Never released as a single, you can just imagine a bunch of drunk record execs in navy suits slurping paella, not knowing what to do with it. Especially way back in 2000.
But of course it was actually the soaring highlight of this entire masterwork.
You've never heard anything quite like it. It's an exercise in playing off jarring syncopation against a smooth falsetto that contains just enough melody to warrant the name. The vocal seems perpetually poised just this side of panic.
It's a cloying, claustrophobic, almost sinister track that you just so happen to be able also to dance to. There's a sense of alarm from an external threat. The lyric supports this.
"Who's in a bunker, who's in a bunker?/ Women and children first"
The album itself is peppered with references that Yorke has acknowledged regarding what was taking place in the former Yugoslavia at that time, and it's hard not to read this in the same context. The riff is a sample from Paul Lansky, apparently.
Lansky wrote an essay about the song explaining all the nerdy complexities of the chord progressions which is no doubt lurking around online for the truly avid fan.
"You have no fear of the underdog/that's why you will not survive".
I find Spoon confusing. Mostly competent, they're one of those indie acts whose work TV shows love syndicating. Competent, but safe. Not a band to inspire fandom, but nor do they earn much criticism. And very occasionally they produce a single for the absolute ages.
As with a few entrants in this list, your humble compiler is willing to let one brilliantly crafted song outrank those of far more established artists, this being after all a song-based exercise.
Spoon seem to shine when they are as self-consciously musical as possible. This is a complex beast, the melody's not quite as simple as it first appears and catchy as hell. Vocalist Britt Daniel's voice is a great textural match with its brassy bottom end.
If music performs any sort of valuable social function, this song knows exactly what that is, and on that basis proceeds to excel in everything that matters.
If even one sad soul drags themselves off any terrible canvas to which they may have fallen in life bouyed naively by the sentiment that this song peddles, Spoon have already done the world more good than Bono will in his entire lifetime. And I reckon it's a good bet.
This never really charted, and none of the other noughties lists put it this high, I just think it's archetypally great by the one criterion I ultimately use in these tests...
Selfish Cunt, Martin Tomlinson and Patrick Constable
Britain is Shit - Selfish Cunt
No Wicked Heart Shall Prosper (2004)
A lot of bands were assigned the rather mutoid moniker of 'post-punk' over the course of the decade, and the term was almost already meaningless the minute it was uttered. As if anything could come post-music's nihilistic end...
But of course the music did continue, it just wasn't punk anymore. To suggest that for instance Green Day have in the slightest relevance to or provenance from the original seventies genre is to render the original meaningless.
Maybe it's in the art of reducing punk to shallow symbolism, void of all its original significance, in drawing an equivalence between The Clash and playing your guitar quite loud with a safety pin on, in failing so completely to understand punk, that you evoke in the process a perfect nihilism. The act of neutering punk's most genuinely transgressive dimensions becomes in itself the most authentically punk act possible.
And it's the authenticity that was so frequently lacking in the things terms like 'post-punk' or 'new punk' or whatever permutations were applied to during the decade. Music that almost always seemed to veer more properly towards other genres - pop at one end of the spectrum, hardcore or even emo at the other.
There's only one act since the Pistols that have given us any sense that they are in any way inheritors of punk's wholesale aesthetic, political and musical mantle, and that act is Selfish Cunt.
Yes, it's in part about the notoriously violent concerts, the beating up crowd members, the cancelled gigs, the bannings from venues, but it's also about the overtly nihilistic take on politics, it's about the aggressively sexualised cross dressing of Tomlinson (if Brian Molko and Iggy Pop ever spawned ...)
And it's about realising that THE most punk instrument in this day and age MUST be the drum machine. The quintessential enabler of so many musicians not even good enough to play with a bad band.
And it's about the lyric, the give-nary-a-shit vocal delivery, the utterly vicious pillorying of the middle classes, the political classes, the working class. It wants to kick the whole lot down, not because it has a better world in mind, just merely that it's run out of interest in this one. It's petulant, destructive, wanton, and throughly non-didactic.
Are you listening, Green Day?
Above is a little video I made for YouTube as this is kind of a hard one to stream. See below for more hot cross dressing action, from when we last encountered SC earlier in the countdown.
The highest ranking Australian act you will find in this chart, rendering this the quintessential Aussie tune of the decade. So there.
Yet another example that great, timeless pop relies on little much more than one tremendous melody. It's plaintive, maybe it's a little affectatious, but its emotive power - even after all these years of how many listenings is there.
Where Glenn Richards can at times veer into the purple prose, as with a lot of the Augies' more recent material wherein you feel the song was being made to fit the clever-clogs lyrics with, ironically a less lyrical overall effect.
But here, the balance is just perfect. The final lines, which would have the option of being delivered as a heart-jerking crescendo, are instead just left to waft off with the tune such that the song leaves us with nothing so much as an abstract sense of loss, of longing.
It's evoking these senses so effectively without straying into cliche or becoming overblown by surplus emotive devices that places this near the pinnacle of the decades' genius.
I hope we all had Ricardo Villalobos in our SuperMuso teams this week ...
15.
