Numbers 125 - 101, "Jesus, etc."

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Because you certainly earn credit in this reviewer's accounts for taking YOUR form, ANY form, no matter now hackneyed, outdated or conservative, and re-working that form to its artistic acme.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)

Numbers 225 - 201, "Things Fall Apart"

What were the noughties?  It's possibly a premature question to ask. Where we had a clear sense of what the previous decade constituted in 1995, we probably had a less clear picture of the 90s in 2005, and an arguably less defined one again in 2015.

So, in one respect the capabilities of a discrete ten year block to connote all of the aesthetic, social and cultural changes within it seem to be declining. And that's possibly part of what we're mapping. There is no question that the seemingly ever-accelerating pace of globalisation along with the rapid technological changes that have enabled it have produced an infinitely more complex world, and complexity is by its nature resistant to essentialism.

Complexity is also resistant to harbouring the sort of regionalisms that prosper behind protectionist walls. Discourse is now at least potentially more global than ever, and it becomes more difficult for regional discourses to exist in isolation from others that don't share a similar regional focus.

And you'd expect all of this to lead to a few things in the musical milieu:

• A more globalised musical culture with less regional differences
• A musical culture based less on discrete styles or genres than around interrogations between those styles
• A musical culture less dominated by a small number of headline artists, and more by an undifferentiated mass body of artists
• A democratisation of the process of music production enabled by advances in home recording technology and new distribution models

And largely we've seen all these things to one extent or another come about.

The noughties were arguably the first decade which saw no major new music genres emerge. This ties in with concepts a postmodernist would have no trouble at all recognising regarding the 'death of history' and our living  in 'an eternal present'. But it also maps a new form of discursive plurality that has perhaps almost  come to define the postmodern condition. The inherent intertextuality of all discourse is both highlighted and heightened by the new technologies used for its transmission. So no song exists independent of both the musical discourses that preceeded it, nor similarly the contemporaneous discourses within which all music is received. This would include all economic, political, social, societal, etc discourses.

And it's not surprising a model like that should turn out few new discrete styles and genres, where the production of  such depends more upon isolation and an environment in which similar discourses arising from similar inputs have their own discrete chamber within which to reverberate, wholly isolated from the larger body politic.

My thesis is that we've really only seen two significant new musical styles in the last ten years - Grime and Dubstep. Grime is hip hop with the postmodernism turned up to 11. Where hip hop was all about sampling and re-using found objects, it was thoroughly dada-ist in its aesthetic. So, what many posit as the ultimate postmodern musical style is actually thoroughly grounded in an aesthetic that dips its lid more in modernism's direction.

Grime appears to dissipate the entire possibilities of identity. Grime is Dizzee Rascall riffing on the same syncopated rhythm eight lines in a row, eight times the same statement, but with each line producing different meaning. Grime is complex triple-stepping  beats where High Modernist Hip Hop just needed a kickdrum on every 4/4 beat.

Where hip hop writes from the position of a vastly over-determined unitary narrator. "I" is the most routinely used word in hip hop lyrics. But that identity has thoroughly broken down in grime. Gone much of the "bitches and bling" bravado, to be replaced by a more humble, more polyvalent, less all-powerful narrative.

Similarly, Dubstep has its origins in drum and bass and allied dance styles. Accordingly, it's almost a completely post-linguistic style. Lyrics are minimal and exist more as just another sonic element. It's in many ways the apotheosis of the post-meaning, post-god, post-discursive style that one would predict emerging, given how many other aspects of contemporary complexity also exhibit these traits.

More on this to come. I thought you'd probably want some actual music in the interim.

#	Name	Artist	Album (Year)
225.	You Know I'm No Good	Amy Winehouse	Back To Black (2006)
224.	Letter from Abroad	John Cale	(2008)
223.	Skip To The End	The Futureheads	Promo Only Modern Rock June 2006 (2006)
222.	Green Aisles	Real Estate	Days (2011)
221.	2080	Yeasayer	All Hour Cymbals (2007)
220.	Postcards From Italy	Beirut	Beirut (2006)
219.	Body Language (Tocadisco Remix)	M.A.N.D.Y. Vs. Booka Shade	Body Language (Single) (2007)
218.	I Feel Space	Lindstrøm	Solid Sounds 2005.2 [Disc 1] (2005)
217.	Knife	Grizzly Bear	Yellow House (2006)
216.	Pass That Dutch	Missy Elliott Feat. Ludacris	Respect M.E. (2003)
215.	Memorize The City	The Organ	Grab That Gun (2004)
214.	Booo! (Radio Edit)	Sticky Feat. Ms. Dynamite	Real Garage [Disc 2] (2001)
213.	Stargate of the Hell	Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.	Glorify Astrological Martyrdom (2008)
212.	Hallelujah	Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds	No More Shall We Part (2001)
211.	First Day On The Run	The Fauves	Thousand Yard Stare (2000)
210.	So Many Ways	Mates Of State	Bring It Back (2006)
209.	We Own The Sky	M83	Saturdays = Youth (2008)
208.	Make Out Fall Out Make Up	Love Is All	Nine Times That Same Song (2006)
207.	Fell In Love With A Girl	The White Stripes	White Blood Cells (2001)
206.	Cannot Get Started	Handsome Furs	Plague Park (2007)
205.	As I Sat Sadly By Her Side	Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds	No More Shall We Part (2001)
204.	Remember Me	British Sea Power	The Decline Of British Sea Power (2001)
203.	Comfy In Nautica	Panda Bear	Person Pitch (2007)
202.	A Lady Of A Certain Age	The Divine Comedy	Victory For The Comic Muse (2006)
201.	Us Amazonians	Kirsty MacColl	Tropical Brainstorm (2000)