The highest ranking Australian act you will find in this chart, rendering this the quintessential Aussie tune of the decade. So there.
Yet another example that great, timeless pop relies on little much more than one tremendous melody. It's plaintive, maybe it's a little affectatious, but its emotive power - even after all these years of how many listenings is there.
Where Glenn Richards can at times veer into the purple prose, as with a lot of the Augies' more recent material wherein you feel the song was being made to fit the clever-clogs lyrics with, ironically a less lyrical overall effect.
But here, the balance is just perfect. The final lines, which would have the option of being delivered as a heart-jerking crescendo, are instead just left to waft off with the tune such that the song leaves us with nothing so much as an abstract sense of loss, of longing.
It's evoking these senses so effectively without straying into cliche or becoming overblown by surplus emotive devices that places this near the pinnacle of the decades' genius.
Nobody seems to really know anything about the actual provenance of this album. It sounds a LOT like NWW got a hold of some Faust out-takes and decided to fuck with them, and a lot LESS like an actual collaboration. Some artists find themselves included in this list possibly more on the basis of a body of work or album than on a stellar standout single, and this is Nurse with Wound's moment. NWW as band, as opposed to NWW as Steven Stapleton began performing live again in 2005, but this appears to mark something of a side project - though Stapleton has apparently played a couple of live encores with Faust over the last couple of years. Anyway, while the whole album rightly deserves a place here, as certainly the best NWW offering I've heard in a long time, Stapleton is impossible to keep track of, so who knows what gems I may have missed? Regardless, this is probably the most accessible track off the album.
59.
Clint Eastwood - Gorillaz
Clint Eastwood (Single) (2001)
It's kind of hard to imagine how Gorillaz ever had their conceptual birth. Would anyone in the nineties have even remotely dreamt that Damon Albarn would ever put out a rap album? Or that Misterdobalina WOULDN'T be the only thing Del the Funky Homosapien would be remembered for? Del performed on Gorillaz first album under the identity of "Del the Ghost Rapper", with the band having an unusually exhaustive fictional metanarrative incorporating cartoon half-ape/half-human characters. Del was supposed
to be a spirit that was hiding from death within the band's drummer. Whatever.
It's funky, dance oriented pop, and that's arguably a height Gorillaz could be said to have scaled almost alone during the decade.
58.
Sabrina - Einstürzende Neubauten
Silence is Sexy (2000)
Marking a neat and definitive break with their erstwhile trademark industrial raucousness, Silence is Sexy saw The Neubauten reborn as newly restrained, pared back, experimental unit. Silence itself is, obviously enough, the unit of analysis for the album. It's in the spaces BETWEEN events that the band creates meaning, not from the events themselves. But it's the very success of that pursuit which the band themselves seem to want to undermine, and the title track concludes oxymoronically with the rejoinder that "silence is not sexy at all."
Sabrina is easily the most radio friendly offering from the album, and quickly became one of the band's staple performance tracks. The song asks the question of what colour can be ascribed to this new music. Those who know the band's ethos know that they have always drawn inspiration from dada-ist processes of creation, using randomly drawn cards as musical instructions from which the songs are then improvised, so the idea of colour representing both mood and sound is no great leap of logic. And Sabrina answers in a resolute voice that the colour of silence is BLACKNESS. "It is as black as Malevich Square/The cold furnace in which we stare." And it's a brilliant blackness, with a video that does it complete justice.
57.
The Night Is A Blackbird - Augie March
Strange Bird (2002)
Yep, well I'm pretty confident this isn't going to be in anyone else's top forties anywhere. So all the other lists are wrong. This song is like a slow-paced ritual emotional disembowelment. That's a GOOD thing. And Glenn A Richards is probably Australia's greatest contemporary lyricist. And I'm probably the only person in the country who thinks that. So all the other Australians are wrong too.
56.
To Clean - Woods
Songs Of Shame (2009)
Don't know much about these guys, though they've been around since 2005, they only actually ever appeared on my radar through this whole noughties list shebang. It's New York folk, but with a disharmonic twist, they're extremely prolific - with nine albums in the last ten years, this is an extremely well crafted neat little gem.
55.
