Numbers 30-26, "You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve"

#29, Robert Smith - fat bastard

30.	Silence (DJ Tiësto's In Search Of Sunrise Remix) - Delerium Feat. Sarah McLachlan
	Perfecto Presents Another World [Disc 2] (2000)
	Voted by Mixmag as the "12th greatest dance record of all time", in what's an otherwise mostly appalling catalogue of utter dross. (Seriously, that's the WORST BEST OF anything I think I've ever read. It's not even vaguely canonical.) Because of the vagaries of randomly tagged pirate MP3s I spent most of the decade thinking this was Paul Oakenfold. But no, bugger me, it turns out I like a Tiësto song. Well, mix. And it's the source material that really shines, rather than the mix. There are umpteen similar versions, but this does actually seem to be the best. Sarah McLachlan's voice is what carries it. She bends just the right notes JUST enough to render the delivery quite unique, quite effective, and quite affective, and the semi-breathless vocal is married perfectly to a curiously haunting and for the genre atypically complex melody. The original is MUCH slower, more like a traditional pop song, so well done Tiësto for seeing the potential in it. Now would you mind explaining the remainder of your career?
29.	Bloodflowers - The Cure
	Bloodflowers (2000)
	God, The Cure are irritating. When this came out, Robert Smith was all over the media saying this was going to be the last ever Cure album, and well they've pulled that act about three times now. But this was believable. Because this sounds like a gamma ray burst from a dying, once massive star. The utterly epic swansong you'd produce if you wanted to keep your place in history secure. Smith has said he sees this as the culmination of a trilogy that began with Pornography (1982) and Disintegration (1989). The lineage from Disintegration is everywhere obvious, these are brooding, sullen, monolithic, epicly serious songs, all driven by reverb laden guitar riffs. They're both albums crying out to be played end to end in a massive darkened stadium. "This world always stops," I said "This wonder always leaves, The time always comes to say goodbye" "This tide always turns," I said "This night always falls again, And these flowers will always die." Lying, deceptive bastard. Lying, deceptive, obscenely talented BASTARD.
28.	You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve - Johnny Boy
	Johnny Boy (2006)
	I can still remember the first time I ever heard this. I was in Sydney for  I forget what reason, some conference I was flogging books at, probably. Women's Health? doesn'tmatter. I was banged up in bed, Friday night I think, with a huge tray of room service, remnants of the minibar scattered artfully across the duvet. Rage on the telly. This came on and well bugger me, now I need another miniPims, because that song is the damnest, catchiest, freshest, most original bit of pop I've yet heard this side of forever. These guys are the NEXT BIG THING. You heard it here first, and boy did I tell everyone I met for the next fortnight exactly that.   Well. I have no idea how any artist can possess enough talent to produce a debut single THIS GOOD from an album this turgid. Do NOT ever buy this album. Little chance of that unless you only shop the 99c bin at Dixon's, of course, because it and this band, frankly deservedly, sank without trace. How can anyone have the ear to produce a tune this killer and not be able to hear the other 11 tracks aren't in the slightest bit tuneful or interesting on frankly any level? Doesn't matter. Enjoy this, because it's the last you'll ever hear from Johnny Boy.
27.	The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
	Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (2005)
	This works on so many levels, the intro riff that's basically one note and a pitch bend that stays in your head for hours. Alex Ounsworth's voice. The wholly unintelligible vocal. The way it ramps up to the chorus: "Hauuuuuuunteeeeeeeeedd byyyyyyyy apastijustcantsee anymore anymore anymore well leeeeeeeeetmetellyou..."   It's got a vaguely alt-country whiff about it, but in essence it's pure pop. And I think I've had grander fun bouncing around dancefloors than any track discussed here so far. Actually maybe Modest Mouse win that. You don't care, either way. PLAY LOUD!!!
26.	Halo - Beyoncé
	I Am... Sasha Fierce (2008)
	OK, this is the last of the Beyoncé. Not a track I should really need to introduce. But it's everything that's great about her. It's epic, it's positively oozing grandeur, the vocal goes places most singers simply aren't capable, it will run madcap around your head for a solid hour after any given listen. It's some of the finest Top Forty Chart-pop of not merely this decade, but most of those preceding it equally.

