Seriously. There are gaps you know ....
You don't really start from anywhere meaningful to say in terms of earth shattering events of the decade, the one that shattered the Twin Towers of New York City and with it so many lives is inescapably the defining one for the entire globe.
Across vastly different cultures and regions, the impact of these events came to define the decade for so many - arguably any culture with any significant access to media to an extent that has certainly been rare in human history.
Do we see this new zeitgeist reflected in the music of the age? This is one issue we will ponder.
On a musical level, I have a few theses to extend progressively here.
My main one is that the decade really saw the end of all things monolithic in rock in particular, maybe pop and rap less so. Who are the big stadium acts now? They're all guys, and I do mean guys, from the 80s or earlier doing reunions.
It seems like Blur v Oasis are the last meaningful monoliths we are ever to see if there's any trend to be evinced from the handing of these sorts of titles to Snoop Dogg, Beyonce, Rihannon, J Lo, Gaga, etc. The thing that unites them is a large-scale vacuousness, a sense that all these beings are mannequins to more or less overt extents.
They're brands built by marketing, they themselves are just sites for discourse, billboards. So much so that even though they are at one level all about MEEEE as a global marketing force, the actual 'self', the sense of all this being about a real, living person rather than someone who descends daily from Mount Olympus, is entirely lost.
And technology pushes us ever more into this ever more self-enabled, atomised world. And we, and young folk in particular spin a very positive narrative about these discourses of narrative and freedom.
Yet at the same time we feel betrayed and jaded with what we see as outmoded structures in government and in the broader political/social sphere, we claim to crave a better sense of engagement with an ideal something in so many areas of our lives. Yet we're getting torn apart by the atomisation discourse on the one hand and the communitarian on the other.
In musical terms, file sharing and related technologies have impacted an entire artistic discourse. The self-proliferation and DIY ethos has much in common with punk. But at the level upon which distribution is still reliant upon industry models we have seen considerably less investment in new artists and innovation than at any time probably since the dawn of rock itself.
It must be pointed out, this survey doesn't bear that lack of innovation out. It shows that artists are always going to find a way to make great music. But the look of the whole 'scene' is very different to how it the 90s would have appeared looking back from 2005.
In this list, we see a profusion of artists and styles pointing off in a million directions, where in the 90s we'd be stoking the chart with Britpop and Madchaster or derivatives thereof. Subcultural forms were either established and survived and evolved within themselves.
In the case of rave, it started out as a wildly innovative and deeply counter-cultural movement, but it was soon coopted by the entire corporate superDJ/superclub/superfestvial scene with such depressing speed and completeness, this has to be one of the key stories of the 90s.
That decade started with the promise of a 'Peace Dividend' from the Cold War, but was bookend by the events of September 11, 2001 that led the US at least into a War that accrued public debt at such a rate that government couldn't drag the US economy out of recession, giving us ten years of stagnant growth.
So, this isn't the nineties, but it's obviously an extension of it. Why should an arbitrary point in time affect any of this anyway?
Technologies that enhanced social atomisation and individualism were already well advanced, even if we didn't have social media yet. Probably the other great universal global trend to emerge this decade.
More on this. And specifically on how everything has impacted music later this week.
| # | Name | Artist | Album (Year) |
| 249 | Womanizer | Britney Spears | The Singles Collection (2008) |
| 248 | Down Down Down | The Presets | Beams (2005) |
| 247 | Living With War | Neil Young | Living With War (2006) |
| 246 | Departures | Closer Musik | Kompakt Total 3 (2010) |
| 245 | The Lisbon Maru | Fuck Buttons | Tarot Sport (2000) |
| 244 | Incinerate | Sonic Youth | Prime Cuts (Promo) (2006) |
| 243 | Fingers Become Thumbs! | Future Of The Left | Curses (2007) |
| 242 | Club Foot | Kasabian | Kasabian Empire () |
| 241 | Epoca | Gotan Project | La Revercha Del Tango (2001) |
| 240 | Little Rhymes | Mercury Rev | All Is Dream [Bonus Track] (2001) |
| 239 | Running The Loping | Smog | A River Ain't Too Much To Love (2005) |
| 238 | Hate To Say I Told You So | The Hives | Tyrannosaurus Hives (2000) |
| 237 | Bewitching Cattle | Moon Wiring Club | Shoes Off And Chairs Away (2009) |
| 236 | The Empty Page | Sonic Youth | (2002) |
| 235 | Death to Death | The Crucified | Take Up Your Cross/Nailed (2008) |
| 234 | Inside Outside | The Grates | Gravity Won't Get You High (2006) |
| 233 | You And Me | Her Space Holiday | The Past Presents the Future (2005) |
| 232 | Halcyon (Beautiful Days) | Mono | Walking Cloud And Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered And The Sun Shined (2004) |
| 231 | I Feel Just Like A Child | Devendra Banhart | Cripple Crow (2005) |
| 230 | Take Me To Your Leader | Add N To (X) | Loud Like Nature (2002) |
| 229 | The Modern Age | The Strokes | Is This It? (2000) |
| 228 | Drop It Like It's Hot | Snoop Dogg | Shark Tale Motion Picture Soundtrack (2006) |
| 227 | Pon De Floor | Major Lazer Feat. Vybz Kartel | Guns Don't Kill People... Lazers Do (2009) |
| 226 | Empire State Of Mind | Jay-Z Feat. Alicia Keys | The Blueprint 3 (2000) |
