Numbers 100 - 91, "for Reverend Green"

100.	Mistaken For Strangers - The National
	Boxer (2007)
	You could accuse them of being the poor folk's Interpol. But The National have pieced together an impressive body of work over the past decade or so, and this was the standout track from their breakthrough album. It broods like Interpol, and is as lyrically obtuse. The relentless snapping drums set the mood without any real letup as we transition seamlessly into a very nice, understated chorus that somehow manages to be catchy at the same time.
99.	The Miller's Daughter - The Drones
	The Miller's Daughter (2005)
	This was a tricky inclusion. There are a number of artists represented here whose body of work has rightly earned them a place in this list, even if they never released a killer hit single during that time, and The Drones presented just such a problem. Lifted from the eponymous EP, this is as snarlingly good as anything the band has ever released, and it captures all their raucus talents - both lyrically and musically.
98.	Cattle & The Creeping Things - The Hold Steady
	Separation Sunday (2005)
	Separation Sunday was by this reviewer's reckoning one of the freshest releases of the mid-noughties. It presented a vision of adolescent urban alienation delivered in a vital, engaging, and at times even poetic stream of consciousness monologue. What made the album REALLY interesting was its interplay between urban alienation tales and religious - particularly high Catholic themes. That this is the moral background against which American youth in particular play out their adolescence made Separation Sunday a vital and unique cultural survey which had a lot new to say and said it exceptionally well. And while rock/pop's propensity to steal or to drape itself in religious iconography and mores is indisputable, rarely is this managed with anywhere near the empathy for its content. Separation Sunday instead is a proper exploration of the interplay between identity and religon, particularly during modern adolescence when identity is so much in crisis anyway. Hence the iconography of graffiti and recreational drug use sits everywhere in the album uneasily beside Christian iconography. This interplay is nowhere more redolent than in this track, and it's what really gives this one a dimension of greatness.
97.	The Leavers Dance - The Veils
	The Runaway Found (2003)
	It does the soaring tuneful indie sound archetypal of its time as well as any.
96.	Atlas - Battles
	Mirrored (2007)
	Certainly one of the more unique of the decade's offerings, and utterly insidious in spite of itself. A real garage jam aesthetic prevails here, the vocals are minimal, as is the content, and that's kind of the point here. It's an exercise in form. And one of the great ones.
95.	C'mon C'mon - The Von Bondies
	Pawn Shoppe Heart (2004)
	This was one of the most barnstorming releases of 2004. It grabs you by the scruff of your aural neck within the first thirteen seconds and never lets go. And you're almost dared not to sing along.
94.	Gold Digger - Kanye West
	Late Registration (2005)
	This insidious dancefloor mega-hit was played at every party on every scene in 2005, and probably represents the moment we realised Kanye wasn't going away anytime soon.
93.	For Reverend Green - Animal Collective
	Strawberry Jam (2007)
	The arch experimenters came into their own in the noughties. Arguably nobody pushed the form of popular song more consistently and artfully across the decade than the Baltimore four-piece. And this swoony, multi-layered cacophany is entirely representative.
92.	Fuck Forever - Babyshambles
	Down In Albion (2005)
	At first I wondered "what's the point in having a side project to the Libertines which sounds exactly like them?" But apparently Mr Pete Doherty was actually tossed out of the Libertines for some alleged and no doubt spurious substance abuse issues. And this bare bones, cocaine-addled ode to decadence was a pretty memorable response.
91.	Heart Failed (In The Back Of A Taxi) - Saint Etienne
	London Conversations (2000)
	Saint Etienne were truly a nineties act, but they had this one hit in the mature years of their reign that is the equal of anything they ever produced. Easy to put in a genre with Massive Attack, EBTG, Portishead, they never quite achieved the fame or status of those others, but their body of work does stand out well against theirs, and this track shows why.

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)

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)