Decade postmortem: 2007 and 2008

Having gone through a decade of old top 10s, I’ve been thinking about the two contrary motives involved in putting these things together. On one hand, the lists express personal tastes, more emotional than analytical. And since they are usually cranked out on deadline at the end of the year, they can be inexact, first-draft statements reflecting a moment in time; it’s like a postmortem temperature taken while the body is still warm. This gut-level impulse tends to favor more unpredictable, less popular picks: fanboy plugs, showoff-y picks, oppositional stances.

On the other hand, you’re making broad statements about the state of music, and there have to be real criteria for that judgment. Less impressively, critics want to look smart to other critics, and that means balancing a certain number of obscurities with a certain number of choices in common, which function as trade credentials. This is the more calculating approach, and it’s the mindset of collective editorial lists at magazines and websites. With the imprimatur of a publication, personal feelings are minimized (as is the blame for erroneous or lame picks), and these lists end up being more official and predictable, in line with the consensus; in fact, they establish consensus.

Neither approach is right or wrong; they work together. But looking back years later it’s hard to hold on to those random, contrarian choices, since the vibe you felt making them in the first place has probably faded, and the weeding process of history has rearranged the field. For example, from our point of view 10 years later, Kid A towers over the releases of 2000, but at the time it was somewhat more controversial: Pitchfork put it at No. 1 that year, but it was only No. 5 in Rolling Stone, behind Eminem, U2, D’Angelo, even Madonna’s Music.

What this means for me is that as I’ve revised my lists they have probably become more “correct” but also less interesting: fewer surprises, fewer argument-starters, less defiant advocacy. One of my favorites for 2008, for instance, was the Jonas Brothers, which caught me some shit. (Hi, Jake.) I can’t say now whether I was right or wrong about it because I haven’t listened in a year; that fact alone, however, is reason to edit that album out, since it can’t have been so great if after 12 months I don’t care.

But it’s also one of those self-correcting, conformist moments, an opportunity to replace an honest but risky lark with something safer, more familiar, “stronger.” At the same time, you’ve got to hold on to your individuality and avoid succumbing to the groupthink that can make so many of these lists tediously identical at the time they’re drawn up but then uselessly out of fashion once X number of years pass and nobody cares anymore about Northern State or Arrested Development. That, and the fact that you need to listen to lots and lots and lots of music, is why it’s hard to do this.

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That’s theory. Now for practice. Here’s my original list for 2007 (and original blurbs):

1. Dirty Projectors, Rise Above
2. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand
3. Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
4. Battles, Mirrored
5. Feist, The Reminder
6. Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
7. M.I.A., Kala
8. Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
9. Avril Lavigne, The Best Damn Thing
10. Radiohead, In Rainbows

Scorecard: Pretty right-on, I think. Dirty Projectors blew my mind in 2007, and I still like them now. Plant/Krauss is magnificent, and Spoon added another reason for being the best band of the decade. I’m moving Feist and M.I.A. up, bumping Battles down, and replacing Avril with Deerhoof, who deserve more credit than they’ve been getting at decade’s end. Otherwise not many changes. (Nos. 11 through 20 would include Black Lips, Yeasayer, Linda Thompson, Kanye, the Frames, Miranda Lambert and Nick Lowe. And Avril.)

Kind Reader, I present my revised list for 2007:

1. Dirty Projectors, Rise Above
2. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand
3. Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
4. Feist, The Reminder
5. M.I.A., Kala
6. Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
7. Battles, Mirrored
8. Radiohead, In Rainbows
9. Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
10. Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity

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2008 is a little trickier for me. My original list (and blurbs):

1. Vampire Weekend
2. Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago
3. Girl Talk, Feed the Animals
4. Metallica, Death Magnetic
5. TV on the Radio, Dear Science
6. Randy Newman, Harps and Angels
7. My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges
8. Black Kids, Partie Traumatic
9. Jonas Brothers, A Little Bit Longer
10. Beach House, Devotion

Looking at this, Randy Newman now feels more like an 8 or a 9 than a 6, and Black Kids and the JoBros belong in the mid-teens. But what to replace them with? The records that didn’t make my original cut were:

• Al Green, who made a gorgeous, vibrant record with ?uestlove. Cut because Newman was more topical and exploratory, and I didn’t want two fogies.
  
