Pitchfork's best of 2000s
Some of you may have seen last week that Pitchfork was releasing a list of the top 500 songs of this decade (you can read this from the beginning here, if you like).
I like making lists and seeing other people’s lists, and I also have a terrible soft spot for waxing nostalgic, so a list like this was bound to get me thinking. Then B decided we should make a playlist of all the songs on the list that we already had and listen to it in chronological order, so as to suss out the “narrative” of the decade. This has been both amusing and enlightening, and so I wanted to note a few things here.
• Jay-Z can probably be fairly called the rapper of the decade. While the last ten years definitely have been about the rise of southern rap, who’s been more, well, important than Jay-Z? (Ignore of course that he hasn’t really done anything worthwhile since the Black Album, but come on, that record was massive)
• I think I like the Arcade Fire more than I thought I did. I should probably relisten to their first record.
• Daft Punk haven’t made a decent record since 2001, but the three standouts from Discovery are still totally phenomenal. To me, they don’t sound the least bit dated, and I could probably keep putting them in mixes for another ten years without anyone complaining.
• One time I went to a Postal Service show primarily to see the opener - Cex - and left right after that. What the hell was I thinking? There’s an opportunity that’s probably never going to happen again.
• Songs which I still totally love: The Microphones’ “The Glow”; Joanna Newsom’s “Peach, Plum, Pear”; Bright Eyes’ “First Day of My Life”; plenty of others.
• There’s an odd thing about this list, which is that it tries to straddle the line between “best songs” and “songs of the decade”. In that the former is about quality irrespective of time, and the latter is about music which typifies its time.
• As such, there are a lot of songs on the list which I hear and think “there is a much better song on this album that I would have chosen instead of this one.” E.G.: Songs: Ohia’s “Blue Factory Flame”, Comets on Fire’s “The Bee and the Cracking Egg”, David Byrne & Brian Eno’s “Life is Long”, Stars’ “Romantic Comedy“ or “Time Can Never Kill the True Heart”, Vitalic’s “Poney, pt. 1”, and others, I’m sure.
Finally, I should note that I have absolutely no intention of producing any kind of end-of-decade material for this blog - I simply don’t have the time to do a proper job of going through every record I have from the last ten years. That said, you can expect the same year-end wrap-up I did last year, with plenty of downloadable goodies. But, uh, not until the year’s actually almost over.
