Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

I wanted to close out these pages with some thoughts on the 2000s, on list-making in general, and on just what the hell I think I’m doing here.The convention we have of separating musical activity out into decade-long chunks is just that: a convention, bearing as little relationship to the ebb and flow of actual musical activity as Euclidean geometry does to the lumpy, fractal world we live in. The 2000s, as a musical decade, are not easily summed up into any tidy apothegms. Fashions certainly change, but the technology by which twenty-first century pop is produced has stayed more or less the same, and there is nothing being made here at the end of the decade that was conceptually or technically impossible at its inception. (As if to prove the point, the first AutoTune hit is more than a decade old by now.) Multitrack recording in the 40s, stereo in the 50s, variable-speed tape in the 60s, electronics in the 70s, sampling in the 80s, and home audio software in the 90s — there is nothing like that for our era, nothing we can do that we couldn’t have done before. We have been bounded only by our imaginations in this decade; which, as it turns out, can be a pretty strong boundary. Much of the music on this list could have been made ten or twenty or thirty or forty years ago: does that mean the decade has failed? Or, more specifically, that the filter I have applied to this decade is too limited in the scope of its own imagination?

This list is limited, yes, and designedly so: both out of laziness and out of a sense of possibly misguided honesty, I didn’t want to have to do any homework in order to make it. My blind spots are large, and obvious: non-radio hip-hop, electronic subgenres whether for the club or the home, most indie rock after about 2003; country, metal, mainstream hard rock, industrial, emo, anything at all from outside the US or Britain (and even a lot from inside Britain, dubstep for instance), and on and on and on. And even where I’m most confident, I’m still ignorant: I’ve only heard the singles off Stankonia, for crying out loud.

So what drove me to think I should make a list of songs from this decade, a decade I have clearly taken only a superficial interest in over its course, and expect to be paid attention to by anyone with the slightest understanding of the subject? Especially since my list is so full of songs everyone has already heard? If list-making (pace Hornby) is about distinguishing and codifying a particular taste out of the welter of material Out There, what does it say about my taste that I’ve chosen only the obvious, only the already-praised, only the (dread word) popular?

I’m sure a lot of people reading this would have preferred that I followed the path revealed by the handful of tracks that everyone hasn’t heard, follow the more obscure tributaries on which I found the Notwist, the Mountain Goats, Justus Köhncke, and Regina Spektor. They after all tell you something about me; everything else, superstar and critical darling alike, just tells you about itself, its inclusion here just another data point in the matrix of conventional wisdom.

But I am honored to be that data point. My instincts, as I have said, are towards building consensus, and I wear the image of rebellious outsider, the standard rock & roll (and hip-hop) pose, with an ill grace. (And anyway rankings and song choice are how I express my individuality.) If tout le monde also thinks “Hey Ya” is the decade’s best song, well — doesn’t that mean it probably is? Anyway, the more people say so, the truer it becomes. Talking about pop is nothing if not subjective for anyone this side of Joel Whitburn.

Anyway, that’s it. Finis. I’m done with lists for a good long time now. Which doesn’t mean I’m done with writing about music; I have several projects set to begin (or resume) in the new year. But to catch any stray thoughts I may happen to have in the interim, you’ll have to follow my Tumblr.

5. The Postal Service “Such Great Heights”
(Ben Gibbard, Dntel)
Sub Pop · 2003

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As I keep saying in as passive-aggressive a way as possible, this is a list of pop songs. There are a whole lot of important genres that aren’t well represented on this list — country, metal, Latin, the wide varieties of electronic music which don’t fit well under “pop,” not to mention the old warhorses like jazz, classical, and the contemporary avant-garde. But the one oversight I’m most conscious of, the one significant pop genre that came into its own and flowered in this decade without much attention and even less encouragement from the critical community among which I (if only as a reader) count myself, and of which I have taken no account on this list, is emo. “Death Cab For Cutie aren’t emo!” I hear you scream, and well no, I suppose not in the technical sense. They’re never loud enough, for one thing. But Ben Gibbard’s overlong, straining-for-wit lyrical conceits, the general bummed-out mood of their music, and let’s face it even their stupid name have been massively influential on the crop of emo (mall- or otherwise) bands that came of age after the turn of the millennium. Anyway this is as close as I’m going to get to talking about emo, so. I (doing things all wrong, as usual) had heard Dntel but not Death Cab For Cutie when the Postal Service’s album was released. I downloaded a few songs, thought they were nice if a little soporific, and then four months later stood in shock at a Borders as “Such Great Heights” played over the in-store speakers. There’s no reason I should have been surprised; Borders employees were just as likely as I was to have an interest in tasteful if somewhat out-of-the-way music, and what I didn’t realize and would have to be reminded of over and over again until I finally caught on in ca. 2006 was that indie was no longer indie in the sense of private. The Internet had done a lot of things to the music industry: one of them was giving everyone the ability to hear and love the pretty little laptop-pop songs that previously only a cult audience could have known about. I had thought I was part of the cult, but it turns out I was part of the cult’s mainstreaming: I too found out about it online. As to the song: Gibbard does his usual overextended metaphors, but placed in the context of Dntel’s pretty, pointillist soundscaping, the lines overlaid to fit the rhythm, he becomes the messy, human part of the machine, his sensitive-guy voice and flowing melody giving the dead-cool novo-glitch around him a beating heart. I haven’t heard the Iron & Wine cover; I don’t want to hear this song without a new wave guitar break repeated four times. Without those shrillest highs, what is there to come down from?