Numbers 50-41, "Formed a Band"

#42, Liars

50.	Formed A Band - Art Brut
	Bang Bang Rock & Roll (2005)
	"It's not irony/ it's not Rock 'n' Roll/ we're just talking, to the kids." And that of course is just oozing irony. It's the song that tries to be as banal as possible. "Formed a band/ we formed a band/ look at us/ we formed a band." But it's a case study in pop banality and pop meanings, this song is about every song. The fact that it generates a quite profound narrative from elements that are in their own right so bland is its genius. Art Brut's debut album seemed to offer so much potential, it crackled with about eight tracks that were all single-worthy, and Eddie Argos seemed at least to this observer to be the absolute next great thing, and mostly because of the well-worn hipster irony. "I'm drinking Hennesy/with Morrissey" is about as knowing as genius gets, at least until he starts singing about David Hockney, or 'Ockney, as pronounced "Modern art makes me/ want to rock out." But something went wrong. He'll probably fancy I'm just kissing arse, but when Chris Chinchilla upped and made Melbourne home, the band seemed to totally lose the knack of writing pop music altogether. And Eddie Argos suddenly didn't wear his ironic pantaloons nearly half as well. So if you buy an Art Brut album, make it this one. JUST this one. And you should, because I'd probably have it in my decade's Top 20.
49.	Poison Dart - The Bug Feat. Warrior Queen
	London Zoo (2008)
	So we've spoken about dubstep, we've spoken about grime. This beast distils and melds all the greatest elements of both. A beat that sounds like a heart attack. A rap that belts you with a sonic baseball bat. Wire magazine had this as their best album of 2008, and they know a thing or two. The culmination of about twenty years quiet achievement by Kevin Martin, I'm really not terribly familiar with much of his other work, and I need to fix that.
48.	Matadjem Yinmixan - Tinariwen
	Aman Iman: Water Is Life (2007)
	There's not a heap of World Music in this list, and I'll confess that's because it's a bit of a musical gap of mine. The Tuareg are a semi-nomadic desert Berber people from Mali, and Tinariwen actually means "the deserts" in their native tongue. Tinariwen the group formed while the founding members were exiled in Algeria during the Malinese civil war, basically building their own guitars, in one case out of "a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire." The band were actually trained as rebel soldiers by Gaddhafi's Libya, eventually returning to their homeland following a Tuareg uprising in the early 90s, and finally laying down arms for guitars on a permanent basis. Their guitar style is known locally as 'assouf', and as is obvious from even the first bar of this number, draws substantially on NON-western musical traditions. While there's a hint of blues to it, it appears to be because it's sourcing the same West African traditions as the blues itself. The band claim never to have heard any actual blues music until they started touring internationally in the early noughties. But in a decade where my thesis starts with "you've heard it ALL before", Tinariwen stand very resolutely out, because unless I've got a bunch of Touareg nomads online here, you very definitely HAVEN'T.
47.	Ready For The Floor - Hot Chip
	Made In The Dark (2008)
	Hot Chip, if Pee Wee Herman went electronic. No question these guys produced some of the catchier indie-centric dancefloor numbers of the decade, the art of it all is these strange, languid almost anti-dance melodies that somehow find themselves very neatly shoehorned into their least suited genre. It all just works.
46.	Nine Samurai - Kode9 and The Spaceape
	Memories Of The Future (2006)
	OK this is the last of the dubstep. Which means this is the decade's finest dubstep. The riff sound at all familiar? It's Fumio Hayasaka's "Seven Samurai Suite" from Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai", and would you have ever thought that would work as a dubstep tune? No. Nothing about this should work. Yet EVERYTHING does.
45.	(I Know) A Girl Called Jonny - Rowland S Howard
	Pop Crimes (2010)
	A collaboration with HTRK's vocalist Jonny Standish, it all hangs on the chorus: "She's my narcotic lollipop" intoned into virtual narcolepsy. Is it a love song or a fantasy? The song's subject matter being audibly present in the song is actually extremely unsettling. It's as creepy as it is romantic, this musical strangeling really does stay with you.
44.	Single Ladies - Beyonce
	I am Sasha Fierce (2008)
	No credible summation of the decade could leave this  out. Arguably the only real candidate for single of the decade, Beyonce has always had a knack for walking JUST enough the artist's side of the populist street, and that extends to every element of the "brand". She herself is possibly the quintessential postmodern gesamtkunstwerk. So this is WAGNER ...
43.	NY Excuse - Soulwax
	Any Minute Now (2004)
	If there were such a thing as dance-punk, this would probably be its anthem. Lyrically its a pick-apart job on late capitalism's erosion/appropriation of human identities "This is the excuse that we're making/ is it good enough for what you're paying?/ You're PAYING!" For all the effort house music most specifically goes to in manipulating the listener's emotions through normally facile "builds" and "drops", this is a properly crafted work of art that starts sloooowly ratcheting up from the minute it starts, and it builds towards a crescendo that Tiesto reckons he'd know exactly what to do with, Soulwax, whom you may also know as 2manydjs, are quite happily to let NY Excuse spin off like a mad loose bobbin into the realms of self-annihiliation. And therein is the genius.
42.	The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack - Liars
	Drum's Not Dead (2006)
	Well worth seeing live, if you ever get the chance, Liars are largely LA-based aussie Angus Andrew's project. And throughout the decade they were certainly amongst those bands doing some of the most interesting stuff in the noise/experimental zone. Although let's face it, a lot of that's not really all that interesting. The album's terrific too. Experimenting with gated rhythm and pedal effects to fully deconstruct the entire idea and purpose of rhythm within the traditional song format. Here, rhythm is present, but it's almost totally indistinct from melody, and with a genuine sense of poetics, the vocal is amongst the most effective and affective things that the noughties produced.
41.	Icarus Smicarus - McLusky
	The Difference Between Me And You Is That I'm Not On Fire (2004)
	"GET BACK IN YOUR HOLE/ AND GET BENT, SON!" I challenge anyone to not let this beast leave them reeling from exposure to even a fifteen second sample. This is absolutely everything that's great about McLusky. Completely irreverent, middle finger thrust proudly in the air. If it's not poetry, and it isn't, then that's basically just poetry's loss. As a great man once said, "play FUCKEN LOUD!"