• Jamey Johnson. Omitted as a reaction against critical groupthink, and because I’m just not a country guy. But it’s undeniable that this is a very strong record.
• Coldplay. Good, but it’s Coldplay.
• She & Him. Nice, but at the time it didn’t seem terribly significant. Still doesn’t, although it’s just as sweet.
• Lykke Li. Sort of the year’s Bjork/Feist/Regina/Fiona/Emiliana quirky-girl entry. Which “shouldn’t matter shouldn’t matter,” as Gwen would say. But it does matter because her album is not half as clever as anything by Bjork or Feist or Regina or Fiona or Emiliana.
  
• Nick Cave. Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is great, but ... I dunno.
• Joe Jackson. Rain is as good as anything he did 25 or 30 years ago, but you’ve got the fogy problem again. What’s 2008 about it? Why could it not have been made in 1983 or 1992 or 2005?
• Magnetic Fields, Distortion. Another consensus choice, and despite a couple of fantaaaastic songs (“Drive On, Driver,” “California Girls”), it felt like a trifle.

Three more you see on every other list from 2008 are Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak, Fleet Foxes’ debut, and Tha Carter III. I still snooze thinking of Fleet Foxes, and don’t feel fully qualified to judge Lil Wayne. But Kanye’s Auto-Tune essay on isolation and misery was visionary; shoulda been in my list to begin with. He and Jamey Johnson make the cut.

So, 2008 revised:

1. Vampire Weekend
2. Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago
3. Metallica, Death Magnetic
4. Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak
5. Girl Talk, Feed the Animals
6. Jamey Johnson, That Lonesome Song
7. My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges
8. Randy Newman, Harps and Angels
9. TV on the Radio, Dear Science
10. Beach House, Devotion

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And that’s our show, folks! My 2009 list will be posted soon. Make that eventually. Well, pretty soon. Happy New Year!

Decade postmortem: 2006

My original list:

1. Cat Power, The Greatest
2. Joanna Newsom, Ys
3. Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not
4. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere
5. Ali Farka Touré, Savane
6. Camille, Le Fil
7. Beyoncé, B’Day
8. Regina Spektor, Begin to Hope
9. Grizzly Bear, Yellow House
10. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain

There wasn’t a huge amount to choose from in 2006, at least if you were looking in the usual places. The top sellers were High School Musical, Rascal Flatts, Carrie Underwood, Nickelback, Justin Timerlake and James Blunt. The Pazz and Jop winners were Dylan, TV on the Radio, Ghostface Killah, the Hold Steady and Gnarls Barkley, followed by Arctic Monkeys, Clipse, Neko Case, Joanna Newsom and a Tom Waits miscellany.

I liked some of those, but not all, and looking back I’m not overwhelmed with feeling for the music of 2006. I stand by The Greatest; never been a huge Cat Power fan but this one really got under my skin, and despite my initial ambivalence it remains very powerful. Beyond that there are a lot of decent records but not many killers. Joanna Newsom only came alive for me in concert, and anyway The Milk-Eyed Mender is more convincing. So I’m moving that down. Arctic Monkeys feels like a blip now, and aside from “Crazy,” Gnarls Barkley is more silly than great.

Other than The Greatest, the ones that hold up the best, in my view, are Camille, Ali Farka Touré and Grizzly Bear, so they’re all getting bumped up. I’m adding Justin Timberlake, which I’m not sure why I omitted three years ago, since I liked it then, too; it’s still dazzling, and while it doesn’t take itself seriously enough to really be called “visionary,” it certainly is futuristic. The other addition is Beirut, which now looks like a harbinger of the kitchen-sink multi-culti direction that indie rock was starting to go in, and Gulag Orkestar sums up the aesthetic with grace.

More comments: Camille’s Le Fil is an unrecognized masterpiece, a set of amazingly inventive vocal variations, Savane is spellbinding as Ali Farke Touré’s swan song (he died in early 2006), and Regina Spektor sounds pretty darn near perfection; Beyoncé is less strong but still fun enough to include.

Interesting that my original top 5 didn’t fare as well as the bottom 5. Why? No idea. Theories/challenges/rebuttals welcome.

So, here’s 2006 revised:

1. Cat Power, The Greatest
2. Camille, Le Fil
3. Ali Farka Touré, Savane
4. Justin Timberlake, FutureSex/LoveSounds
5. Grizzly Bear, Yellow House
6. Beirut, Gulag Orkestar
7. Regina Spektor, Begin to Hope
8. Joanna Newsom, Ys
9. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
10. Beyoncé, B’Day

Buncha ladies. That’s good.