Can't Stand Me Now - The Libertines
The Best Of... (2004)
Somehow they managed to come across as a pack of frat boys, but man, Pete Doherty could WRITE. "Cornered, the boy kicked out at the world/ the world kicked back/ a lot fuckin' harder now". That's basically James Joyce. Shuddup.
54.
The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores - Morrissey
You Are The Quarry (2004)
Who did the decades most extravagant and unexpected comeback? The bloke who'd been putting out wallpaper since 1995. Who won an entire new legion of fans and extended his career by at least another decade with one album? This bloke. Even while failing to release its pinnacle track as a single.
This is absolutely everything that is utterly brilliant about Morrissey. Its simultaneously curmudgeonly AND self-deprecating, it ripples with pathos but sung with a knowing wink. He knows this is everything people have come to expect of him, many of them not intending to flatter. But he sings it to soak up the flattery, whether it truly exists or not.
53.
Four To The Floor (Thin White Duke Mix) - Starsailor
Silence Is Easy (2003)
Here's a weird one. So, EVERYONE knows the remix. NOBODY has even heard the original. And you listen to it and you wonder "how the hell did anyone ever think to turn THAT into a dance track?" and to have it become one of the most ubiquitous, and seemingly obvious such beasts ... it's all very strange. You can compare them below. The remix is in a whole other league entirely.
52.
Pork and Beans - Weezer
Weezer (Red Album) (2008)
The award-winning video draws extensively on the still reasonably nascent YouTube and its meme stash. Could you be ANY more frigging po-mo if you TRIED?
Well yes, actually. Apparently this killer-catchy number was written in anger after their record company insisted they produce significantly more commercial material. The pop culture references "They say I need some Rogaine to put in my hair", "Oakley makes the shades that transform a tool", "Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the chart/ Maybe if I work with him I can perfect the art", are so deliciously obvious, the chorus so over-amped, this is the hit single that tries to murder every other hit single ever.
51.
Oh Yeah - The Subways
Young For Eternity (2005)
Another one you'll probably struggle to find in other lists. I have no idea why. The list of songs during the course of the decade capable of stopping in your tracks - "what the fuck was THAT?" - isn't very long. But I still remember the first time I heard this, but it was on RAGE, so by the time I was hooked the band's name had already flashed off the screen. Then they played the Big Day Out, and I was just checking out this new band - or probably more accurately checking out Charlotte Cooper (all the great rock chicks have been bassists of course) when they flipped into this, and so did my brain.
The album was really promising also. I probably should have found room in this list for "Rock n Roll Queen". You can have it as a bonus below. And they sounded well polished beyond their scant years, although by all reports their more recent albums haven't really matched the promise of their stellar debut.
And the noughties have offered a proliferation of previously unimaginable channels for the production and distribution of music that have been tantamount to a revolution in the entire way music is communicated. And if music is little else than a vehicle for communication, then this is a revolution in the very essence of the medium.
What does it mean that anyone with an internet connection can stream almost at will practically ANY song from the ENTIRE body of human recorded history? And this is neither much of an exaggeration nor any real extrapolation. The Alan Lomax recordings are all on Spotify now.
Alan Lomax (r) with Wade Ward, 1959-60
Does this mean that we are set to witness the death of recorded music as a physical object? A casual look at the sorts of prices collectible vinyl still goes for would suggest no. In fact the other real trend we saw in the noughties was the resurgence of vinyl as a fetishised object, wherein it has connotations of authenticity and of connoisseurship. Values that rock/pop ideology has always valorised in its heirarchies in contrasting the 'commercial' with the 'authentic'.
But as we'll see in the next installment, what the noughties have done is blur that boundary between commercial and authentic. Since the days when Biz Markie first 'yes y'all'-ed forth, hip hop music has had its aim squarely on destroying this dialectic. The accumulation of bling actually became your route to authenticity, not its opposite. And any casual look particularly at contemporary music video culture shows how quickly discourses from this arena have become pop culture stereotypes.
Five minutes on any given Video Hits channel trammels up a bewildering array of variously rehashed stereotypes that owe considerably more to cheerleading and other communal dance activities than they do to a popular music heritage that runs all the way back to the 1950s.
