Great minds

In partial vindication of my own musical judgement (in Chapter Eight of The Noughties), Rolling Stone magazine has dubbed Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ as their song of the decade, with Radiohead and Green Day also showing up on the list, although Lily Allen is strangely absent.

At least somebody remembered Interpol

More backward-looking chinstrokery from the music hack community: Simon Reynolds addresses the fragmented Noughties; and Rock’sBackPages does its own albums of the decade thing (with individual voters’ contributions, including your humble correspondent, itemised here).

More tea, vicar?

Of course, in a morally and culturally relativist universe, there’s no definitive answer as to what the most important event of the Noughties might have been. A life-changer in one person’s life may be a minor blip in another’s. The shocking events of 9/11 and their aftermath, maybe? The financial crash, or perhaps devastation of the Asian tsunami? On a happier note, the technological innovations that brought what, 10 years ago, was the stuff of science-fiction, into the hands of the man or woman in the digital street? Or, of course, the fact that this was the decade in which Judas Priest got their old singer back. Rraaawwwwkk!!!

Bum rap

And as the Observer Music Monthly just fails to make it to the next decade, they dub Beyoncé the artist of the current one (although the readers don’t seem to share the enthusiasm). That said, she has introduced an excellent new word to the Noughties lexicon:

One f***ing thing after another

Back to those lists, I’m afraid: Stuart Evers suggests 50 books of the Noughties; Skylar Jordan does the songs; Liz Frost’s favoured beauty products; and from Car magazine, the weirdest vehicles.

At least Q magazine does things a little differently. For a start, it avoids the awkwardness that many still feel about the word ‘Noughties’ by claiming that it’s offering up lists of the Artists and Albums ‘of the Century’. Which is accurate as far as it goes, but only postpones the agony for another 10 years, at which point presumably they’ll have to make a call on ‘Teens’ versus ‘Tens’.

Moreover, they get a bit Zeitgeisty by presenting the Top 100 not as a poll, but as the individual choices of ‘noted folk’, which is really a euphemism for ‘celebrities’. So we discover that KT Tunstall likes the Flaming Lips and Dizzee Rascal favours Young Jeezy, which is fair enough; but do we really need to know the choon preferences of Stringer Bell, the Master or Spongebob Squarepants? OK, I’ll give them the last one. He likes Oasis, by the way. Bless.

PS: Paul Morley doesn’t like those lists. Or does he?

The one with the whistly bits

And you can even vote for your favourite song of the Noughties.

(Is it just me, or has the decade finally degenerated into one huge I-Love TV show, with optional phone-vote extras?)

That difficult fourth chord

NME offers its best albums of the Noughties; with a not-unexpected leaning towards skinny white boys with guitars. Here’s the Top 10, only the last of which made it into my list of the most significant releases of the decade (see Chapter 8):

1. The Strokes - Is This It

2. The Libertines - Up The Bracket

3. Primal Scream - xtrmntr

4. Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

5. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever To Tell

6. PJ Harvey - Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea

7. Arcade Fire - Funeral

8. Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights

9. The Streets - Original Pirate Material

10. Radiohead - In Rainbows

That said, if we’re talking favourites (a completely different matter, of course), numbers 6 and 7 would have to be in there, along with various bits and pieces by the White Stripes, Johnny Cash, Outkast, Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura, Super Furry Animals and the High Llamas. What about yours?

Lil communication

In Chapter Eight of The Noughties, I suggested that Lily Allen, above any other musician, was able to encapsulate the decade, both with the multi-platform nature of her rise to fame, and the uneasy combination of rampant consumerism and creeping paranoia that permeates her 2008 hit ‘The Fear’.

But now she claims to have moved on, giving up MySpace, Twitter, even YouTube. “I’ve thrown away my laptop,” she says. “I haven’t got a Blackberry and I listen to records. It’s amazing.”

Records, eh? I remember them. The question is, has she stepped back to the analogue Nineties; or simply defined a new agenda for the Teens?

Pop goes the Noughties

Yet more chin-stroking about the best tunes of the Noughties, this time from PopJustice. Are music fans suffering from a more virulent strain of decaditis (see page ix) than those who love books, films and so on? Or have I just missed the other lists?

(And was ‘Groovejet’ released less than 10 years ago? Crikey.)

Wot, no James Blunt?

More Noughties music: Pitchfork’s best albums of the decade. Inevitably noisier, younger, slightly less uniformly Caucasian than the Uncut version, although there’s still plenty of crossover (White Stripes, Arcade Fire, etc). Despite all the postmodern fragmentation, is there still such a thing as a critical canon?

Here’s the Top 10, for comparison:

1. Radiohead, Kid A
2. Arcade Fire, Funeral
3. Daft Punk, Discovery
4. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
5. Jay-Z, The Blueprint
6. Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica
7. The Strokes, Is This It
8. Sigur Rós, Ágaetis Byrun
9. Panda Bear, Person Pitch
10. The Avalanches, Since I Left You

Like iTunes never happened

More Noughties music stuff. Uncut magazine offers its 150 albums of the decade, without really reflecting on the fact that the Noughties saw ‘The Album’ as a product becoming increasingly less important. As I discuss in Chapter Eight, the most significant music story of the period has not been any one particular release, but the changing means of distribution, most of which parcel up music as discrete tracks. Even if you buy an album these days, how often to you listen to it from beginning to end, in the order the artist intended? The question is not whether the Uncut people have made the right choice, but whether the whole idea of a list of best albums is relevant any more.

Anyway, here’s Uncut’s Top 10:

1. The White Stripes, White Blood Cells
2. Bob Dylan, Love And Theft
3. Wilco, A Ghost Is Born
4. Brian Wilson, Smile
5. The Strokes, Is This It
6. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Raising Sand
7. The Arcade Fire, Funeral
8. Bob Dylan, Modern Times
9. Ryan Adams, Heartbreaker
10. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes

Every one's a winner, we're making the fame

As the Noughties comes to an end, the lists, charts and retrospective best-ofs begin to appear. Neil McCormick (with whom I discussed the decade on Radio 5Live a few weeks ago), offers his list of the 100 songs that defined the Noughties. Interestingly, everything in my Top 5 of the decade (p. 123) appears in Neil’s list but (as Eric Morecambe might have put it) not necessarily in the same order.

Neil’s Top 10:

10. Outkast, ‘Hey Ya’ (2003)

9. Kylie Minogue, ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ (2001)

8. The White Stripes, ‘Seven Nation Army' (2003)

7. Johnny Cash, ‘Hurt’ (2002)

6. Leona Lewis, ‘Bleeding Love’ (2008)

5. M.I.A., ‘Paper Planes’ (2008)

4. Coldplay, ‘Yellow’ (2000)

3. Beyonce, ‘Crazy In Love’ (2003)

2. Arctic Monkeys, ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ (2005)

1. Amy Winehouse, ‘Rehab’ (2006)

What would yours be?