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My postmortems of 2007 and 2008 are coming next. I expect there will be less revision there since they’re more recent, but who knows. You can see my previous entries below, or, for those who are really lazy, here: 2000 and 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 and 2005.

(And 2009 is on its way, eventually.)

Decade postmortem: 2004 and 2005

My original list for 2004:

1. Arcade Fire, Funeral
2. Franz Ferdinand, s/t
3. TV on the Radio, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
4. Kanye West, The College Dropout
5. Regina Spektor, Soviet Kitsch
6. Wolf Eyes, Burned Mind
7. Vietnam, The Concrete’s Always Grayer on the Other Side of the Street
8. Usher, Confessions
9. Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Like Bad News
10. William Shatner, Has Been

In terms of how music is made and distributed, the early 2000s weren’t hugely different from the late ’90s. There were still megaplatinum albums (7.4 million for The Eminem Show in 2002, 6.5 million for Get Rich or Die Tryin’ in 2003), MTV still wielded the hitmaking wand, and the Internet was still more of a nuisance/question mark than the Third Horseman. (The iTunes store opened in 2003, to no small amount of skepticism.) But 2004 was the year things started to look truly transitional.

It was actually a good year for album sales. They went up 2 percent in 2004, after slipping the previous three years. Usher’s Confessions was tops with a remarkable 7.9 million. After sweeping the Grammys and moving 5.1 million copies of Come Away With Me in 2003, Norah Jones continued to sell by the truckload: another 3.8 million in 2004. What could be wrong, right?

In hindsight there were probably a million indicators of what would come, but here are two obvious ones: First, Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, a big flaming copyright violation released online with no label. It proved that this crazy new distribution model could actually work, and while the labels were used to challenges from the consumer/pirate side, this one came from an artist. Second, the Arcade Fire. They scaled the peaks of blog hype, but their sales were still peanuts by biz standards. Lesson: the days of plucking a Kurt Cobain out of indie-rock are over. Consequence: the indies dry up as a farm league and spin totally out of orbit.

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I think I was pretty dead-on with my list. Aside from a few position changes, the only change I want to make is to cut Vietnam, which made an impression on me at the time but hasn’t held; Joanna Newsom replaces it. Notes: Nix on The Grey Album, a curiosity that I never got much out of musically, although I recognize DM’s ingenuity. I’m also omitting U2, the Killers, Gwen Stefani, Interpol and Wilco for various reasons, the biggest that I don’t love the albums. And yes, the Shatner record is good!

What does all that biz analysis have to do with my favorites? Nothing. It’s just interesting.

So, 2004 revised:

1. Arcade Fire, Funeral
2. TV on the Radio, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
3. Joanna Newsom, The Milk-Eyed Mender
4. Kanye West, The College Dropout
5. Usher, Confessions
6. Franz Ferdinand, s/t
7. Regina Spektor, Soviet Kitsch
8. Wolf Eyes, Burned Mind
9. Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Like Bad News
10. William Shatner, Has Been

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And now for 2005. I don’t have much more to say about the biz or the larger culture. It was the year in which, despite everything, George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term, having won a decisive majority. Maybe it’s appropriate, then, that the best album of the year was an uncompromising, politicized cry from the third world.

My original list:

1. M.I.A., Arular
2. The Frames, Burn the Maps
3. Sons and Daughters, The Repulsion Box
4. High on Fire, Blessed Black Wings
5. Kanye West, Late Registration
6. Decemberists, Picaresque
7. White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan
8. Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine
9. Keyshia Cole, The Way It Is
10. The Go! Team, Thunder, Lightning, Strike

I’m going to give myself the groupthink test on these — i.e., looking back after four years, which ones am I certain I was voting for out of love, and which might be the result of that invisible consensus peer pressure we were talking about earlier?

1. Not a chance. Loved it, listened over and over.
2. Nope. It didn’t even make Pazz and Jop.
3. Ditto.
4. Ditto, not that metal would make that list anyway.
5. Some groupthink is inevitable, but to my 2009 ears it still sounds completely solid. And it’s amazing just how much of a fully-formed star Kanye was right from the get-go. He had years of practice with Jay-Z, Twista, Jadakiss et al., but none of those guys had the gumption to look into a live network TV camera and say, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
6. Probably some, but it’s easy to forget how fresh the Decemberists sounded in the first half of the 2000s. Picaresque is what their major-label debut should have sounded like; as I’ve said elsewhere, it got stale pretty fast after this point.
   
