Gorillaz began as a lark but turned serious once it became Damon Albarn’s primary creative outlet following the slow dissolve of Blur. Delivered five years after the delicate whimsical melancholy of 2005’s Demon Days, Plastic Beach is an explicit sequel to its predecessor, its story line roughly picking up in the dystopian future where the last album left off, its music offering a grand, big-budget expansion of Demon Days, spinning off its cameo-crammed blueprint. Traces of Albarn’s Monkey opera can be heard, particularly in the hypnotic Mideastern pulse of “White Flag,” but Damon’s painstaking pancultural pop junk-mining no longer surprises — when hip-hop juts up against Brit-pop, it’s expected — yet it still has the capacity to delight no matter which direction the Gorillaz may swing.

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The Beatles always stood apart from their peers, a self-evident statement that sadly extended to the treatment of their catalog in the digital age. Where all their peers from the Byrds to the Who have had their catalogs remastered and reissued in deluxe editions, sometimes several times, the Beatles remained stuck in the early days of digital, their 14 albums plus Past Masters singles collection remaining untouched since 1987, despite the occasional upgrade and tweak on the 1993 Red & Blue Album reissues or the remix of the Yellow Submarine songtrack in 1999. Those 1987 releases were hardly without controversy, either: many fans were upset that the first four albums were presented in mono, not stereo, while others complained about the quality of the mono mastering; some were upset that Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles weren’t in mono, there were grumblings about George Martin’s new stereo mixes for Help! and Rubber Soul, then there were criticisms about harsh, brittle sound and shoddy packaging, where Magical Mystery Tour was stripped of its lengthy book and cover art was butchered.

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Facing the third album blues, the Arctic Monkeys turned to Josh Homme, the Queens of the Stone Age mastermind renowned for his collaborations but heretofore untested as a producer. On first glance, it’s a peculiar pair — the heirs of Paul Weller meet the heavy desert mystic — but this isn’t a team of equals, it’s a big brother helping his little siblings go wayward and get weird. Homme doesn’t imprint his own views on the Monkeys but encourages them to follow their strange instincts, whether it’s a Nick Cave obsession or the inclination to emphasize atmosphere over energy.

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If a death from a cardiac arrest seems too small and sudden a death for Michael Jackson, the biggest superstar in the world, it’s because no death would seem appropriate for the self-proclaimed King of Pop. At his best and at his worst, Michael Jackson never quite seemed to belong to this world -his talent too enormous to comprehend, his self-imposed fantastical seclusion too odd to understand – so envisioning an end never quite seemed possible, although in many ways the final chapter in his tragic rise and fall was written years ago. The Michael Jackson the world loved so dearly hasn’t been around for almost 20 years, starting to fade sometime after the coolly calculated Bad, then disappearing completely in the wake of scandal in 1993. It’s no great stretch to say Jackson never recovered those accusations of child abuse – some would argue he may not have deserved to – but all that ugliness somehow never managed to erase memories of Michael at his peak, whether it was the preternaturally gifted young lead singer of the Jackson 5 or the international phenomenon of the ’80s.

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Any project in the works for two decades is bound to generate its fair share of myths and so it is with Neil Young’s Archives, a series of a multi-disc box sets chronicling Young’s history. Originally envisioned in the late ’80s as a Decade II, the project quickly mutated into a monster covering every little corner of Neil’s career. With its escalation came delays, so many that it sometimes seemed that the project never really existed; it was just a shared fantasy between Neil and his faithful. During that long, long wait, fans held tight to the idea that Archives was a clearinghouse of rarities similar to Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series, a treasure trove of unreleased songs and epochal live performances that would trump whatever bootleggers had to offer. While rare and unheard music is certainly a key part of Archives, particularly on the first disc covering the pre-history of 1963-1965, viewing this project as merely a CD box set is wildly misleading. Neil Young has designed Archives as nothing less than an immersive multimedia autobiography, an interactive experience where the music, text, video, and pictures feed off each other, creating a virtual journey through Neil’s past.

Because this is a biography, Archives, Vol. 1 winds up relying very heavily on previously released recordings, containing almost all of Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, and Harvest, key Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young cuts, and the previously released archival live albums Live at the Fillmore East 1970 and Live at Massey Hall 1971. Such a large chunk of familiar material is bound to disappoint any listener expecting Archives to be a rarities-only set, forgetting that its origin was as a sequel to Decade, the triple-LP set that mixed up hits with unreleased tunes. Archives follows a similar blueprint, excavating many rare gems — some, like “Bad Fog of Loneliness” quite familiar to bootleggers; some, like an extraordinary “Dance Dance Dance” cut with Graham Nash, not — and placing them neatly alongside his well-known jewels, so the end effect isn’t a rush of discovery but ongoing quiet revelation, an impression underpinned by the set’s leisurely pace.