4. Gnarls Barkley “Crazy”
(Cee-Lo Green, Danger Mouse, Gianfranco Reverberi, Gian Piero Reverberi)
Downtown · 2006

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In the Golden Age of American songwriting from the 1920s through the 1940s, the composer was king. His melodies would come tripping from the piano, elegant or moody or angular or rambunctious as he chose, and the lyricist would knock his word-pegs into the assigned note-holes like a carpenter with a rhyming dictionary. Then came rock, and people generally wrote songs all in a go, words and music coming together like the voice of God, multiple but unified, and they sang them too, because it was more democratic that way. Then came hip-hop, and with it the rise of a new figure, the DJ, who scrounged old records to make a backing track for the rapper, whose lyrics were so urgent and real that they dispensed with melody altogether. And now, within our own time, the seas have shifted yet again. Once more, the solitary genius sits at his keyboard and the music comes tripping out, elegant or moody or angular or rambunctious as he chooses, and once it’s polished up he hands it off to the guy with the rhyming dictionary, only he’s also a rock writer, coming up with melody and lyrics to fit the backing track. That this process describes the collaboration between Postal Service just as well as Gnarls Barkley’s is no mistake: it’s yet another way that pop exists now, both outside the industry structure of superstar producers and writers-for-hire and artists with their own unique vision, and somehow part of it. Gibbard and Tamborello famously made their record on different sides of the continent; Gnarls Barkley work similarly separately, Danger Mouse conjuring up impossibly tight and well-structured songs out of the scraps of old Italian soundtracks and whatever else he’s got laying around in what must be the most well-stocked music library in New York, and Cee-Lo stepping into a studio months later and belting out whatever comes into his head on top of it. It’s not hip-hop — nor is it rock, or dance, or any of the other ways of thinking about music we’re so used to slotting things into, although it’s informed by all these processes. It’s something new, something that would have been impossible without the myriad connections made live by the Internet, something that we’re only just beginning to see the fruits of. All of which has little to do with the song, elegant and moody and angular and rambunctious all at once, and only maybe 30% of that is due to the rubbery guitar line Danger Mouse lifted from the Reverberis’ soundtrack to a 1968 Django sequel. Cee-Lo’s obsession with psychosis and identity has found the perfect outlet: his own cracked, hoarse singing voice, the most unlikely pop instrument to emerge in this decade of liquid vocals and inhuman computerization.

3. Britney Spears “Toxic”
(Bloodshy & Avant, Cathy Dennis, Henrik Jonback)
Jive · 2004

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There could only be one. In 1999, for no apparent reason (the journalists and fever-brained music writers digging deep into the historical and cultural milieu of the late 1990s have yet to explain the world to itself), a sudden boom in youthful dance-pop took place. But the Backstreet Boys, Nsync, Christina Aguilera, Destiny’s Child, Jennifer Lopez, Pink — and also-rans like Vitamin C, LFO, 98°, B*Witched, and Mandy Moore — were not immediately apparent (at least not to me, not that I was paying particular attention) as a sort of sea change in popular music. They fit into what I perceived as a standard mold in 1990s pop, the ephemeral, “manufactured” act. Los Del Rio, Hanson, Lou Bega, Eiffel 65 — this stuff had always been around (Right Said Fred, 2 Unlimited, Jordy, MC Hammer), and was basically harmless and would peter out in a while, to be replaced by real music, the real pop that I was interested in — which would be, uh, Third Eye Blind and Everclear and I even liked a Creed song or two back then sigh. Except that I couldn’t really get a handle on these new acts; there was nothing obviously novelty about them. The nerve of them, acting like they were singing real songs and expressing real emotions, when they’re obviously just kids being told what to sing and dance and pose as! That, as far as I remember, was my attitude, insofar as I had one; apart from an isolated moment when I realized that a peer expressing visceral hatred for these acts was being disproportionate in his reaction, I mostly rejected them, with the result that I can’t hear my way back to the dance-pop wave of 1999-20001; it still sounds overly slick, calculated, and completely false to me. It wasn’t until these kids began their second or third acts that I started to take notice. Pink recast herself as a rocker; Aguilera as a stripper (foreshadowing the Pussycat Dolls), and Destiny’s Child and Nsync broke up and their lead singers became the respective (and respected) heads of their field. Even Mandy Moore eventually went all singer-songwritery. And the void at the heart of this narrative, the name I have left unsaid throughout? She never tried on a new identity, never recast herself as anything but another image, never became a person. She remains, even today, the perfect blank slate, an antiseptic, inhuman human being on which all the fears, the hopes, the desires, and the scorns of a particulate, unfocused age can be written and read and written over. Her voice is weak, her looks average, her personal life as close to the median American’s as an individual person could possibly be. (Quickie marriages, quicker divorces, teenage pregnancies, drugs and rehab and going a little crazy? I don’t know where you’re from but around here we sigh and call it life.) Her discography is devoid of a guiding personality, a singular if restless vision. None of it bears any relationship to the rest: her producers, a dizzying roll-call encompassing every interesting or even half-interesting idea in the decade, are the ones who deserve the credit, and take it. She alone has remained faithful to the original charter of 1999; she alone will bear the blows, do it again, be our slave, teeter on the threshhold of adulthood, fight the music, take her prerogative, demand more, call out a womanizer, ringlead the circus, seek Amy, engage in ménage à trois — all of it forever, for as long as plastic spins or ones and zeroes multiply — and be the sordid, vapid reflection of our own sordid, vapid desires. And in 2004, as the nation descended into its most harrowing, depraved chapter since Vietnam, as secret prisons multiplied across Europe and Asia, as torture flourished, as we shook and awed a foreign nation for a lie and a dollar, she reflected back to it “Toxic.” Woozy synthesized stabs suggesting Middle-Eastern modal strings, with sitar and tabla deep in the mix, evoke the primal fears unleashed by 9/11 and stoked by a secretive and careless presidency, of brown men in modern clothes spreading disease and mayhem. “You’re toxic, I’m slipping under.” (Remember the anthrax scare? Her writers could hardly have chosen a better adjective.) Who was toxic, if not the exotic Other we both feared and were impelled towards, addicted (“I need a hit, baby give me it”) to blood and oil and the remorseless logic of endless war? America, a thousand hack journalists wrote, lost her innocence on September 11, 2001. Yeah, just like Britney was a virgin. “Toxic” tells the truth, in both directions. Oh, yeah, and it’s a great dance song.