7. Nah, check my other lists.
8. Probably. It is an excellent album, though, and I have no regrets about including it.
9. Nah, I fell for it all on my own. This one also didn’t make Pazz and Jop.
10. Yeah, makes me wince. What can I say, sometimes you make a bad call.

So that’s pretty good, I think, overall. I’m cutting the Go! Team, as you might guess, but otherwise leaving my list pretty much intact.

For me, the big contenders I had originally excluded are: My Morning Jacket’s Z, Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, Feist’s Let It Die, Spoon’s Gimme Fiction, Teenage Fanclub’s Man-Made, Amadou & Mariam’s Dimanche à Bamako, Wolf Parade’s Apologies to the Queen Mary, Van Morrison’s Magic Time, Lee Ann Womack’s There’s More Where That Came From, Teddy Thompson’s Separate Ways and Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy.

Of those, the only ones I have unequivocal feelings about are My Morning Jacket, Wolf Parade and Okkervil River. And I think MMJ wins out. Sorry, Sufjan, your big breakthrough was beautiful but a little too precious for me. Sorry, Feist, Spoon and Teenage Fanclub, I love you guys, but your albums were flawed. Sorry, Amadou & Mariam, you handed Manu Chao the keys. Sorry, Teddy, I still think you can better. Sorry, Van and Lee Ann, you made gorgeous records but they feel lost in time.

So, 2005 revised:

1. M.I.A., Arular
2. The Frames, Burn the Maps
3. Kanye West, Late Registration
4. Keyshia Cole, The Way It Is
5. Sons and Daughters, The Repulsion Box
6. Decemberists, Picaresque
7. High on Fire, Blessed Black Wings
8. White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan
9. My Morning Jacket, Z
10. Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine

Decade postmortem: 2003

My original list:

1. Sparks, Lil’ Beethoven
2. Tall Dwarfs, The Sky Above, the Mud Below
3. Shins, Chutes Too Narrow
4. Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers
5. Kings of Leon, Youth & Young Manhood
6. Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It in People
7. Outkast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
8. Warren Zanes, Memory Girls
9. The High Strung, These Are Good Times
10. Grandaddy, Sumday

The big releases in 2003 were Outkast, Norah Jones, 50 Cent, Beyoncé, Linkin Park and Evanescence. The ones that turned up on the most critics’ lists were Outkast, the White Stripes (Elephant), Fountains of Wayne, Radiohead (Hail to the Thief), the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Shins.

2003 was a pretty great year for pop singles. There was “Hey Ya!” and “In da Club,” perhaps the two greatest hip-hop/pop songs ever. (And I mean pop: Not talking about “Straight Outta Compton” here.) It was also the year of “Crazy in Love,” the greatest of whatever that is. And “Seven Nation Army,” the White Stripes’ peak, the last moment before they began obsessively dismantling the formula they had created.

So with all of those wonderful pop hits, why did I pick Sparks and Tall Dwarfs? I don’t really know. To some degree I think it’s the contrary instinct: you know everybody else is going to pick the White Stripes and Outkast, so you go for a personal favorite and try to grab some cool points with something obscure. It’s kind of ridiculous, but everybody does it. Another reason is simply that you’re rating full albums, not singles.

And goddammit, Lil’ Beethoven really was the most entertaining album of the year for me. It’s full of bile and wit and stacked harmonies, with “classical” arrangements and the Sparks’ trademark opera-rock vocals (they did it before Queen), and the Mael brothers just ridicule everything they see: ostentatiously angry rock bands, the island of Ibiza, automatic phone hold-bots, “Ugly Guys With Beautiful Girls.” There’s no real point to it, no major relevance. But neither was there any huge point to The Importance of Being Earnest, and you damn well better believe that that would have topped my list in 1895.

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Judging by some of my other choices, it seems that my mood in December 2003 was, “Fuck it, I feel like choosing these 10 albums right now, and I’m tired of thinking about it.” Call it PMS: pre makingalist syndrome. So Tall Dwarfs is good, but probably not No. 2 good. Warren Zanes and the High Strung, nah. Fountains of Wayne album has some nuggets but it’s no Utopia Parkway.

