Pop Albums: With tweets and clips and - oh, yeah - songs, Kanye West shines brightest in a fragmented firmament.

Being a pop music fan these days is more about songs than albums. By now, that's a certainty, if not a cliche: iPods and MP3s broke the CD into little pieces, and now we're all free to assemble our personal playlist puzzles.

But that's not the half of it. In 2010, it's not just about songs.

It's about memes and tweets and YouTube videos, links and posts and status updates. It's about the Internet, and how the Web that made music free now makes music fans - and music-makers - free to overshare and obsess, all the time.

That's part of what makes Kanye West the indisputable artist of the year. It helps that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the best album anyone put out in 2010. But what seals the deal is West's unfiltered, impulsive way of gracing us with his every thought - meshed perfectly with the promotional imperatives of the remade music business.

In other words, with Kanye you don't just get an album's worth of genre-defying glimpses into the mind of a madly ambitious pop star.

You get self-promoting and self-deprecating 140-characters-or-less observations on Twitter that Internet readers then turn into New Yorker-style cartoon captions. You get an apology to George W. Bush (who, Kanye said post-Katrina, didn't "care about black people"), and a YouTube clip of Kanye rapping in flight from the cockpit of a commercial airliner, and a 35-minute movie about a supermodel phoenix who crashes to the ground in a fiery explosion.

Not everybody can provide this much content in the Twitterverse, but Kanye can.

A word about the death of the album: People may download, buy, or stream individual songs much more frequently than entire albums, but that hasn't stopped artists from expressing themselves in long-playing form. Three of the picks below - Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, Titus Andronicus' The Monitor, Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid - are concept albums, songs linked by some highfalutin idea.

While that's not strictly true of the others, all are marked by a musical and thematic cohesion that aims to sustain itself over the long haul. Attention spans may be relentlessly shrinking, but artists convinced they have something substantial to say are pushing back, and demanding to be heard, at length.