2. The Strokes “Under Control”
(Julian Casablancas)
RCA · 2003

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I no longer remember why I was reading the NME online. But I was, and I saw their writeup of “Hard To Explain” in the summer of 2001. I fell hardest for the “perfect blackout silence” line describing the moment when the song pauses as though to catch its breath. (Like, ahem, Aerosmith’s “Living On The Edge.”) So I downloaded the only mp3 I could find on whatever primitive file-sharing network I was using back then, a tinny mess of an mp3 which sounded like it was recorded off the radio by a computer mic and probably was. I no longer remember why I believed and trusted the NME. But I did, so I waited and waited until there were more Strokes songs — real ones this time — on the file-sharing network, and I listened to them and heard the combination of Television and Buzzcocks and Pavement and Velvet Underground that everyone else heard, and slowly got kind of excited about them and the possibility that they might work out to be the saviors of rock. And I bought their first record soon after it was released and listened to it not nonstop because I’ve never listened to any record nonstop that’s just not how I process things but I listened to it a lot. (I listened to it again yesterday for the first time in years and everything sounded exactly as I remembered it.) And “Last Nite” was on the radio — on the motherfucking radio! — along with “Fell In Love With A Girl” and maybe “Hate To Say I Told You So” though I don’t remember it, and Nick Hornby was right and all our patient punk-and-British Invasion-and-glam-and-Britpop-loving dreams were about to come true. We had kept the faith, we would be rewarded. Except of course, no, that didn’t happen, it was a blip and the Strokes were an indie band — the kings of indie rock for a while, if they wanted to be, although even in late 2001 I was aware of backlash — and so I became indie rock too, and over the next year or so would champion the Libertines and the Raveonettes and Interpol and the Polyphonic Spree and Hot Hot Heat and Simian. (Yes, Simian, long before they became a Mobile Disco. I still think that’s weird.) And then the Strokes made another record, and I bought it the day it came out because I was that guy now, and I listened to it with ears that had been thoroughly prepared by reading every single word I could find on the Internet about it, and so had mixed reviews. I couldn’t decide whether the Carsy keyboard-sounding effect on the guitar in “12:51” was irrepressibly awesome or irredeemably lame, because neither could everyone else, and I couldn’t decide whether the record built nobly on the promise of their first record or failed to live up to the purity of its vision, because neither could everyone else. “Under Control,” though. I was sure about “Under Control.” (Everyone else was not, as I recall.) Because in addition to reading every word I could find about the record, I had read every word I could find about the band, and Julian Casablancas had gone out of his way numerous times to namecheck Sam Cooke as a vocal influence, and I had just bought a Sam Cooke compilation and — look if I have to explain to you why Sam Cooke is great, I quit. “Under Control” was the song where I heard Sam Cooke the most. Well, obviously, it’s a rock & roll ballad, bearing the same relationship to the Strokes’ standard sound as “Surfer Girl” did to the Beach Boys’ early sound or “Tired Of Waiting For You” did to the Kinks’, slowing it down and giving it a little time to compose itself. I included it on a mixtape I listened to more than anything else in 2003, 2004, and 2005. It’s still my favorite Strokes song. They didn’t make a third record. No, hush. They didn’t.

1. Outkast “Hey Ya”
(André 3000)
LaFace · 2003

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Well, duh. What did you expect?

I knew sometime in 2004 that “Hey Ya” was the frontrunner for Song Of The Decade, and anything that came along in the back half would have to be damn good to live up to it. And nothing did.

This is an unfortunate byproduct of my silly “one song per artist” rule, which means that according to the label on the CD spine this is ineligible to be considered as an André 3000 song, which  means that Big Boi appears nowhere on this list, which is ridiculous on the face of it. But if I have to choose between a song on which Big Boi appears and what I think is the best Outkast song . . . there’s no question.

Seriously, if you have any questions left, you haven’t listened to the song enough. Alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright OK now ladies!

10. Kanye West “Love Lockdown”
(Kanye West, Jeff Bhasker, Esthero, Malik Yusef, LaNeah Menzies)
Roc-A-Fella · 2008

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The summer of 2008 (as I’ve tried to explain, at punishing length, here) was immensely transformative for me and my listening habits. I had never seriously listened to pop radio before, and I believed the claim made by essentialist snobs, whether they privileged indie, hard rock, or old-school hip-hop, that pop radio had become a wasteland of terrible cookie-cutter thug ballads, soulless R&B, and the occasional brainless, utterly predictable bauble from a white person. Radio was drowning in guest verses, with all the hooks sung by the same people, using the same handful of unimaginative production tricks, the most damning of which was AutoTune’s clearly synthetic cheapness, which obviated the last bastion of Actual Human Talent left on radio, the Terrific Voice. Anyone could use AutoTune and they wouldn’t even have to be able to sing! Well, yes, which is why it’s the most deeply exciting development in pop music since I don’t know sampling or something. The original (and still heady after all these years) promise of punk was that it erased the need for virtuosity: just pick up a guitar, turn up the volume, and be a star. AutoTune makes the same promise for the voice: the last ivory tower has been knocked down, and pop is available for anyone with an idea to make a mark. Which brings us to Kanye. Few people have had more great (or otherwise) ideas in pop over the past decade; regardless of how the hothouse environment in his mind makes him act in public, he’s responsible for more good music on this list than anyone else, even Timbaland and the DFA. I will always be grateful to the summer of 2008 for preparing me to hear “Love Lockdown” in its first radio play. After all the busy, melodramatic, overstuffed ballads, the hateful club tracks and the simpering fake lesbianism, this moody electro lament was, at long last, a song. Like the gentlemen at #3 and #1 below (come on, I know you looked), Kanye could no longer be contained by the strictures of hip-hop and must sing. Thanks to AutoTune, he could, getting to the heart of our conflicted love affair with technology here at the end of the first decade of the third millennium. The machine has become part of us; and we sound more and more like machines, even at our most heartbroken and desperate. And then the tribal drumming comes in, just to remind us what’s still in our blood.

