PopMatters made a very good selection of the 15 best hip-hop albums released this year, arguing that the "best records of the year served as rallying cries and made us reconsider the very genre itself". So, the PM's 15:

15. Megan Thee Stallion – 'Good News'

14. Pa Salieu – 'Send Them to Coventry'

13. Riz Ahmed – 'The Long Goodbye'

12. Denzel Curry/Kenny Beats - 'Unlocked'

11. Elzhi – 'Seven Times Down Eight Times Up'

10. Flohio – 'No Panic No Pain'

9. R.A.P. Ferreira – 'Purple Moonlight Pages'

8. Sa-Roc – 'The Sharecropper's Daughter'

7. Jay Electronica – 'A Written Testimony'

6. Spillage Village - 'Spilligion'

5. Run the Jewels – 'Run the Jewels 4'

4. Growing Concerns Poetry Collective - 'BIG DARK BRIGHT FUTURE'

3. Aesop Rock – 'Spirit World Field Guide'

2. Serengeti and Kenny Segal – 'Ajai'

1. Black Thought – 'Streams of Thought, Vol. 3: Cane & Able'

Leslie West, the towering guitarist who created the hard-rock milestone 'Mississippi Queen' with his band Mountain, died aged 65, the New York Times reports. West was respected for his versatile playing - from fingerpicking to metallic power chords - and was revered by a new generation of guitar players who followed, like Eddie Van Halen and Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore.

New York rapper Ecstasy from the early hip-hop band Whodini has died aged 56, Billboard reports. Coming out of the fertile New York rap scene of the early 80s, Whodini was one of the first rap groups to add R&B twist to their music, thus laying the foundation for a new genre - new jack swing. They made the first rap song accompanied by a video. Live performances of the group were also the first rap concerts with the participation of breakdance dancers.

On Monday, Philadelphia punk rock band Mannequin Pussy reached out to their neighbors via Twitter in hopes of finding their 15-passenger blue Ford van, which had been stolen the night before, Brooklyn Vegan reports. A day after, the band announced that the missing van was found, by Philly ska band Catbite "on another street in north Philly. They popped open the back lock, hot wired tf outta it and dumped it 10 blocks????". Turns out Catbite also had their van stolen, and they found it less than a mile away a few days later.

John McClure of Reverend & The Makers has offered to perform private one-on-one shows for fans who will be spending Christmas Day on their own. McClure told BBC he’s already been offering private performances through the pandemic.

Burial will release his new album in the spring, and he announced it with a 12-minute song 'Chemz'; Darkside also plan a release of a new album in spring, which will be their first in eight years', and they announced it with 'Liberty Bell'.

The Village Voice, the long-running New York alternative weekly culture paper, which also covered music, is returning both to digital content and print, after being acquired by Street Media, who currently publish LA Weekly. The digital publication will begin in January, with quarterly print editions starting in early 2021, the New York Times reports. Bob Baker, a former Voice editor, will be senior editor and content coordinator, and more former staffers will be hired. The cult alt-weekly ceased print publication in September 2017 and online publication a year later.

PopMatters made a selection of new artists who are expected to brake quite big quite soon (for some it had actually already started to happen). Among the selected there are: Polaris music award winner Backxwash; indie-rock foursome Porridge Radio; critically highly acclaimed Sault; Moscow all-female prog/post-punk girls Lucidvox; genre-defying Bartees Strange.

“Christmas songs shouldn’t only be this performative optimism. They should contain a grain of melancholy. Especially in 2020, it’s tone deaf to say, ‘Oh Christmas is all going to be ‘happy happy’. I try to live in the real world” - Chilly Gonzales told The Independent about his "sad" holiday album 'A Very Chilly Christmas'. There are others from the indie-rock world that felt the urge to add some sadness to Christmas - Mark Lanegan, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, Calexico...

National Guitar Museum has named Eddie Van Halen as their Lifetime Achievement Award winner for 2020, and, for the first time, it was in memoriam. Every year for more than a decade, the museum has saluted a living guitarist who has contributed significantly to the legacy of the guitar - previously it was given to Roger McGuinn (2011), B.B. King (2012), Tony Iommi (2015), Glen Campbell (2016) and Bonnie Raitt (2017). The guidelines state that the person whose talents had an effect on guitar playing, and whose career inspired and influenced other guitar players, Blabbermouth reports.