The Wire is a British music magazine publishing out of London, which has been issued monthly in print since 1982. Its website launched in 1997, and an online archive of its entire back catalog became available to subscribers in 2013. Since 1985, the magazine's annual year-in-review issue, Rewind, has named an album or release of the year based on critics' ballots.
"Freedom Principles" The Wire no. 370, Dec. 2014
Mark Sinker (pictured in 2014) had a brief, controversial tenure as editor of The Wire. Though he was fired, his run as editor has received retrospective praise.
In the 1990s, longtime contributor Simon Reynolds (pictured in 2011) coined the genre "post-rock" and wrote influential essays on a variety of developments in rave that he termed the "hardcore continuum".
Image: Steve Lacy (cropped)
Rewind is the annual year-in-review issue of The Wire, a British music magazine founded in 1982. The year-end issues have been published every January since 1986, adopting the current "Rewind" title in 1997. Each year-end issue has included an annual critics' poll, collating critics' ballots into a list of the year's best releases. The polls survey writers affiliated with the magazine.
The Wire no. 263: the "2005 Rewind" issue
The American avant-garde jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman topped The Wire's poll in two consecutive years.
American jazz pianist Cecil Taylor (pictured at right) placed first in the 1988 poll and, in 1990, received a "special accolade" for a box set that would have otherwise topped the poll.
American hip-hop group Arrested Development topped the critics' poll in 1992, the first year that the magazine placed an all-genre list ahead of its jazz list.