9. The White Stripes “Fell In Love With A Girl”
(Jack White)
Sympathy For The Record Industry · 2001

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It’s important to note here that I’m not advancing the idea that “Fell In Love With A Girl” is the White Stripes’ best song, much less that it represents some kind of holy purity which their later, more complex and less austere records defiled. “Seven Nation Army,” with its fake bass line, was the bigger hit, and Jack White hasn’t stopped evolving, restlessly searching out new ways to apply his pared-down Detroit garage aesthetic to pop forms both modern and classic. So why is this two-minute blast of hormonal teenage rawk, with a curious lyric about how love is fleeting (cf. #1 below) and a drum line that’s basic even by Meg’s low standards, here, rather than any of the dozen other White Stripes songs that could have taken its place? It was the first one I heard, but I don’t think that explains it all. The truth is that six weeks ago I listened to White Stripes song after White Stripes song, trying to figure out which one sounded best in between #10 and #8, and which one I could claim as the one that belonged on the list: not according to the judgment of my peers, but according to mine alone. “Fell In Love With A Girl” emerged as the answer, giving no reasons for itself. I can only speculate. Is it the noisy, overcharged guitar, the most purely punk sound I’ve ever heard on daytime radio or MTV? (This fell into the brief period between when I watched MTV and when it stopped showing music videos.) Is it the deceptively sophisticated rhyme scheme, misleading/beating/cheating/peeping/meeting/fleeting/repeating throughout the length of the song and for once in a Jack White lyric adding up to a coherent thought rather than just being rhyme for the sake of rhyme? The secret engine of White Blood Cells, the thing which most end-of-decade tributes to the Stripes leave out, was the faux-naïve power of acoustic songs like “Hotel Yorba” and “We’re Going To Be Friends,” practically giving the Moldy Peaches their tweepunk template. Even with the guitars revved up, “Fell In Love With A Girl” exists in the same delicate idyll, a heart-on-sleeve aesthetic that kids who don’t trust the glitzy, hyperliterate trappings of emo can get behind. Bobby says it’s fine, he don’t consider it cheating. Bobby’s not saying everything; is he perhaps related to Bobbie Gentry’s Billie Joe?

8. Christina Aguilera “Ain’t No Other Man”
(Christina Aguilera, DJ Premier, Charles Roane, Harold Beatty, Kara DioGuardi)
RCA · 2006

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Those of you (and I realize I’m being generous in pluralizing that phrase) who followed this blog over the summer are surely unsurprised: of course the guy obsessed with the 40s is going to throw in something this indebted to big-band nostalgia. Two things there. First, I’m not particularly obsessed with the 40s, which is why it was one of the last decades I got round to writing about; I’m much more of a 20s/30s guy (which makes me far nerdier than you thought). Second, this is not an exercise in nostalgia however much people who flinch when they hear brass intrumentations claim it is. Sure, Aguilera herself complicated the issue by playing pinup-queen dress-up in videos and photo shoots, posing with obsolete technology and even namecheking Billie Holiday (of all people she owes nothing whatever to; Billie for instance had a passing familiarity with subtlety and nuance) on the album. But the song itself is thoroughly modern: looking past Premier’s crate-digging samples (from funk records released in 1968 and ’69, ahem), in its hyperkinetic, twisting funk it owes more to Michael Jackson’s impossibly sleek rhythm-pop of the 1980s than to anything made with acoustic instrumentation. (A debt she acknowledges in the song with Jacksonian cries and whoops.) It’s the giddiest rush of dancefloor infatuation this decade has produced — which is saying something, as dancefloor infatuation has been perhaps the primary topic of concern for 00s pop. (Cf. #6, which isn’t nearly as giddy but much more gorgeous.) Admittedly, I never paid attention to Christina Aguilera till she did this: my only exposure to “Genie In A Bottle” has still been “A Stroke Of Genie-us,” and I was uptight enough to loathe her “Dirrty” period as much as any patriarchal white hetero. She had to dress up as Betty Grable to hook me in: but her (and Preem’s) junkshop scavenging of the past to build giddy modern Frankenstein-pop was one of the first slaps across the face that made me start to take radio pop seriously. If they could play this, they could play anything.

7. Eminem “Lose Yourself”
(Eminem, Luis Resto, Jeff Bass)
Shady · 2002

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I look forward to the potted histories of the future, when this song will stand as one of the markers of self-serious bloat which pushed radio rap into all-party all-the-time, crunk-n-jerk mode. (Viz. the way potted histories of 70s rock talk about prog as the reason punk “had to happen.”) And much like the icons of 70s rock, Eminem’s been a shadow of his former self ever since, unable to live up to the moment when he sounded as urgent and necessary as anyone’s ever been. (Our generation’s Rod Stewart? Oh my Lord that’s adorable.) All of this, I realize, makes it sound like “Lose Yourself” is dull and wanky, a melodrama of one that doesn’t even bother to be insane — and I guess I can kind of see how someone would think that, how someone would prefer the bounce, outrage, and vicious wit of his earlier singles to this overheated slice of self-help self-absorption. (It ends with the words “You can do anything you set your mind to,” for God’s sake. What is this, you can imagine Slim Shady snarking, some fuckin’ after school special?) But Eminem, for all the manufactured controversy and gleeful violence he got famous for, is still an immensely talented writer, rapper and (here) producer: he pushes through the melodrama into meaning. The craft on display on the jaw-dropping third verse is still astonishing some seven years later: all those rhymes for “spot” piling up on top of each other, until you’re screaming along with the last line, tears streaming from your eyes. (Just me? Oh, okay.) It’s a summation of everything Eminem had achieved to date, the first two verses in the third person as he describes the plot of 8 Mile (informed, as the whole movie is, by Em’s own biography), and then switching to a lacerating first person — “this is no movie, there’s no Mekhi Phifer” — he just unloads. He’d given hints of emotional depth before (“Stan,” obviously, but throughout his discography he’s far smarter and aware of what he’s doing than the stereotypical twelve-year-old fan he cultivated as an image), but this is the finest postmillennial portrait of the pressures of lower-middle-class life in America — “man these goddamn food stamps don’t buy diapers” (there are three internal rhymes in that line, he’s fucking showing off even while speaking a truth understood immediately by everyone who’s ever felt the conflicted shame about taking food stamps and rage that it’s still not enough) — and Eminem became, briefly, not just the greatest rapper in the world (yes I said it, the fact that this is the highest-ranking rap song on the list isn’t a mistake or entirely attributable to my inner racist), but one of the most important writers in America. Of course he couldn’t sustain it; neither could Philip Roth. But the record still resonates: these times are so hard and it’s gettin’ even harder . . . .