Fizheuer Zieheuer - Ricardo Villalobos
Fizheuer Zieheuer (2006)
Well. You either know it or you don't. Or you may just know it by the horns 'breakdown'. Yes, it's a 37 minute 'dance' track with a funeral speed 'breakdown' in traditional horns sampled from a Serbian gypsy folk group. 37 minutes of large-scale monotony, where the horns appear as oases amongst the seemingly never-ending dunes of "oom-pah" that blanket everything.
But this is not an exercise in banality. A desert at scale could be read as monotonous, but closer perspective will reveal much texture amongst the dunes. This is an exercise in monotony, but it's a deeply profound one.
If taken at one sitting and in the right mood, it's mesmeric to the point where the ear becomes, in the midst of the sameness, intensely attuned to the very subtle ways in which the track does ebb and flow.
If you're willing to give it your full attention, it is certainly one of the most profound musical listening experiences the decade delivered. And this man is without doubt amongst the finest practitioners of his craft, consistently pushing the boundaries of an often stale genre.
For the faint-hearted, I made a YouTube video for a shorter, 15 minute version. Give it space. You won't be sorry,
14.
Evil - Interpol
Antics (2004)
Too easily derided. Maybe they invite it in their self-conscious hipsterism, but musically I do maintain they were easily a million times more creative than say The White Stripes, who readers will find rather conspicuously absent from this list.
This utterly irresistable dancefloor-filler was probably their finest moment. It ebbs and flows in a way so much contemporary pop just refuses to do. The "chorus", pitches up to what could be full crescendo about three times, only to push further, finally hitting the pinnacle - a series of emphatic drum smashes "Why. Can't. We. Just ..."
It's just a superbly crafted song, superbly produced. The only thing that genuinely sounds like Joy Division about this band is Paul Banks' voice. People were far too quick to dismiss them for their po-facedness, but this album and ... Bright Lights would probably both belong somewhere in a Top Forty Albums of the Noughties.
13.
Moan - Trentemøller
The Last Resort (2007)
What to say about this? No, this wasn't on many other lists and never this high. But I'm still, after nearly a decade past, completely addicted to this. It's like the finest stuff Massive Attack ever did with their female guest vocalists.
Anne Trolle is the vocalist here, and based on this she deserves be known far wider afield than her native Denmark. Delivering her vocal this breathlessly could have easily come across as trite, but Trolle goes nowhere near that domain.
She serves up just ... just enough emotion to set up a conflict between the deadpan delivery and the almost desperately emotive content.
This entire work is a Danish tour-de-force, with the artist himself hailing from Copenhagen, where he's helped popularise a number of local acts through his remixes. The song just oozes Scandi cool.
But I swear it's not just because it's a Dane-ophile's wet dream that this one has earned its place here. Use your ears.
Blood on My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos' Apocalypso Now Mix) - Shackleton
Blood on My Hands (2007)
Why is this at number 12? Who the hell is Shackleton?
Well, put simply, I don't think I know of a better, more powerful or significant artistic response to the events of September 11, 2001 than this. Shackleton's other works - particularly Music for the Quiet Hour are all well worth checking out for fans of stripped back yet moody minimalism.
It's both a response to the events themselves and a response to OUR response, but it totally avoids lecturing or moral posturing from any dimension. Instead, we're asked to create meaning from a set of almost uncannily disparate phrases.
"I'm standing on a mountain top/letting out a scream/it's the language of the earth, it is the language of the beasts." And it's thoroughly unclear throughout who our narrator is.
It seems to me that this work is drawing a very sophisticated parallel between the drivers of the terrorist horrors that were visited upon the world, and the response of our political leaders to those events.
We're perhaps condemned for failing to speak ourselves in anything less mute than "the language of the beasts", but we're never really sure. And it's from within that ambivalence that the song derives its power to deeply unsettle.
It's just a great, great work of art.
11.
Walk In The Park - Beach House
Teen Dream (2009)
There's only ever really been one way to write a great pop song. Pick a melody. Pick a really catchy melody. Now repeat it ad nauseum. Congratulations, you're now an artistic genius.
In some dimension. Because it should simply be that easy. But if it's that easy then why has so much utter musical dross been written? If it's that easy, then why is is this SO sublime?
#20. Miss Kittin "D'you know Frank Sinatra? He's DEAD. Hahahaha."
20.
Frank Sinatra - Miss Kittin & The Hacker
First Album (2001)
So, there's a wee language warning on this one. And a rather large taste one. This rates so highly as a vicious satire on the sheer vacuity of modern celebrity culture. And frankly I'm not sure any song on this list deals with a more important contemporary issue. If Black Mirror is vital TV for the same reason, this is its vital soundtrack.
The vocal is delivered with such deadpan while the content has such shock value, it's from that fissure that the song derives its power to unsettle. You kind of want a shower after this. Or a time machine. There's a hot tub time machine gag in there somewhere ...
19.
Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) - James
Pleased to Meet You (2001)
It's a kind of sad story this one. One of Britain's longest lasting and best loved bands were approaching their 20 year mark when they released what was to become a surprisingly poorly received swansong album, even with the benefit of Brian Eno's production. This was the only single lifted from the album, it charted poorly and the band soon split, faced with a supposed massive unpaid tax bill from Her Majesty.