As for the other biggies, yes on 50 Cent and Beyoncé, both of which are so fantastic I really can’t account for their omission. Elephant also belongs here, bottom half. But I stand by my meh of Hail to the Thief, and while I think the Strokes’ second album is underrated, it’s not as great as, say, Grandaddy’s still-amazing Sumday. I don’t remember why I put Kings of Leon here, but I’m leaving it because I don’t have a good reason to take it off.

Revised:

1. Sparks, Lil’ Beethoven
2. 50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin’
3. Grandaddy, Sumday
4. Shins, Chutes Too Narrow
5. Beyoncé, Dangerously in Love
6. Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It in People
7. White Stripes, Elephant
8. Outkast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
9. Tall Dwarfs, The Sky Above, the Mud Below
10. Kings of Leon, Youth & Young Manhood

I think that’s a pretty good list.

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Next ... 2004!!!

Decade postmortem: 2002

My original list:

1. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2. Sonic Youth, Murray Street
3. Afel Bocoum, Damon Albarn, Toumani Diabaté and Friends, Mali Music
4. Spoon, Kill the Moonlight
5. George Harrison, Brainwashed
6. Breeders, Title TK
7. Low, Trust
8. Orchestra Baobab, Pirates Choice
9. Bright Eyes, Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground
10. Pulses, s/t

I don’t remember a lot about 2002, other than that the whole thing felt like a long, horrible countdown to the inevitable invasion of Iraq. And looking over the various critics’ lists from that year, there’s a lot of music that hasn’t aged terribly well. Critics aren’t to blame for that, but they’re to blame for brainwashing themselves into overpraising it. I’m sorry, but Beck’s Sea Change was a boring, ponderous exercise that deserved about half the stars that Rolling Stone gave it.

Then there’s Maladroit, Songs for the Deaf, In Search Of..., The Rising, One Beat, and ones by younger and supposedly fresher bands: Turn on the Bright Lights, Original Pirate Material. None of these hold up great: a lot of weak mid-career placeholders (Weezer, QOTSA; remember Red Hot Chili Peppers’ By the Way?), dutiful post-9/11 statements (Springsteen, Sleater-Kinney) and overhyped fads (fill in the blank).

BUT, there was indeed a lot that was good. White Blood Cells broke the White Stripes, and Kill the Moonlight still stands as one of the sharpest and most original statements of the decade. Springsteen gave us jingoism, but Sonic Youth dealt with the painful reverberations of 9/11 on a more personal and poignant scale, unexpectedly delivering their best since Daydream Nation. It’s slightly depressing, though, that 2002’s best album (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) only came out that year because it had been delayed by an idiotic music-biz drama.

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I think I did OK on my list but not great; I excluded a lot of the crap but still made a few iffy choices. I’m striking the Breeders and Low, and disqualifying my buddies the Pulses as a conflict of interest. Technically Orchestra Baobab shouldn’t count because it’s a reissue, but I can’t resist; it really is that magnificent. I’m also giving credit to A Rush of Blood to the Head — say what you will about Coldplay, it’s a very strong album — and I’m adding Salif Keita’s unbelievably gorgeous Moffou as well as a sentimental favorite, Sondre Lerche. Honorable mentions to Doves’ The Last Broadcast, Sigur Ros’s () and Hot Snakes’ Suicide Invoice.

So here’s my revised list:

1. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2. Spoon, Kill the Moonlight
3. Sonic Youth, Murray Street
4. Orchestra Baobab, Pirates Choice
5. Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head
6. Afel Bocoum, Damon Albarn, Toumani Diabaté and Friends, Mali Music
7. Salif Keita, Moffou
8. Bright Eyes, Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground
9. Sondre Lerche, Faces Down
10. George Harrison, Brainwashed

Decade postmortem: 2000 and 2001

UPDATES: I tweaked the 2000 list a bit and added an addendum to 2001.

Now is the time when the music critics of the world compile their lists of the best releases of the year, and, even more agonizing, of the decade. Actually, for most writers that time was a month ago. I always get to these late, cuz (1) I don’t usually have a pressing early deadline, and (2) I find it psychically impossible to look back on a year until at least the second week of December.