6. Annie “Heartbeat”
(Annie, Svein Berge, Torbjørn Brundtland)
679 · 2004

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In 2004 I was working at a job I wouldn’t admit to myself I hated (and would later be fired from for, basically, finally admitting it to myself), spending every moment I could spare (and some I couldn’t, thus the firing) reading Pitchfork and other indie-music sites and downloading everything I read about. (Onto office computers, like a moron. I mentioned I was fired, right?) That was the context in which I first heard “Heartbeat,” (Mem. I just mistyped that as first heart “Heartbeat,” which is also true if ungrammatical) as a gauzy slice of heaven in a sea of overthought, underheard noise I was purposely drowning in so that I wouldn’t have to think about my life. It was not until much later (okay okay this week, looking up the credits) that I realized that Röyksopp had had anything to do with it — I knew who Röyksopp were, oddly enough, having loved their 2001 record Melody A.M. back in the days when I had time to fall in love with whole records — and now that I know it makes so much sense, their peculiar sense of feathery weightlessness grounded by their predeliction for live-sounding drums. It’s those drums that make “Heartbeat,” kicking into double-time as Annie coos breathlessly about finding love on the dancefloor. Their crisp weight codes as “rock,” while the rest of the production codes as “techno,” and Annie’s voice itself codes as “indie pop,” its girlish softness more in line with the Sundays or Belle & Sebastian than anything we (Americans) think of as chart pop. Yet it was this record — and Scott Plagenhoef’s writeup of it in Pitchfork — that first made me realize that I liked pop more than rock. Within the next several years I would discover that I wasn’t alone, that there were whole pop-loving corners of the internet in which the output of singing women, genius producers, and writers-for-hire were discussed with as much seriousness and intelligence as the rock I had become used to, and bored with, reading about. (New York London Paris Munich, R.I.P.) If Annie’s voice had been stronger; if Röyksopp had chosen to use shinier production, I might never have given it the time; but as it was, this record set me however subtly on the course I’m still taking, into the heart of pop, in which I’ve rediscovered and reinterpreted everything through the lens of pop, asking not “is it true?” “is it authentic?” “is it subversive?” (the questions asked by rock critics), but “does it thrill?” “does it move?” “is it funny?” (which are the same questions, only more broadly applied). And every time I cue up “Heartbeat,” it still sounds like heaven, drawing me (drowning me) to the beat of its symphony.

20. Alicia Keys “No One”
(Alicia Keys, Kerry Brothers Jr., George O. Harry)
J · 2007

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This marks one of the rare occasions on which I haven’t seen an entry on this list valorized anywhere else; for someone with my consensus-seeking instincts, this means I’m flying blind, without the support of my peers, lost in subjectivity. Yet I’m not actually worried that I’m wrong about this: the strength of the composition, the production, and the performance, piling as they do one on the other to create perhaps the most straightforward, even basic pop this decade has seen, are so obvious as to convert even the most chart-skeptical. (I have to assume.) As a writer and performer, Alicia Keys started out with a tendency towards bloat, overstuffing her songs and albums with not particularly original ideas; she’s pared down her vision since, becoming both more disciplined and more eccentric as her gestures towards a classicist past have become integrated into the futuristic modernism of her peers. The sine-wave snyth lines that decorate this piece could be right out of a Neptunes song; but it’s her music-box piano figure that underpins the overwhelming, terrifying emotions in her voice.

19. The Pipettes “Pull Shapes”
(The Pipettes)
Memphis Industries · 2006

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For a year of my life there was no album I listened to more frequently or with more delight than 2006’s We Are The Pipettes. They remain the only act on this list I’ve seen live, for which I pulled an all-nighter driving to Los Angeles. I don’t really believe in having a favorite anything , but if forced to pick one they’d probably be my favorite pop act of the decade. Which speaks more to my indie sensibilities than to their greatness, unfortunately — they gave me much of the vocabulary to enjoy Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton and a lot of other stuff on this list, but they remained firmly a niche act, their success limited to the indie audience that recognized references to the Ronettes, the Supremes, and the Shangri-La’s with just the right knowing smirk. But they did what they set out to do, which was to however slightly shake up smug indie assumptions like “boys > girls,” “guitars > beats,” “writing your own material > singing professional-grade songs,” and “imitating 60s-era beat groups > imitating 60s-era girl groups.” Yeah, they were a nostalgia act, but they were smarter and catchier and and less one-note and way more fun than the thousand and one faux-garage bands that formed this decade, just as in thrall to nostalgia but taken more seriously because they were dudes.

18. Kelly Clarkson “Since U Been Gone”
(Max Martin, Dr. Luke)
RCA · 2004

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In which Max Martin transfers his sense of dynamics, the push-and-pull of his tightly wound pop structures, to instrumentation that codes as “rock,” even though the song could have been played on a Fairlight CMI and sung by Britney Spears and dismissed as just another lame dance-pop effort. But replace the faint digital scratches with faint feedbacking guitar, the loops with barre-chord strums, and the the whooshes and zooms in the break with power chords, and suddenly a generation of teenage girls think of themselves as rocker chicks. Which isn’t meant to sound dismissive: rock has always been pose and calculation as much as it has been frenzy and release, and the 2000s’ explicit acknowledgment that such identities can be fluid, taken on for the space of an album or single and then discarded when you or your audience grows bored, is perhaps far more honest than the greybeards now embarking on their forty-fifth farewell tour because their audience will not let them be anything but what they were in 1972. None of which is encoded in the song: it’s just a great dismissive breakup tune, perfect for air-guitar, jumping up and down (whether on a bed or not), and flipping a hearty bird to the loser who isn’t what he said he would be. Like most every song in the front half of this list, it’s a modern classic, a “Respect” for the text-message generation, a “Why Don’t You Do Right” fifty-some years on. As long as men suck, women will have to sing these songs.

