Numbers 200 - 176, "The Teaches of Peaches"

It doesn't take terribly much inspection of the list so far to arrive at a particularly unfortunate conclusion: POLITICAL MUSIC IS DEAD TODAY.

Because there isn't even an otherwise ignored undercurrent of political activism to the contemporary music scene, such as has previously been the case since the 1950s.

In the 80s and 90s, the likes of U2 and Midnight Oil would routinely be presented as overtly "political" music. What's really being measured is the tradition of the "protest song". Bono and the Oils wrote protest music - songs that had an identified target and went for its political jugular.

Today, we have M.I.A., yes, but what's interesting is that the politics has migrated from the song itself and into the sphere of the singer's identity. M.I.A.'s music might reference "third world democracy" before singing "zoom-a-zoom-a-zoom-zoom", but the content is by and large not political, and not message-oriented. And as a sung message anyway, to a certain extent perhaps any statement has to be INHERENTLY trivial, and existentially banal.

Instead, as political activism in general has become more oriented to the personal and the realm of identity politics, so political music has become more discursive. So it's less about the transmission of opposition to 'monolithic others' to be shouted down via slogans and rhetoric, and more about cultural modes of resistance.

Peaches doesn't spend a huge amount of time opining on the discursive practices behind gender. Her lyrics don't celebrate queer cultures in the recognisable and overt way that say the Pet Shop Boys' "Go West" was an overt paean to them. The differene between "Go West" and "Fuck the Pain Away" is obvious from the song titles alone, and it exemplifies quite well the overall change that we are mapping. Peaches doesn't tell folks to go out and join queer collectives. But every element of her SELF, her identity, her persona is imbued with a radical counter-disourse towards some sort of similar EFFECT.

It's the difference between maintaining the illusion of the unitary, immutable power of the word, the truth, that which lends itself to structuralist analysis, and accepting a truly postmodern, discursive analytics. The two prescribe very different modes for effective political action.

And given Midnight Oil and U2 have resolutely failed to change the world through music, I would mount a case that a new, discursive political music stands just as good a chance of achieving something as the old modes we'd more directly recognise.

That said, I, a decrepit socialist find real meaning in connecting with the unitary, barricade-storming ballads that socialists have marched behind for hundreds of years. Billy Bragg, Phil Ochs and Joe Hill offer us a motherlode as historians of political songforms.

And because everything that's wrong with the world today is an inability to grasp the historical context of anything, well, where people stand up for their rights, Joe Hill is with us still. Joe Hill inspires us still.

200.	Night (Radio Edit)	Benga & Coki	Night (2008)
199.	Barely Legal	The Strokes	Is This It? (2000)
198.	Amazing it Seems	Granada	Granada (2005)
197.	Get Myself Into It	The Rapture	Get Myself Into It (Comm Single) (2006)
196.	Strict Machine	Goldfrapp	Black Cherry (2003)
195.	The Orchids	Califone	Roots & Crowns (2006)
194.	The Funeral	Band Of Horses	Everything All The Time (2006)
193.	Rutten	Skream	Skream! [Bonus Tracks] (2006)
192.	Fools	The Dodos	Visiter (2008)
191.	Apocalypse Song	St. Vincent	Marry Me (2007)
190.	C'Mere	Interpol	Antics (2004)
189.	Punchlines	Mates Of State	Bring It Back (2006)
188.	Hang Me Up To Dry	Cold War Kids	Up In Rags [EP] (2006)
187.	Lights Out	Santigold	Santogold (2008)
186.	Ten Years Or Twenty	Moon Wiring Club	Shoes Off And Chairs Away (2009)
	I MADE THIS VIDEO! PRAISE ME!
185.	New Slang	The Shins	Oh, Inverted World (2001)
184.	He's Alright [Bonus Track]	Kurt Vile	Childish Prodigy (2009)
183.	Are You The One?	The Presets	Beams (2005)
182.	Pure Pleasure Seeker	Moloko	Things To Make And Do (2000)
181.	Banging Camp	The Hold Steady	Separation Sunday (2005)
180.	Daniel	Bat For Lashes	Two Suns (2009)
179.	Fuck The Pain Away	Peaches	The Teaches Of Peaches (2000)
178.	Thou Shalt Always Kill	Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip	Angles (2008)
177.	Try Again	Aaliyah Feat. Timbaland	Aaliyah (2005)
176.	L.E.S. Artistes	Santigold	Santogold (2000)

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)