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 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)