[Note: This is the first in a series of articles that constitute Village Voice Media's year-end music package. The others - pop, indie-rock, dance mixes, Latin, country, alt-country/Americana, metal, rap/hip-hop and special graphics breaking down the year in charts and 2008's worst lyrics - will be posted on Rocks Off throughout the rest of the holiday season.]
It's time to rank the best of what went around and came around again.
BILLY JOEL
The Stranger
(Columbia/Legacy)
As punk and disco e
​Get ready for the closing curtain of Rice University's production of Threepenny Opera. The grand story by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill is being touted as "a musical of murder, mayhem, and matrimony!" Meant to satirize traditional opera while creating an new kind of musical theater, Threepenny is set in London just before Queen Victoria's coronation. Characters include Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, a mob-boss of local beggars; Polly, his headstrong daughter; Mack the Knife, Polly's new husband a