17. The Libertines “I Get Along”
(Pete Doherty, Carl Barât)
Rough Trade · 2002

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My ambivalence about rock, expressed in the foregoing, is nowhere to be found here. The Libertines, I’m going to go ahead and say and laugh if you want to, are the most rock & roll band to emerge since mm let’s say the Sex Pistols (fully aware of how managed, manipulated and curated the Pistols were and have been since, that’s kind of the point). Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying Pete Doherty is a misunderstood genius, or even a particularly interesting person. I haven’t been able to bring myself to care about Babyshambles (or Dirty Pretty Things, Carl Barât’s second band) since the Libertines broke up, but they still made some of my favorite music of the decade, all the more fascinating because it was always just on the edge of falling apart. Producer Mick Jones (not the one out of Foreigner) left dropped drumsticks and in-studio scuffles into the final mix of their albums, and that was just as much part of the Libs’ aesthetic as the preening about Albion or whatever. And it’s this song that found them at their best: the nursery-rhyme (which is to say medieval) brilliance of “I get along/Just singing my song/People tell me I’m wrong” closed out by the close-miked, casual “Fuck ’em” is still one of the best pop moments of the decade.

16. Peter Björn & John ft. Victoria Bergsman “Young Folks”
(Peter Morén, Björn Yttling)
Wichita · 2006

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It was just a matter of time until twee went mainstream. That it happened with Victoria Bergsman out of the Concretes is about as perfect a coming-out party as twee fans could have hoped for; that it was more or less everywhere for a year after it came out so that even the people who had championed it at first were sick of it by 2008 was, well, what happens when stuff goes mainstream. The mainstreaming of indie, that topic of a thousand blog posts, could fairly be said to have met a saturation point here, and the fact that Peter Björn and John’s continued existence as a pop outfit has met with universal apathy reveals the limits of twee’s potential as a cultural force. Without Bergsman, that whistled hook, and a song everyone knows, what’s the point? (Equally, without PBJ, that whistled hook, and a song everyone knows, Bergsman’s solo career has been confined to rapturous Pitchfork reviews and the same devoted but miniscule audience.) But the song is just a whistled hook, a drum line which always turns out to be more sprightly than it was in memory, and Bergsman and Morén’s light-voiced, Swedish-accented delivery of the tweetastic narrative of falling in love at a party. And that’s enough.

15. Gorillaz ft. De La Soul “Feel Good, Inc.”
(Gorillaz, Trugoy The Dove)
Parlophone · 2005

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As an example of where my head has been at in regards to pop music for most of this decade, when I first heard this song my first thoughts were not about Gorillaz, Damon Albarn, De La Soul, Danger Mouse, or Blur; they were about George W. Johnson. Johnson was the first African-American recording star in the 1890s, a one-time street performer stuck in front of a recording horn, where his attention-grabbing tricks of whistling and laughing in musical pitch translated into some of the first big novelty record sales. (He’s estimated to have recorded his signature, “The Laughing Song,” 25,000 to 50,000 times in the days when every record was a master.) The racist implications of the first black star on record being a chortling nonentity are hard to overlook; but the roaring, similarly mirthless laughter of black men in “Feel Good, Inc.” bridges the centuries and, whether De La Soul, Albarn, and Danger Mouse meant to do it or not, recontextualizes Johnson’s desperate, flop-sweat-soaked laughter as the first echo of what would become a giddy cartoon threat. Of course, if that was all the song did it would be even more of a footnote than Johnson himself: but it also rescues two reputations (De La’s and the Gorillaz’) from being dismissed as one-note has-beens, darkening both cartoon-bright images without significantly dampening their bright pop appeal. It can be read as a dry run for Danger Mouse’s later historico-pop recontextualization of a hip-hop maniac, but it stands on its own as one of the weirdest hit singles in a decade full to the brim of weirdness.

14. Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Maps”
(Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
Interscope · 2004

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Yet again, I’ve barely heard Karen O and company beyond this song. I dutifully listened to Fever To Tell when it came out, but halfway through I was already in revolt against spiky post-punk revivalism, and the cool balladic “Maps” came as a relief from shrieks and scrapes that I haven’t revisited in a half-decade and probably remember as far more boring and samey than they really are. But it was the unexpected appearance of “Maps” as a song on the actual honest-to-God radio that made me pay attention. Not enough attention to take notice whenever Yeah Yeah Yeahs did anything since, unfortunately — but in my evolution into an old-school pop fan, I can’t help feeling like following a band is overrated; if they’re any good they’ll impinge on my consciousness without much expenditure of effort on my part. (Which wasn’t ever true and is becoming less so every day as radio crumbles before our eyes into just another media distribution channel and one of the less important ones at that. But anyway.) The unexpected vulnerability of the song was what surprised me at first; and it’s what’s stuck with me over the years as its moody guitar soundscaping has become just another element in pop (viz. two spaces down), Karen O’s plaintive “they don’t love you like I love you” variously interpretable as hopeless romanticism, anti-war sloganeering, obsessive stalkeration, or just reportage of some unknowable inner reality. It’s the pounding toms that tell us the truth: just keep going.

13. Beyoncé ft. Jay-Z “Déjà Vu”
(Beyoncé, Rodney Jerkins, Delisha Thomas, Makeba Riddick, Keli Nicole Price, Jay-Z)
Columbia · 2006

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The disconnect between my first impression of Beyoncé (gritting my teeth in the back of a car as the white-girl driver sang along out of key to Destiny’s Child songs I in my youthful wisdom disdained as poorly-written and over-sung) and my current one (Queen of Pop and deservedly so; has she ever made a misstep or revealed more than she chose to?) is enough to make me always want to second-guess myself in regards to her work. Which means: I know “Crazy In Love” is the one that everyone else calls her masterwork, but “Déjà Vu” is the one I heard first and so I prefer its snaky 70s funk strut to the more abstract production of “Crazy In Love.” (I might be wrong, to quote another nerdy white guy.) Jay-Z’s breathless verses are just icing on the cake here: B’s ice-queen glamour, controlled even on the edge of emotional breakdown, has never been better deployed than here, her voice like liquid silk. It sounds like the most expensive funk song ever, materials imported directly from classic soul and worked by the finest craftsmen in the world into an immaculately-designed disco anthem. If the “you” of her lyrics is Jay-Z, his somewhat boorish bragging in the second verse (except, it’s Jay, so you believe him) only furthers the narrative: of course he’s fascinating, especially in the eyes of this powerful-voiced, powerful-emotioned woman he’s managed to land. The way she winds up as the song goes into repeated-chorus mode, getting more and more expressive while in control every step of the way, is like watching a master athlete at work: the slightest miscalculation will break every bone in her body, but she still makes it look easy.