I’ll be posting my 2009 list soon. But while scanning through the best-of-the-decade cloud, I’ve also been reflecting on my own past choices. Every critic should be held up to the lasting wisdom of his or her old year-end lists. Anybody can pick 10 faves, but a good critic is supposed to have the insight to find quality amid the mediocrity, and to explain and contextualize it. The problem is that aside from a few obvious mega-masterpieces (Thriller, Nevermind, William Shatner’s The Transformed Man) no one knows what will stand the test of time, which is the only test that matters. As a result, the art of the year-end top 10 includes an embarrassing amount of guesswork, fanboy advocacy and consensus groupthink gone stupidly wrong.

In 2007 the Village Voice ran a brutal but very funny reckoning about its Pazz and Jop poll, which covers hundreds of critics each year. (New Times had recently bought the Voice and begun booting its staff, so the motivation might not have been purely journalistic.) Reviewing decades of old Pazz and Jop tallies, the new Voice found a lot of howlers. Our nation’s rock critics got Thriller and Nevermind right (phew), but otherwise came out looking only slightly smarter than Grammy voters. For instance, in 1991 P.M. Dawn was laughably overestimated at No. 5, while My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless only made No. 14 and Dinosaur Jr’s Green Mind No. 37. Those are two of the most important alt-rock albums of the ’90s, and it was pretty obvious at the time how big a deal they were. In 1995 Elastica was No. 5 but Ready to Die was shunted all the way down to No. 38. I think we know who killed Biggie Smalls!

Over the next week or so I’ll be reviewing my past lists to see how well they hold up, and revising them as needed. Feel free to take me to task, shout in solidarity, call bullshit. It can be tricky to define exactly what we’re saying with these rankings. The big question is whether they represent only personal affinity or are larger statements about artistic or cultural importance. I lean toward the former, although I think a critic isn’t doing his job unless the latter plays a significant part.

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First up: 2000. I can’t find a list for that year; if I made one at all, it was informal. But with the benefit of hindsight, here’s the one I would (or should) have made:

1. Radiohead, Kid A
2. Webb Brothers, Maroon
3. High on Fire, The Art of Self Defense
4. White Stripes, De Stijl
5. Grandaddy, The Sophtware Slump
6. Sigur Ros, Agaetis Byrjun
7. Bebel Gilberto, Tanto Tempo
8. Outkast, Stankonia
9. Coldplay, Parachutes
10. Dead Prez, Let’s Get Free

I can’t deny Kid A, which stunned me when it came out. It was amazing that something so bizarrely beautiful went to No. 1. It’s a milestone in the history of weird music. It wasn’t a breakthrough exactly: it wasn’t the first “post-rock” album, nor was it really a major reboot for Radiohead (that was OK Computer). But Kid A continued and surpassed all the post-rock/electronica that had been bubbling up through the ’90s, when those sounds were new and revolutionary. And after a decade it still hasn’t been surpassed. Why? Because Radiohead made it look too easy. In the same way that 1,000 shitty lo-fi bands tried to fake being Pavement in the 1990s, 1,000 shitty post-rock bands tried to fake being Radiohead in the 2000s. It’s still happening, and that’s why Radiohead are still giants.

I also love the Webb Brothers, who reside in a different and less futuristic musical continent. These young sons of Jimmy Webb (“Wichita Lineman”) absorbed their father’s songwriting classicism and applied it to the druggy, debauched fast life in an epic concept album dripping with melody. (I originally had this in my 2001 list, but I believe the album came out in 2000. I can’t remember anymore.)

Following that, High on Fire’s debut was an instant classic of stoner metal, and De Stijl was the album that got the buzz going on the White Stripes. (I bought it at Midnight Records on 23rd Street; I hadn’t heard of them before, but it had one of those covers that guarantees something interesting.) Otherwise, I don’t have much to say about this list, other than that I remember being very struck by Dead Prez at the time, and that it took some time for me to make sense of Grandaddy; I probably would not have included them on this list if I had written it in December 2000, but now it seems essential to me. The Sigur Ros album had a complicated release history but it basically broke in 2000. (First major press mention on Nexis: announcement of NME Premier Awards nominees, Jan. 21, 2000.)

