Numbers 80 - 71, "This is Our Emergency"

80.	Shine A Light - Wolf Parade
	Apologies To The Queen Mary (2005)
	Had I known the video was this stupid in advance, I might have marked this further down. Oh well. These guys know how to write a tune that lingers in your subconscious for DAYS. They rightly musically belong alongside their mates in Arcade Fire. Where other lists will cram Arcade Fire's two or three key singles  into the top twenty, we'll hear nothing further from them in this countdown. Wolf Parade, however we're not done with yet ...
79.	This Is Our Emergency - Pretty Girls Make Graves
	The New Romance (2003)
	Find me any band around today with a name half this good. It is of course a direct lift from The Smiths song of the same name, so they know how to reference the pantheon. A brilliant, high-strung effort from an act that have delivered consistently good albums over the past decade or so, but no singles anywhere near this stand out. A song made up of a million mini-phraselets "Stand up so I can see you/ Shout out so I can hear you/ Reach out so I can touch you" and we seem to be on a crescendo, but then the punchline is deadpanned. "This is our Emergency", and all expectations fly out the window, and this weird genre-defying creature deserves a spot all on its own.
78.	Shut Me Down - Rowland S. Howard
	Pop Crimes (2010)
	I've dealt with Rowland at some length in the NEXT post, which I've twittishly published ahead of this one. Suffice to say, this is about as good. It all rests on ONE mantra intoned through that booming, arresting bass vocal that could only possibly belong to one man. "I miss you SOOOOOOOOOOOOO much." Close to the finest guitarist this country has ever produced he was also a songwriter of major importance, "I'm standing in a suit/ as ragged as my nerves" is as good as anything Nick Cave ever wrote. The entire landscape is so much the poorer for his absence.
77.	Sandstorm (Original Mix) - Darude
	Ignition (2007)
	You don't get to become a thing as ubiquitous as this became without having set off some kind of important primal nerve somewhere. The main riff belts you about the head with a musical baseball bat, then pauses just long enough to let your head ring with it all. The soundtrack to the wee small hours for too many who'll never remember them.
76.	Heart It Races - Architecture In Helsinki
	Places Like This (2007)
	And here's a video that might have managed to bump its soundtrack up the countdown a few places. This is such a unique, weird beast, it sits nowhere neatly in genre terms. The rhythm is actually a kind of afro-traditional melded to western structures in a way we really haven't heard since ... wait for it ... Paul Simon produced some of the most interesting material of the late 80s. Certainly one of the decade's more accomplished Australian acts. I'm predicting this will stand up well to time's ongoing enquiries.
75.	The Rat - The Walkmen
	Bows + Arrows (2004)
	"Yooooooooooouve got a nerve to be asking a favour/ Yooooooooouve got a nerve to be calling my number .... can't you hear me I'm/ beating down your door." It's not really a chorus at all. But it's better than most of the decade's actual choruses. This thing broods like a menstruating teenager. The menace, the spite, the bile all just sitting barely beneath the skin of this nasty, hateful number that pretty much everyone will agree was the band's finest moment.
74.	Grindin' - Clipse
	Lord Willin' (2002)
	Pharell Williams doesn't make the countdown in his own right. But if any producer, including Dre did more for music during the noughties, then I'm utterly ignorant of them. Because I saw Clipse live a  few years back. The most disappointing gig I've ever been to. Who'd have guessed it, these guys CAN'T RAP outside a studio. But there's the amazing dimension, because on record NONE of their rap peers can hold a candle to them. So if that's not Pharrell's magic, I'd love to hear any alternative explanation. The way they inflect everything semi-conversationally is completely peerless. The main riff? Sounds like it's that noise you produce when you click your jaw and use your mouth as a resonance chamber. So the whole thing is kind of understated, sounds punk-fresh-DIY, and lyrically snaps crackles and pops with a joy in the rudiments of language that every great rap act had in their DNA. But NEVER pay to see these guys live.
73.	Kids - MGMT
	Oracular Spectacular (2007)
	If you had to hand ownership of the decade's dancefloors to a single riff, does anyone have a better candidate than this? Becoming a touchstone for SO MANY different styles, genres, scenes takes some REAL songwriting chops. In future when people ask "remember the noughties", most respondents are just going to hear this riff playing in their head.
72.	All My Friends - LCD Soundsystem
	Sound Of Silver (2006)
	Another contribution from arguably New York's finest. They virtually defined their own genre and naturally enough came to own it. It's dance music you just BARELY want to dance to, its smart, sassy lyrics are such that who doesn't want to sit down and have about eighty beers with James Murphy?
71.	Numb Numb (Screwed and Chopped) - Juvenile
	Juve The Great: Screwed And Chopped (2003)
	I suppose you could make the case that 'Screwed and Chopped'/slowed and throwed plus 'Dirty South' are new noughties-born subgenres within hip hop. So here's one of the finest examples of both. The slowed up syncopation effect on the vocal in the chorus is somewhere music hasn't much been before. And yeah, maybe it's a cheap and obvious gimmick. But somewhere in the definition of a gimmick is the meaning "it just WORKS." And nobody has stepped into the silly hip-hop generic attire of the self-proclaimed drug dealing overlord more fittingly before or since. And it's all kind of tongue-in-cheek hilarious "My shit is the bomb/There must be Saudi Arabians that ain't used some."

