Numbers 150 - 126, "Kill All Hippies"

The plural of medium is media.

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.

150.	Motorbike	Wooden Shjips	Dos (2009)
149.	Track Of The Cat	Pram	Dark Island (2003)
148.	This Is Hardcore	Pulp	Hits (2006)
147.	Monster	You Say Party! We Say Die!	Lose All Time (2007)
146.	Flags Of Freedom	Neil Young	Living With War (2006)
145.	Welcome to Jamrock	Damian Marley	Reggae Mix (2004)
144.	Dream On	Christian Falk Ft. Robyn	Dream On (2008)
143.	Playground Love	Air	Talkie Walkie (Russian Edition W/Bonus) (2003)
142.	Do You Want To-	Franz Ferdinand	(2005)
141.	Ha	HTRK	Marry Me Tonight (2009)
140.	Bonkers	Dizzee Rascal	Tongue N' Cheek (2009)
139.	Sing It Back	Moloko	Things To Make And Do (2000)
138.	Smile Like You Mean It	The Killers	Hot Fuss (2004)
137.	Bottle Baby	Augie March	Moo, You Bloody Choir (2006)
136.	Dare	Gorillaz	Dare (2005)
135.	1 Thing	Amerie	P (2008)
134.	Tear You Apart	She Wants Revenge	She Wants Revenge (2006)
133.	Hard To Explain	The Strokes	Is This It? (2000)
132.	Kill All Hippies	Primal Scream	Xtrmntr (2000)
131.	No One Does It Like You	Department Of Eagles	In Ear Park (2008)
130.	Take Me Out	Franz Ferdinand	Franz Ferdinand (2004)
129.	Come Pick Me Up	Ryan Adams	Heartbreaker (2000)
128.	Island In The Sun	Weezer	The Green Album (2001)
127.	Dominos	The Big Pink	A Brief History Of Love (2009)
126.	Spaceape	Burial Feat. The Space Ape	Burial (2006)

Numbers 249 - 226 - "Sign 'o' the Times"

So what the hell happened in the noughties?

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)