Numbers 40-36, "Hope There's Someone"

#39, Antony and the Johnsons

40.	We Call Upon The Author - Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
	Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2007)
	OK so firstly, I messed up. So there are TWO #40s. I can't imagine why you'd care. This is some kind of brilliance this one. Cave's songwriting has evolved significantly to allow the "voice" that's present here. There's no Birthday Party DNA left in this one at all. In the place of po-faced junk-addled posturing is real humour and self-effacement. And while arguably the most self-consciously LITERARY track in this entire list, it extracts its own piss in a manner you can't help but think of as quintessentially Australian. The brilliance of "everything is banal and jejune" rests on the reality that absolutely no human being alive would ever use those words in any context, and yet here they are in a pop song rendered almost conversationally. And it's the conversational tone "My friend Doug's tapping on  the window/Hey Doug how ya been?" and the succession of weird banalities that populate the song that are its central charm. It seems a song of literary pretensions, but is it laughing at them or not?? "Prolix, prolix, there’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix." That seems to be the crux of the song, but is that Fitzgerald or is it Freud? Literature or its interpretation? It's highly entertaining, that's what it is.
40.	Hoppípolla - Sigur Rós
	Takk... (2005)
	One of the decade's truly standout and standalone musical wonders, both the band and this track, and their live shows for that matter. Almost impossible to situate, it has a post-rock provenance, but also a world music heritage, at least for a western audience where the experience of hearing sounds not words is the essence, and what sublime sounds. It could be absolutely noone else.
39.	Hope There's Someone - Antony and The Johnsons
	I Am A Bird Now (2005)
	What to say. If I called the last track sublime, this goes wherever beyond that your imagination might allow. That voice. The plaintive lyric and the matching melody. The sentiment that makes every human at the core of however cold curmudgeonly heart yearn. A wonderful band, and they make wonderful albums, although frankly an hour of this stuff is just a bit too much ...
38.	Fall From A Height - The Honeydrips
	Here Comes The Future (2007)
	This is just a WEIRD weird beast. It's kind of Retro-minimal-futurist, but there's a lot more going on than that. Probably because there's a movie soundtrack playing out in the background. That's a sample from Annie Hall, if folks are interested. The child actually becomes the central figure, and his sense of both naive threat and resignedness to it is affecting. Plus it turns heads at parties in a way that says it's not just me.
37.	At Death, A Proclamation - Phosphorescent
	Pride (2007)
	Surprisingly disappointing live it must me said. At least their set list was. I'm only familiar with this album - mostly excellent, but the tracks were sort of rocky dross. This was a very standout highlights, and some of the finest experimental rock certainly the noughties threw up.
36.	Carry Me Ohio - Sun Kil Moon
	Ghosts Of The Great Highway (2003)
	So this is Mark Kozelek's noughties project. And some of his finest work was done in the decade - selecting the highlights here was hard, but this is probably fore amongst them. A typically  languid, woozy melody and a lyric that probably suffers from veering into purple prose a few too many times. What the hell is  he actually talking about?

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)