So here we are in the perpetual now, shorn of our history and all its context. Naked and unformed whiteboards waiting to be scribbled on and erased, where we have NO BASIS for attaching quaint, unitary, historicity to anything, where any value judgement is subjective - can never be definitive. By definition that can never be defined either.
It should really be no wonder that in this environment political music died a sorry death. And Neil Young, the already dead, is the only fellow in today's list who could conjure its true spirit. #146, below. Enjoy.
So what's the point of it all? In an age when everything is fragmented and personalised to the nth degree, what's the point of trying to maintain a pantheon, a heirarchy, a 'Top Forty' anything?
We're all going to have umpteen variants of this same pantheon. What I've done here, in spite of the professed objectivity of my method, is produce a list that is irredeemably my own, and unavoidably incomplete. I can't have heard every song that would conceivably qualify for this last, and where that mightn't have mattered doing this for the eighties or nineties because the candidates at least for the upper echelons would be pretty incontrovertible.
But THE noughties artist? I laugh a little under my breath when I hear people debating Foals v Muse v ColdPlay v Franz Ferdinand. Most of these artists don't make this chart. By virtue of not being good enough to even be candidates. So the Pantheon, if it even vaguely exists is completely in dispute and completely individualised. Radiohead would probably be as close to a universal nomination as you could go.
And as we've seen, this process leads directly to a shifting in locus for any Pantheon from the trans-generic realm of "pop/rock" into the specifically genre-based R&B/club arena. So in this list we do hear quite a bit from Beyonce and Jay-Z, Alicia Keys and Kanye. Heck, I've even got the Sugababes in this installment.
The Sugababes - Lineup #638,742 Mutya/Keisha/Siobhan
Because you certainly earn credit in this reviewer's accounts for taking YOUR form, ANY form, no matter now hackneyed, outdated or conservative, and re-working that form to its artistic acme. Music today has a far broader and more significant social function than when the classical composers built its original pantheon.
As we've seen, the idea that music might be able to change the world in some monolithic manner might be dead, but our belief that developing new ways of seeing the world, of "innovating" (pardon me, I'm trying to be zeitgeisty) our entire outlook being central to humanity's future dies much harder.
And so I'll keep pumping this out, for it maps something far more significant and more resonant than an agreeable collection of sounds. It's the heartbeat of the ages.
125.
Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Belle and Sebastian
Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003)
124.
Rej
Âme
Rej (2006)
123.
Fuck the Poor
Selfish Cunt
No Wicked Heart Shall Prosper (2004)
122.
I Want To Die In The Hot Summer
I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness
I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness [EP] (2003)
121.
Jesus, Etc.
Wilco
From the Beginning (2007)
120.
My Little Brother
Art Brut
Bang Bang Rock & Roll (2005)
119.
Cruiser
Red House Painters
Old Ramon (2001)
118.
Fix Up, Look Sharp
Dizzee Rascal
Boy In Da Corner ()
117.
Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole
Martha Wainwright
Martha Wainwright (2005)
116.
Young Folks
Peter Bjorn and John
Writer's Block (2006)
115.
Jerk It Out
The Caesars
39 Minutes Of Bliss (2003)
114.
Seven Nation Army
The White Stripes
Elephant (2003)
113.
Decent Days And Nights
The Futureheads
Burnout 3 : Takedown (2004)
112.
Daft Punk Is Playing At My House
LCD Soundsystem
LCD Soundsystem [Disc 1] (2005)
111.
Heartbeat And Sails
Augie March
Sunset Studies (2001)
110.
Slow Hands
Interpol
Antics (2004)
109.
Follow The Cops Back Home
Placebo
Meds (2006)
108.
Black Rainbow
St. Vincent
Actor (2009)
107.
Eli, The Barrow Boy
The Decemberists
Picaresque (2005)
106.
Two Weeks
Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest (2009)
105.
No One
Alicia Keys
As I Am (2007)
104.
Feel Good Inc.
Gorillaz
Dare (2005)
103.
Scarlet Fields
The Horrors
Primary Colours (2009)
102.
Push The Button
Sugababes
Change (2000)
101.
Waitin' For A Superman
The Flaming Lips
VOID [Video Overview In Deceleration] [Music] (2005)
