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.