The entire Archives is designed to trace Neil’s evolution, to explain how his dead ends were really detours and how his mood swings weren’t all that wild; it preserves Young’s history as he perceived it. To that end, the DVD and especially BluRay editions of the set are essential to understanding both the project and Neil himself, so much so that the CD edition feels almost like an afterthought, a skimming of the surface of a deep lake. Often, Young delayed Archives due to the limits of technology, a claim that seemed no more than an excuse to keep the project incomplete, but Archives in its BluRay incarnation lives up to all of Neil’s promises over the years, coming close to collecting everything — lyrics, press, artwork, TV performances, doodles, scraps of every sort — in one place, letting users linger for as long as they’d like in a specific era. Surely, the sound quality on BluRay is extraordinary — the music leaps out of the speakers yet never sounds overly clean, digital, or modern — but it’s the interactive nature of the set that impresses most. While the DVD set also is complexly interactive, BluRay is designed to be continually updated via the Internet, so Young can add songs and videos whenever he wants, placing the new material as a virtual pushpin on each disc’s time line. Acting as a supplement to the text biographies on each disc — the biography only covering the years on the disc — the time line places Young’s evolution on a broader scale and is illuminated by this extra material, such as a downright thrilling CSNY performance of “Down by the River” on ABC-TV, but this is merely a teaser for the main event: the virtual filing cabinet, where every song on the set has its own folder bulging with handwritten lyrics, press clips, photos, snippets of in-concert introductions, alternate takes — the list is almost endless and it’s always different, so it’s easy to flip back to a song and discover a bunch of information you missed the first time around. Add to this, there are an untold number of Easter eggs, sometimes housing the best stuff here, such as videos of Young combing through the archives and reminiscing in 1997, or a 15-minute film clip of Young discovering a CSNY bootleg while record shopping in the early ’70s and then taking it from the store.

This level of detail may suggest the one serious flaw in Archives: it cannot be taken casually. It demands complete, undivided attention, requiring users to dig as deep as they’d like, and it’s no stretch to say that it could take a week or two to discover everything here. Also, the set comes so tantalizingly close to being complete, it’s a major irritation to have one song lopped off of each the albums; surely, the extra storage space on DVD and BluRay could have allowed for complete runs of Everybody, Gold Rush, and Harvest. But really, these complaints feel churlish when faced with a box that is an embarrassment of riches, offering so much more than anybody could have imagined during that long, long wait. Not only was the wait worth it, Archives feels like it was 20 years in the making. It’s an extraordinary work that redefines what an autobiography can be.

American Idiot was a rarity of the 21st century: a bona fide four-quadrant hit, earning critical and commercial respect, roping in new fans young and old alike. It was so big it turned Green Day into something it had never been before — respected, serious rockers, something they were never considered during their first flight of success with Dookie. Back then, they were clearly (and proudly) slacker rebels with a natural gift for a pop hook, but American Idiot was a big album with big ideas, a political rock opera in an era devoid of both protest rock and wild ambition, so its success was a surprise.

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By all accounts Together Through Life arrived quickly, cut swiftly by Bob Dylan and his touring band in the fall of 2008, surprising the label upon its delivery a couple months later, then rushed into stores in April ‘09, just a half year after the release of the monumental archive project Tell Tale Signs. Given the speed of its creation, it fits that that album has a spontaneous, kinetic kick, feeling so alive that it’s a little messy, teeming with contradictions, crossed signals and frayed ends. That liveliness turns Together Through Life into a much lighter affair than its weighty predecessor Modern Times, which was tinged with doom and had thematic unity, two things missing from this comparatively breezy affair. If Together Through Life is about any one thing it is, as its title and cover photo elliptically suggest, the enduring power of romance, how it provides sustenance and how its absence can make life hard. But all this suggests that Dylan has turned in a meditation of the meaning of life and love here, when its core charm is its very modesty.

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Left to his own devices, Prince will indulge in his peculiar vice of releasing triple-albums. He celebrated his freedom from Warner with Emancipation, following that with another triple-disc in Crystal Ball, which just happened to be the provisional title of the scrapped three-LP iteration of 1987’s Sign o’ the Times, he had a triple-live set in 2002, and now he’s navigating the rough waters of online distribution and exclusive contracts with big box retailers in 2009 with another triple-disc set called LotusFlow3r.

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