They deserved a better sendoff. We'll hear more from James in the Top Ninety of The Nineties project (stay tuned), during what was really their heyday, but this song is not a bad way to cap a career. Easily the best track on the album, it combined everything that was great about the band, obtuse lyrics wedded to virally addictive chorus melodies that make the whole pub want to stand up and sing along.
18.
No Pussy Blues - Grinderman
Grinderman (2007)
It's always an interesting experience to first encounter a good band live rather than through their singles. I knew what Grinderman were about when making my way to what is still the most fabulous music festival I've ever attended - the sadly sole stranded lonesome Australian All Tomorrow's Parties at Falls Creek.
I was expecting something more Nick Cave-y and less Warren Ellis-y. The band just seemed to love creating NOISE. Clearly they were enjoying themselves and most of all were really enjoying playing together. Tight wouldn't really be the right word, perfectly loose would be closer. But when they played this, this one really shone for the CRAFT of the songwriting, and that's where you now the hand of Mr Cave is at play. Oh, plus the misogyny ...
17.
Special Cases - Massive Attack
100th Window (2003)
Here's another band that rightly belongs at the pinnacle of the NINETIES pantheon doing their gamma ray burst from a dying star thing. This album featured songs far more complex than anything the band had previously attempted. This isn't the sparse, catchy triphop that defined them in the previous decades. This album heralded the demise of a singles band - OK they were always much more than that, the demise of that dimension of their work is probably better - and the birth of one of the most important outfits experimenting in musical form still known to us today.
As always with Massive Attack, it's all about the BASS here. Musical bass. Vocal high treble. The vocal sprints hurriedly where the bass just barely creeps. And I say creeps, because it really is haunting, ominous, foreboding ... A tremendous video to boot...
16.
Wolf Like Me - TV On The Radio
Return To Cookie Mountain (2006)
The song that launched a career, and revived a million flagging dancefloors. Yet another song that proves the timelessness of the pop formula - create a catchy hook, repeat it ad nauseum, and provide backing that gives it a fitting pedestal.
That's how you go about creating art. You don't need to be able to sing flouncy trills like Beyonce, all the great poets ever born have shown a simple structure in repetition can generate meaning and profundity, and that's what's going on here.
Lycanthropy is normally a kind of corny affectation in popular culture. Not here.
Remember how this whole thing began? Jealousy of my friend Dan's countdown, which he now appears mysteriously to have deleted was the motivator. This was Dan's number one, and a case could certainly be made. The Knife have long been one of the more interesting and experimental electronic acts going around, and they have a significantly better ear for a good melody than can be said of the majority of their peers.
But it's the weird, sparse, wobbling, ungrounded baseline here that really makes this one stay with you.
24.
Banquet - Bloc Party
Silent Alarm (2005)
Bloc Party always suffered from a perception of being a bit of a bit of a poor-man's Interpol, and it's pretty easy to see how Interpol could have written this. It's almost got 'movements' that play with the listener's expectations. A question that begins in soaring vowel-y falsetto is completed with a rapid-fire staccato of consonants.
"Why d'you feeeeeeeeeel/sonegated?"
The chorus relies
again on phrases that start with the repeated long-format word "tuurning/coooming" followed by a response so rapid-fire it leaves pauses in the chorus where the notes should be.
And it follows in that fine literary tradition of conflating food and sex that began with humanity's very earliest origin myths.
23.
Such Great Heights - The Postal Service
Give Up (2003)
Another indie song that made a successful crossover into television - both soundtrack and commercial, such that it really ought to have become thoroughly irritating.
But there's something about those curious, oscillating midi blips in tandem with the vocal that just doesn't seem to age.
It's also been scientifically established as the twee-est track still physically possible to dance to.
"They will see us waving from such great heights
'Come down now', they'll say
But everything looks perfect from far away
'Come down now', but we'll stay."
22.
Hey Ya! - OutKast
The Love Below (2003)
The song that revived a million flagging dancefloors. All ages, all genres, all good. I believe this is the highest positioned song in my countdown to have spent significant time at number one internationally, so arguably the winnner of the People's Choice Award. The best and most successful song of the entire decade.
Please don't tell me rap has no musical dimension. It's the musical chops, the fact there's actually a melody present virtually throughout the entire track, it's the ability again of that melody to carry some unusually complex vocal shennanigans, and this is nowhere more in evidence than the "alrightalrightalrightalright" call and response breakdown.
This has always been where most rap artists just in-fill rather than create, in structural terms. But who DOESN'T remember where they first heard "Shake it like a Polaroid picture"?
21.
Paper Planes - M.I.A.
Kala (2007)
Rap has always performed strongest when it wears it's rhythm and dance heritage lightest.
Full marks to the Producer, Major Lazer for the correct response when the artist announced she wanted to include four gunshots not just DURING the chorus, but AS the chorus lyric. Listen to this. One semiotically vacuous sound repeated for times creates a very pecific "meaning", that the listener actively interprets as language.
"All I wanna do is/ BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG/ and a' take your money."
There's no information missing from that sentence whatsoever.
