Since my valued colleagues entrusted me with this year’s edition of the DAA State of Pop column, it is with great humility and deep respect I declare the following:

I can’t do it.

That is, I can’t do it in any fashion that would make my 1,000 words anything more than what they are: a pin-hole view of a vast, multi-faceted pop music landscape that’s getting bigger and broader by the day.

Just consider this factoid being bandied about the music press: Each and every year, more than 30,000 -- 30,000 -- recordings hit the marketplace. Even if that total includes thousands of singles, classical releases and CDs by bands that never venture out of their own zip codes, anyone trying to digest the pop-music platter in a given 12 months is still saddled with roughly as many recordings as there are hours in the day.

Of course, not even the most open-minded listener would argue that more than, say, two percent of the product swamping the shelves each year is worth even a cursory spin in the CD player. But that still begs the question, which two percent is the good percent? Is it Britney/Bizkit/Backstreet and their fellow Billboard bumrushers? Is it Outkast/Common/ D’Angelo? PJ/Sleater-Kinney/Belle and Sebastian? Perhaps some clubland concoction so ephemeral only Simon Reynolds and his acolytes took notice?

Take a survey, and you’ll likely get as many answers as there are music fans. At the start of century number 21, everyone defines the year in music differently for the simple fact that the tent in which it takes place has grown so large. Folks over the indie-rock corner might be close enough to sample alt-country and maybe hip-hop but might never make it all the way over to electronica or acid jazz. Likewise, the teen-pop contingent might mingle with the R&B crowd but never come within earshot of Afropop or folk.

If that makes the kind of year-end summation I’d intended to write a fool’s errand, I’d argue it also makes the current period a kind of golden age for anyone willing venture out of their corner of the tent and do some mingling. Even hampered by a writer’s income, a mortgage payment and zilch in the way of record-company freebies, I managed to get my hands on an extraordinary amount of good-to-great music in 2000, from Sonny Rollins to Roni Size, the Ass Ponys to Madonna, Eminem to Rokia Traore, Wu-Tang to Amy Rigby, the Go-Betweens to Youssou N’Dour, James Carter to Outkast, volume four of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music to Billy Bragg and Wilco’s second run at updating the Woody Guthrie legacy, and on and on and on.

Still, in almost every year-end top 10 list, I see mentioned a band or album I might have loved just as much as All Hands On the Bad One or In the Air (if not as much as Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea), and might yet if I encounter them in the used bin of my local CD retailer. Even a glance at the top 10s prepared by my fellow DAAers reveals artists I don’t know (Idlewild, Kevin McCormick, Broadcast) and CDs I haven’t heard (Death Cab For Cutie, Groove Armada), and that’s from a group of generally like-minded thirtysomethings with generally modest CD budgets. There’s so much more out there -- so much of it worth hearing -- it boggles the wallet.

Even if my corner of the pop tent wasn’t as expansive as it might have been in 2000, it was nonetheless a nice place to spend the year. The big news was artists like PJ Harvey, Amy Rigby, Sleater-Kinney, Erykah Badu, Kim Gordon (of Sonic Youth), Madonna and Elastica, all of whom released definitive or near-definitive career statements and made 2000 one of the best years for women in pop since I-can’t-remember-when. Rigby’s the ringer, about as far from fame as Madonna is near it, and anyone who’d appreciate a Shelby Lynne with better tunes, a sharper wit and more dirt under her fingernails would do well to make her acquaintance.

Rap made a customarily strong showing in 2000, with solid releases by Del the Funky Homosapien, Wu-Tang Clan, Outkast and Common all making my hit list at various times during the year. But Common’s R&B-fueled respect raps and Outkast’s beat-backed political rants were ultimately blown away by the 3,000-pound parental target called Eminem. You might hate him, I love him, but concede I might love him less if I had a 13-year-old in the house. Of course, 13-year-olds are the only ones who seem to get the joke: inflammatory, immensely talented and immensely full of shit, his only real act of subversion might be the proof reaction his album provides for the low esteem in which adults hold the intelligence of their kids.

Kids weren’t the only ones who squeezed out sparks in 2000. Steely Dan reformed for their first album in 20 years, a smooth slice of middle-aged perversion featuring underage runaways and lust-addled cousins. Likewise, Uncle Lou and his demons came roaring back after a brief flirtation with legendary love, full of bad vibes, broken promises and his best batch of songs in years. And how about a hand for Sonic Youth, who bounced back from the theft of their beloved guitars with an album that continues perhaps the longest run of artistic excellence in the history of pop.

Since my corner of the pop tent happens to be located in Chicago, let me put a plug in for a couple hometown favorites: The Handsome Family, whose In the Air finally hit the right mix of tragedy of tunecraft; and the Waco Brothers, whose Electric Waco Chair once and for all sloughs off the band’s stigma as yet another Jon Langford side project with the sometime-Mekon’s best rock and roll since The Mekons Rock ‘N’ Roll.

As I said, 2000 offered something for everybody, and pretty much everything for somebody. But there's also something to the argument that the fragmentation that's increasingly common in the pop tent is bad, that the partitions being erected between genres ultimately encourage insularity and stagnation. That’s why -- as much as pleasure as I get from tidy, modest masterstrokes like In the Air or the Go-Betweens’ The Friends of Rachel Worth -- I’m convinced it’s the big albums fueled by big ideas and grand ambitions that ultimately seize the moment and force you to recontextualize all the music you hear before them and after them. For plenty of people, that album was Radiohead’s Kid A, a disc that stuck me as cheerless and histrionic, if not lacking in ambition. For fellow DAA scribe Burt Glass, it was U2 and All That You Can’t Leave Behind, a work that recapitulates the group’s fundamental strength as a rock-and-roll unit without reneging on 20 years of artistic growth. For me, though, no CD provided more bang for the buck than Polly Jean Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, an apocalyptic, sexy, sweeping bath of sound that rolled over everything else I heard this year.

In the end, it’s what music needed a little more of in 2000: someone with the balls to walk into pop’s big tent, turn up the amplifiers and drown everyone else out.