❧

And now, 2001. Here’s the list I made at the time:

1. Spoon, Girls Can Tell
2. White Stripes, White Blood Cells
3. Lightning Bolt, Ride the Skies
4. Manu Chao, Proxima Estación: Esperanza
5. Radiohead, Amnesiac
6. Low, Things We Lost in the Fire
7. Moldy Peaches, Moldy Peaches
8. Webb Brothers, Maroon
9. Fugu, Fugu 1
10. Tortoise, Standards

I think I’m right about a lot of this. But there are two big, big albums I would need to add: Nick Lowe’s The Convincer and the Shins’ Oh, Inverted World. The Convincer has become a real favorite of mine; discussing it with Claudia Marshall on WFUV recently, I called it “the most tasteful album of the 2000s,” and I stick by that. It’s magnificently elegant and eloquent, the perfect sound for Lowe’s wry but still warm-hearted reflections on the follies of life and love. The Shins I don’t need to explain; it’s fabulous, and it gets me right there. What I will say in defense of this revision is that that both albums reached me too late because of 9/11, when my life shifted to constant fifth-gear mode for several months. (Lowe’s album was released on that day; the Shins came out earlier, but I don’t think I heard it until early 2002.)

Otherwise, it’s a fairly easy decision to remove Manu Chao and Tortoise, neither of which has held up terribly well for me, and as noted above Marooned is reassigned to 2000. More difficult to lose is the lovely and playful Fugu. It charmed me eight years ago and is still nice, but here in 2009 it don’t sound like such great shakes.

That leaves room to add two titles, and there are some prominent candidates: Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft, the Strokes’ Is This It, and Jay-Z’s The Blueprint. In terms of who made the best album, I think Dylan wins out, and as much as I might loathe the Strokes, I have to admit that Is This It holds up really, really well. It was also the year of Miss E ... So Addictive, but my frustration with Missy albums is that aside from two or three brilliant tracks they tend to get pretty boring.

So here’s my revised list for 2001:

1. Nick Lowe, The Convincer
2. Spoon, Girls Can Tell
3. The Shins, Oh, Inverted World
4. White Stripes, White Blood Cells
5. Lightning Bolt, Ride the Skies
6. Radiohead, Amnesiac
7. Bob Dylan, Love and Theft
8. Moldy Peaches, Moldy Peaches
9. The Strokes, Is This It
10. Low, Things We Lost in the Fire

Addendum: Teenage Fanclub’s Howdy, released in the UK in 2000, came out in the US in 2001. It’s gorgeously pastoral, and asks simple, honest and poignant questions about life and love. (Here is my review at the time.) If I were to put it in this list it would be between Nos. 3 and 4, but I don’t want to mess with it at this point.

❧

Next up ... 2002!

Best of 2004

ALBUMS

1. Arcade Fire, Funeral
2. Franz Ferdinand, s/t
3. TV on the Radio, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
4. Kanye West, The College Dropout
5. Regina Spektor, Soviet Kitsch
6. Wolf Eyes, Burned Mind
7. Vietnam, The Concrete’s Always Grayer on the Other Side of the Street
8. Usher, Confessions
9. Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Like Bad News
10. William Shatner, Has Been

THE NEXT 10

Mr. Airplane Man, C’mon DJ
Joanna Newsom, The Milk-Eyed Mender
Devendra Banhart, Rejoicing in the Hands
Liars, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned
Mosquitos, Sunshine Barato
Bang on a Can Meets Kyaw Kyaw Naing
Nick Cave, Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
Tom Waits, Real Gone
Futureheads, s/t
Hot Snakes, Audit in Progress

26 MORE

Cucumbers, All Things to You
Tilly and the Wall, Wild Like Children
Caetano Veloso, A Foreign Sound
Blonde Redhead, Misery Is a Butterfly
Comets on Fire, Blue Cathedral
Laura Veirs, Carbon Glacier
Faun Fables, Family Album
Mouthus, s/t
Elliott Smith, From a Basement on the Hill
PJ Harvey, Uh Huh Her
Walkmen, Bows + Arrows
Bright Eyes/Neva Dinova, One Jug of Wine, Two Vessels
The Divine Comedy, Absent Friends
Iron & Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days
Division of Laura Lee, Das Not Compute
On Air Library, s/t
John Cale, HoboSapiens
Black Dice, Creature Comforts
Pink Grease, This Is for Real
Blood Brothers, Crimes
Chingy, Powerballin’
Beastie Boys, To the 5 Boroughs
Danger Mouse & Jemini, Ghetto Pop Life
Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse
Hem, Eveningland
v/a, Lif Up Yuh Leg an Trample