Numbers 90-81, "To Hell With Good Intentions"

90.	Someone Great - LCD Soundsystem
	Sound Of Silver (2006)
	This is a wonderful, understated number. It bleeps and bloops along with a repetitiveness that puts the otherwise affectatious vocal solidly in the foreground. It's about expectations that never quite reach fulfilment, the little disappointments we find in others as much as the unexpected joys.
89.	To Hell With Good Intentions - McLusky
	Mclusky Do Dallas (2001)
	Well, hardcore doesn't get much of an outing in this list. In fact McLusky probably carry the entire hardcore banner here. And really, what other candidates were there? This is absolutely brimming with typical attitude, and a bass line that growls with a suppressed ferocity that periodically explodes in incendiary fury. Resolutely working class in their attitude, McLusky didn't mess around with words, and nor did they need to. Every line here says just enough without eloquence to produce some of the finest poetry that was ever shouted.
88.	Kaliko - Zomby
	Zomby EP (2008)
	We've already spoken about dubstep as arguably the ONLY well-defined genre unique to the noughties, and this is perhaps close to its apotheosis. Resolutely anti-melodic, entirely driven through rhythm, but a rhythm that refuses to sit still. Because its modulations ARE the song, and so it's dance music you can just barely dance to. So it sits kind of purposeless, ungrounded in any actual music that's gone before, but it needs ALL the music that's gone before it for its wellspring. Vital, nervous, a little unhinged, with a kind of tic-toc heartbeat, this sounds like the vital signs of a vampire.
87.	I Turn My Camera On - Spoon
	Something To Look Forward To: Past & Present Selections For The Radio (2005)
	Spoon. I think of it as the "Party of Five" phenomenon. At some point in the late nineties, it became a thing that every not actually coolsie show on TV needed to bust out some sort of soundtrack populated by vaguely "indie" sounds. And boy did Spoon reap a harvest from that. The Simpsons, Veronica Mars, Bones, Chuck, Scrubs, Numb3rs, to name but a few of the shows that borrowed Spoon's  coolsie cloak. While their albums have been patchy, they've done nothing but shine as a singles act, with some unbelievably catchy bassline driven numbers of which this is probably their best.
86.	The Strangers - St. Vincent
	Actor (2009)
	Now here's a late decade curio. It's hard to know where to position the erstwhile Anne Clark. Her pedigree, immaculate, via Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens, she belongs rightly at the more complex end of the musical spectrum. Weird harmonies swirling everywhere but where you expect them to go, and it probably takes a true musician's musician to sound like a peer to David Byrne. This one is both entirely typical and one of her more sublime efforts.
85.	Black Cab - Jens Lekman
	Oh You're So Silent Jens (2003)
	"Oh no, goddamn/I missed the last tram/I killed the party again/Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn." Jens Lekman burst out of the blocks in the early part of the decade to become everyone's favourite weirdo with an accent. His lyrics are equal parts simplicity and profundity matched usually to a pretty basic three chord structure. Yet as a songwriter he certainly sits somewhere near the front of the pack, and it's hard to pin down exactly why, but he can DO THINGS with the same chords everyone else is using just by inserting his lyrics. It's the lyrics themselves to some extent, but it's also that VOICE ...
84.	Cone Toaster - Black Dice
	DFA Compilation #1 (2003)
	Yes. So, you're copping a fair whack of experimental electronica in this list. Because again, if any genre really existed a propos of the zeitgeist, certainly the late noughties produced a real wellspring of experimentation thoroughly in line with the idea that we exist in a time BEYOND the end of music, a time when everything's been said already and all that's left for musicians is to fuck with music's existing, finite tropes. This band have made an extremely interesting musical journey, from an earlier hardcore-noise-industrial mode in the prior decade, the noughties saw Black Dice come out all pedals swinging, reinvented largely as experimental electronica, there's guitars in there if you listen closely enough, but gated through enough weirdo pedals to be all but unrecognisable. The joy of this is the way it all slowly falls apart ...
83.	Poker Face - Lady Gaga
	The Fame (2008)
	Shut up. She's done enough.
82.	Schrapnell - Isolee
	We Are Monster (2005)
	And speaking of styles that were unique to the decade, microhouse has probably done enough to be able to stand vaguely in its own right as a genre. Albeit one that doesn't seem to offer terribly much for other artists to build on. But anyone who knows me, knows minimalism is the zone of electronica where I think ALL the goodness lies. And this beautifully illustrates why. Rhythm works with simple, understated melodies that with repetition produce thoroughly infectious hooks, and the song builds through a subtle layering of tracks, you never notice the main riff is little more than four declining notes.
81.	Outhouse - Nathan Fake
	Outhouse (2003)
	Yep. More minimalism. This one more driven, dancier, its techno pedigree worn pretty tellingly on its sleeve. Nathan Fake specialises in exactly this sort of dance-floor oriented minimalism built around an almost indeterminate bassline/melody, it's a track you just can't possibly hum to yourself, because there really aren't any phrases as music would traditionally have understood them, but this is where minimal distances itself from downtempo. The tempo here is up, the rhythm never lets go  of you, and the journey is just storied enough that this stands out among the many contenders that might have represented this not always terribly unique song form.

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)