12. M.I.A. “Paper Planes”
(M.I.A., Diplo, The Clash)
XL · 2007

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The sample from the Clash’s “Straight To Hell” is often what pop writers build their hook around, positioning M.I.A. as a modern descendant of the Clash’s politicized, righteous punk. Which isn’t wrong; but the postpunk-era song I’m always most reminded of is the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime.” In both David Byrne’s paranoid fantasia and M.I.A.’s cut-up ransom note to civilization, a “we” of indeterminate referent is engaged in undermining existing political structures through direct action — or navigating the deceptive and deadly terrain of interpersonal relationships — or engaging in late-period capitalism — or singing a song about singing songs, casting the pop star as paramilitary freedom fighter/postmodern lover/capitalist. What exactly all the organization is for is never spelled out: it could be running drugs (thus the Pineapple Express hoopla), it could be running weapons (thus the Sri Lankan hissy fit), or it could be packaging and distributing records, which is after all the pop star’s first concern, and the gun shots in the chorus are after all a sound effect, one of the most bracing pop sounds in memory, their dancefloor meaning being merely their staccatto rhythm, followed by the most perceptive sound on the record: the kaching of a cash register. Terrorist, drug mule, capitalist, smuggler, human trafficker? Either way, M.I.A.’s getting paid, and no one can say she didn’t deliver on her end of the deal. “Paper Planes” thrills like few pop songs this decade, or any other.

11. Shakira “She Wolf”
(Shakira, John Hill, Sam Endicott)
Epic · 2009

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She is the only pop star I paid close attention to throughout the decade. I’ve explained why elsewhere (#15); but Laundry Service was as important to me in 2001 as any record has ever been, and the huge success of “Hips Don’t Lie” felt like long-awaited justice finally being done on the pop charts. It was in Shakira that I was first able to hear the post-genre mixing and matching that has been the modus operandi of 2000s pop, and her “Objection (Tango)” (trad LatAm accordion with a surf-guitar solo and a disco beat! ?!) now sounds like a dry run for the all-conquering pop majesty that awaits us at #3. So why “She Wolf”? The obvious answer is, well, it’s her new record, and like many pop stars she’s a constant innovator, her newest always being her best. But it hasn’t had time to become a classic, is the obvious argument, not the way “Hips Don’t Lie” (e.g.) has. Point taken; and “Hips Don’t Lie” occupied this spot for the first several weeks that I was writing this list. It’s still an absolutely charming record, matching a Baroque horn figure to a reggaeton beat and even making Wyclef Jean interesting for the first time in ever — but it’s about Shakira as an image, as a (masturbatory?) fantasy, and as a body deeply conventionalized and in its clearest iteration deeply sexist. “She Wolf” is about Shakira as a person, as a psyche, and as (secondarily) a woman with a particular body (which isn’t even stable): it’s interior and subjective where “Hips Don’t Lie” was exterior and objectified. And I’m white enough to prefer a Paradise Garage string break to a booty-grinding reggaeton beat.

30. Belle & Sebastian “Your Cover’s Blown”
(Belle & Sebastian)
Rough Trade · 2004

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I knew the name Belle & Sebastian long before I deigned to listen to them — they were pretty much the gold standard for indie at the turn of the century among all the people who hyperventilated online — and when I did at last download an mp3 it was this one, their least representative work to date, a shiny epic with disco aspirations, a flamenco breakdown, and a guitar sound stolen from 10cc at their least admirable. Stuart Murdoch’s layered, intimately-observed narrative of loneliness and pursuit at regional discos pulled me in, and the glitzy, even slightly tacky production kept me charmed long enough for me to uncover and finally fully embrace the dance music the song gestures to. It’s still an indie song, embarrassed and ungainly, but because it was my first real encounter with Belle & Sebastian I could never really embrace their earlier, fragile-beauty work quite as much. The Life Pursuit is still their best record.

29. Kylie Minogue “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”
(Cathy Dennis, Rob Davis)
Mushroom · 2001

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The moment I realized this needed to be on this list was when, watching Green Wing for the first time a couple of years ago, I was struck by the moment when the disturbingly hilarious Michelle Gomez hums the wordless chorus to Julian Rhind-Tutt, visibly creeping him out. I had to scan my memory banks to place the song (I’ve spent so much time unaware of pop, it’s shameful), but when I did, I was impressed. It fit the scene perfectly — of course — but the scene also uncovered an undercurrent of pathological obsession I’d never heard in the song before, its feather-light synth waves and Kylie’s Australian version of what in America would be a wholesome country accent obscuring the predatory nature of the lyrics. I would have expected that sort of thing from Madonna, who’s been in the game of unsettling just as long as she has that of pleasing, but Kylie Minogue? Wasn’t she some leftover pop moppet from the 80s?

28. Missy Elliott “Get Ur Freak On”
(Missy Elliot, Timbaland)
Elektra· 2001

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My introduction to bhangra was Panjabi MC (via Jay-Z’s remix) — it would be a few more years before I realized that everyone else had already been introduced to it by the biggest club jam of the first half of the oughts. Of course, this wasn’t the uncut stuff; Timbaland as always chopped it up, sped it up, slowed it down, and made a music so futuristic that it was nearly theoretical. Over which Missy is Missy, swaggering, yelling, hocking, and forthrightly seducing with just as much privilege as any male. It’s pathetic that, as profiles of Lil Mama have shown, “Girl Raps!” is still stop-press headline-worthy — after all, Missy broke down those walls in the late 90s (a decade after Queen Latifah had done so in the late 80s (a decade after Lady B had done so in the late 70s)) — but if the challenge was living up to Missy, you can see why it hasn’t really been done.