REISSUES

Brian Eno (8 albums)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly soundtrack
Eccentric Soul series on Numero

DISAPPOINTMENTS

Hives
Mos Def
Magnetic Fields
Sondre Lerche
Air
Destiny’s Child
Secret Machines
Wilco
Northern State
Talib Kweli
Mooney Suzuki
Le Tigre

DON’T CARE

Morrissey
Scissor Sisters
Jadakiss
Libertines
Jet
Drive-By Truckers
Courtney Love
Prince
Polyphonic Spree
Rufus Wainwright

BLANK STARE

The Streets
Velvet Revolver

WORST ALBUM OF 2004

Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart, Alfie: Music From the Motion Picture

EX POST FACTO

Apparently I didn’t make a list of singles for 2004.

Best of 2002

ALBUMS

1. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2. Sonic Youth, Murray Street
3. Afel Bocoum, Damon Albarn, Toumani Diabaté and Friends, Mali Music
4. Spoon, Kill the Moonlight
5. George Harrison, Brainwashed
6. Breeders, Title TK
7. Low, Trust
8. Orchestra Baobab, Pirates Choice
9. Bright Eyes, Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

10. Pulses, s/t

THE NEXT 10

Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head
Super Furry Animals, Rings Around the World
Doves, The Last Broadcast
High on Fire, Surrounded by Thieves
Electric Wizard, Let Us Prey
Sondre Lerche, Faces Down
Salif Keita, Moffou
Gogol Bordello, Multi Kontra Kulti vs. Irony
Hot Snakes, Suicide Invoice
Radio 4, Gotham!

21 MORE

Oneida, Each One Teach One
Andrew W.K., I Get Wet
Bruce Springsteen, The Rising
Manowar, Warriors of the World
Eminem, The Eminem Show
Hella, Hold Your Horse Is
Mekons, OOOH! (Out of Our Heads)
Koufax, Social Life
Walkmen/Calla, Split EP
Ex Models/Seconds, Split EP
Black Keys, The Big Come Up
Paul Westerberg, Stereo
Doug Martsch, Now You Know
MC Paul Barman, Paullelujah!
Sigur Rós, ()
Radio Zumbido, Los Ultimos Dias del AM
Suicide, American Supreme
Clipse, Lord Willin’
Buffalo Daughter, i.
Brazzaville, Rouge on Pockmarked Cheeks
Animals of Africa: Sounds of the Jungle, Plain & Bush

SINGLES

1. Andrew W.K., “I Love NYC”
2. Rapture, “House of Jealous Lovers”
3. Oneida, “Sheets of Easter”
4. Chemical Brothers with Beth Orton, “The State We’re In”
5. Wilco, “Heavy Metal Drummer”
6. Nelly, “Hot in Herre”
7. Clipse, “Grindin’ ”
8. Streets, “Stay Positive”
9. Super Furry Animals, “(Drawing) Rings Around the World”
10. Manowar, “Warriors of the World United”

DUDS

Beck
Frank Black
Queens of the Stone Age
The Vines
Foo Fighters
Black Dice
DJ Shadow
Beth Orton
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

EX POST FACTO

Nix Breeders.
9. Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head
10. Salif Keita, Moffou

Best of 2001

ALBUMS

1. Spoon, Girls Can Tell
2. White Stripes, White Blood Cells
3. Lightning Bolt, Ride the Skies
4. Manu Chao, Proxima Estación: Esperanza
5. Radiohead, Amnesiac
6. Low, Things We Lost in the Fire
7. Moldy Peaches, Moldy Peaches
8. Webb Brothers, Maroon
9. Fugu, Fugu 1
10. Tortoise, Standards

EX POST FACTO

Nick Lowe, The Convincer
The Shins, Oh, Inverted World

SINGLES

1. Bob Dylan, “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum”
2. Webb Brothers, “I Can’t Believe You’re Gone”
3. Daryll-Ann, “Surely Justice”
4. White Stripes, “Hotel Yorba”
5. Rapture, “Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks”
6. Pink, “Get the Party Started”
7. Teenage Fanclub, “Dumb Dumb Dumb”
8. Daniel Johnston, “Funeral Girl”
9. Neil Young, “Imagine”
10. Peaches, “Fuck the Pain Away”