Numbers 175 - 151, "I'll Believe in Anything"

What else made the noughties what it was? We've spoken briefly already about stylistic fragmentation in noughties music, about the lack of distinct new musical 'styles' the decade produced.

What is going on here? It's postmodernism's essence to plunder pre-existing styles and forms. It is drawn from a sense of being beyond the "end of history", human recorded history being large and established enough now to create a sense that all possible things have already happened, all possible genres and discourses have already established. There is nothing new or original left to say. The 12 notes in the Western musical register have already been combined in every possible way.

But this is a decade which proved all this something of a falsehood. The decade began with the planet agape in horror at the events of September 11, 2001. And if this wasn't a new form of history playing out before our box-fixed eyes, then the whole thing was just another live TV drama.

But if the event itself seemed to buck postmodernity, the manner in which it was experienced by a sizeable portion of the planet in real time video, was resolutely postmodern. And the nature of the attacks themselves again underscore this, in which the very acme of modernity's technological achievements are turned into weapons against modernity, against technological advancement, against human advancement altogether.

So, we are more integrated as a species than ever before. More so than ever we can now experience phenomena/media/disourses that take place in cultures, societies and geographies far removed from our own and create a simulacra effect of the same phenomena as though they were OUR lived experiences.

And the music market, even with the fragmentation new technology has brought, is more global than ever. It's very difficult to imagine a band like Tame Impala having the same opportunities to make it globally under the old industry distribution and marketing models.