27. Rihanna ft. Jay-Z “Umbrella”
(The-Dream, Tricky Stewart, Kuk Harrell, Jay-Z)
Def Jam · 2007

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The silent globalization of American pop has been one of the most promising trends of the past five years. The guy who has been on half the chart entries in the past three years is from Senegal; Spanish-language party rap is a consistent presence on pop radio; and the most significant pop starlet to emerge since 1999 is from Barbados. The obvious retort is that it’s too bad they don’t bring any global music with them, being squeezed and pressed into the same robo-R&B mold as everyone else in pop music — which is both missing the point and not paying attention. “Umbrella” doesn’t necessarily sound Barbadian (as though there are any purely local musics anymore); but Rihanna’s method of declaiming lyrics rather than emoting them — a dancehall aesthetic —  would have been impossible to cultivate in the showboating academies of American pop. Sure, it’s the “ella, ella, ella” hook that stuck in everyone’s head; but it’s the unadorned, almost hymnal way she sings it that gave the song legs.

26. Imogen Heap “Hide And Seek”
(Imogen Heap)
Megaphonic · 2005

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But I was there. I was there in 2005 when someone reviewed this for some singles blog and downloaded it and listened to it once or twice and forgot about it. Until I saw the SNL digital skit mocking the finale of The O.C., and I realized it was actually a really effective piece of pop. Some johnny-come-latelies have been walking around saying that the only reason anyone heard the song was that SNL used it in a digital skit. Writa please. But no seriously, this is one of the most unusual things to ever get so popular. Maybe the effects-laden vocal was enough of a hook to get a million soulful indie nerds to buy into it; maybe it really was just the fact that it was in two heavily-watched TV shows. But popularity should be taken into account just as much as any other intangible metric. I can foresee a future in which this is seen as the kind of poorly-aged freak that could only have emerged in the weirdass chaos of the 2000s, like “Spirit In The Sky” in the 60s or “She Blinded Me With Science” in the 80s. If so, just let me say: I called it.

25. The Knife “Heartbeats”
(The Knife)
Border · 2002

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I’ve spent so much time on this list talking about what I don’t know, what I haven’t heard, and how ignorant and out of the loop I have been and continue to be that the question naturally arises who the hell do I think I am to make this kind of list in the first place? We’ll get to that at the end; my two excuses, that I’ve “had other priorities” (the single thing that’s driven the most traffic to this site was a brief plug for my list of records from 1900-1919), and that appearances aside I don’t think ignorance is something to be celebrated, quite the reverse, I’m really uncomfortable with being this honest, have little to do with my credentials in 00s pop. I have none. All of which is a roundabout way of saying — yet again — that I don’t have much to say about the Knife. I heard this song early on, loved its gothy synth-strobe, was bemused by the Jose Gonzalez cover, listened to the Knife’s first full-length once, and never felt the need to return to it or anything else they’ve done together or apart. “Heartbeats,” though. That’s the kind of single that lasts.

24. Justin Timberlake “Cry Me A River”
(Justin Timberlake)
Jive · 2002

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Speaking of which. It’s worth remembering now when he’s more or less accepted as the biggest male pop star there is — not quite the King Of Pop, but more versatile than the erstwhile king ever was; can you imagine MJ being able to cope with the relative chaos of Saturday Night Live? — that there was a time when it looked very much like it could go the other way. The boy band era was over, and Nsync wasn’t even the best of the boy bands, and the pretty one was trying to go solo, his sole credentials apparently being (to people who didn’t pay close attention to Nsync’s arrangements, because why would you ) “Britney’s ex.” The smart money would have been on him falling flat on his face: going by previous form, the New Kids, the Spice Girls, and the Backstreet Boys hadn’t turned out any solo stars. (And still haven’t.) But then the record came out, and the Timberlake we know today came slowly into focus: smart, ambitious, restless, willing to laugh at himself, and not only a hell of a singer but a hell of a collaborator. People give credit to Timbaland for this record, and they should: it’s an amazing sonic document. But it was Timberlake’s melody, lyric, and performance that made it a modern classic.

23. The Shins “New Slang”
(James Mercer)
Sub Pop · 2001

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I regret to inform Natalie Portman that this song has yet to change my life except in the sense that there is slightly more pretty, cryptic guitar-pop in it than I would otherwise have had. The reason that scene in Garden State has been so roundly mocked for a solid five years is that it’s hard to think of a band less likely to change your life than the Shins — except of course in the way that every band could change your life, if you hit them at the right emotional angle at the right emotional moment. Which doesn’t mean that a million sensitive indie hipsters are wrong; “New Slang” is every bit the fragile web of beauty and haunted, half-forgotten splendor they claim. For them. For everyone else — me, for instance — it’s a great, lilting melody and muttered lyrics I have not once paid attention to until just now when I read them online. (Hüsker Dü, everyone wants to be you.) But I like having it around. Just in case, someday,  the right emotional angle slants down.

22. Amy Winehouse “Rehab”
(Amy Winehouse)
Island · 2006

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How did I not notice the “Runaway” riff in the verses until just now? I know it’s fashionable in some circles to sneer at Amy for her retro aesthetic, as though in a junkshop century any scraps we find useful or interesting or resonant aren’t worth salvaging, but for me it’s the only reason I ever paid attention in the first place. But that a guy who’s done top hundred lists of every decade for the past century would fall in love with her (and Mark Ronson’s) Etta James-meets-Del Shannon-meets-Phil Spector sound isn’t particularly surprising; that everyone else would do so is. Winehouse may be more famous for her addictions and misbehavior than for her music at this point; but the only reason anyone takes pictures of her looking like shit for the tabloids is because she set up her tabloid narrative with such precision in this song — and, by analogy, making the addictions and misbehavior of previous generations of pop stars seem less comfortably glamorous and more cellphone-photo sordid in the process.

21. Radiohead “The National Anthem”
(Radiohead)
Capitol · 2000

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It’s those horn charts again. The first time I heard it, of course, it sounded like noise — where where the guitars I had been promised? This was a Radiohead record! — but after a decade with the record, probably my most-played of the decade (he confessed ruefully), it’s just a groove, that bass riff over and over and over and over while Thom wails something paranoid and despairing, robot orchestras swelling and dying in the distance — and then there’s an extended free-jazz outro. It was the most advanced music I’d ever heard; it was absurdly pop by global avant-garde standards; it was the centerpiece of an album the prickliest snobs on the internet would call the best of the decade and snobs aside was such a massive hit that it’s hard to find a rock act today that hasn’t learned something from Radiohead, even if it’s only “falsetto makes everything sound profound.”