives anything at all; what's uncanny is that the Evening Birds' dignified, stately original is instantly recognizable as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," the cheesy 1961 No. 1 by the Tokens. I heard it three times in one day recently; the voices on the verses are still embarrassing, but after Malan's piece, the chorus sounded glorious.

10) "Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still -- The Warner Collection, Volume I" (Appleseed, www.appleseedrec.com)

There is old and there is old. On this 58-cut anthology of field recordings made between 1935 and 1966 by folklorists Frank and Ann Warner, you sometimes hear the sound of people living in an old-fashioned manner -- living according to a frame of reference that is at once familiar and defunct, like an old brand of soda pop, or for that matter the term "soda pop." When "Yankee" John Galusha of New York sings "Days of 49," though, you are in another world, just a few years after the Gold Rush; when Lee Monroe Presnell of North Carolina sings "Farewell to Old Bedford" and the plain but undeniably mystical "Sometimes in This Country," you hear the society that was here before the Founding Fathers met to turn it into a nation.

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