Bands like The Birthday Party and The Go-Betweens in the 80s HAD to leave Australia to access the global music market. Today that would be a very unusual decision for a band to make.

There's a question here of what fragmentation actually means, particularly given that technology has enabled music's fragmentation in line with heightened individualisation. Social media, streaming services, torrents, YouTube, Rate Your Music, Tune-Up, Last.fm, these are all geared towards allowing people to seek out any song on demand and display their individual proclivities in public.

And consequently, we've seen this decade LESS dominated by the sorts of blockbuster acts like U2, and the acts that have emerged form a FAR less established critical hierarchy than any prior decade. Ask five people to name the top five artists of the decade and I'd wager you'd have a list of twenty five separate artists.

And every individual now has a new technology route to getting their music published and distributed wholly absent of any record company organisation, or indeed without a lot of the costs associated with older physical distribution models.

So we've seen a levelling of the playing field, a democratisation of access to the medium, at the same time as the profitability of the formal organisations like record companies has plummeted. It's difficult to be too pessimistic about this, but it does leave one wondering whether, in the absence of the historical "common spaces" where we used to experience music communally and similarly, whether music's social function is going to be impaired.

Because heirarchies provide a means for individuals to communally debate particular discourses with reference to a common starting language. So people with vastly different lived experiences of jazz can all still debate "the greatest jazz track ever".

What happens if and when we lose all sense of our common lived experiences? Can music still continue advancing as a form if every newly empowered individual is working in their own isolated universe?

Because look at what's happened to the Top Forty charts over the course of the decade. Slowly the charts have basically become a virtual proxy for the R&B/dance charts. And why? Where, in the pantheon of noughties experience, is the one place we all still go to hear music in a communal setting? It's the club.

So, club music is the only form capable of pitching to the undifferentiated entire larger music market, and becomes the universal musical language. And that's a problem. Because it's mostly awful, artless, self-aggrandising dross.

175.	Lover's Spit	Broken Social Scene	You Forgot It In People (2002)
174.	Welcome, Ghosts	Explosions In The Sky	All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone (2006)
173.	Beautiful Life	Gui Boratto	Chromophobia (2007)
172.	Welfare Bread	King Khan & The Shrines	What Is?! (2007)
171.	Requiem for Dying Mothers, Part 2	Stars Of The Lid	The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2004)
170.	I'll Believe In Anything	Wolf Parade	Apologies To The Queen Mary (2005)
169.	Paper Doll	Louis XIV	The Best Little Secrets Are Kept (2005)
168.	All Different Things	Bark Psychosis	Independency (2007)
167.	Fredericia	Do Make Say Think	Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn (2003)
166.	The Man With The Red Face	Laurent Garnier	Unreasonable Behaviour (2000)
165.	Velvet	The Big Pink	A Brief History Of Love (2009)
164.	Tiny Cities Made Of Ashes	Sun Kil Moon	Tiny Cities (2005)
163.	Spongebob	Coki	The Sound Of Dubstep Classics - Ministry Of Sound (2007)
162.	Miura	Metro Area	Metro Area (2002)
161.	Love Trinity	Life Without Buildings	Love Trinity EP (2000)
160.	Chicago	Sufjan Stevens	Illinois (2005)
159.	Tracking Treasure Down Featuring Molly	Gabriel and Dresden	Legends 2005 (2005)
158.	Grounds For Divorce	Wolf Parade	Apologies To The Queen Mary (2004)
157.	Small Town Girl	Good Shoes	Think Before You Speak [Bonus Tracks] (2007)
156.	My Angel Rocks Back And Forth	Four Tet	Rounds (2003)
155.	A-Punk	Vampire Weekend	EP (2007)
154.	Irreplaceable	Beyoncé	B' Day (2006)
153.	Neverending Math Equation	Sun Kil Moon	Tiny Cities (2005)
152.	Your Little Hoodrat Friend	The Hold Steady	Separation Sunday (2005)
151.	Zen	Clipse	We Got It 4 Cheap, Vol. 2 (2005)