I've come to accept that for this decade, a Best Albums list is a dead enterprise. Not only is it full of the great artist of the 90's, it feels like a holdover of concepts developed in the 90's. I could and will go a step further: it feels like a holdover of concepts developed in the 20th century.
Without an "Alternative" to take over, a ska or an electronica to point to definite trends, an Alanis Morissette and Courtney Love to "challenge the notions of women in rock." Without a punk or a hair metal or a disco or a new wave or a British invasion in this decade, we can look back at the last 10 years of music and say, conclusively: What happened? It wouldn't quite be right to say not much, but it certainly requires a different framework. Suddenly I've become an old man reminiscing about the old days at age 27.
Technology happened. First in mp3's promulgated, then Napster, then iPod. More simply than that, the computer happened. Everywhere. We all had one, and we all began to play our music on it. We didn't hold albums and records, and we rarely played them all the way through. This is what I mean - I'm admittedly attached to the concept of the album, and my #1 album of the decade is like an album's last stand - a brilliant fly in the face of the pallbearers of the Album's coffin.
That album - Green Day's American Idiot is also fantastic. I won't divorce my personal taste from this list, but it's worth noting this album isn't entirely a reflection of my tastes. For one, one very deserving album is not on it, the album I once listed as the best album of 2003 and an album I've written extensively about: Lucinda Williams' World Without Tears. I think of it as an all time great. I also think there's no room for it here.
For other artists who were "90's" artists like Lucinda, I had to be careful. PJ Harvey's Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is as great as an album in the top 10, but I already had two albums released in 2000 by artists who were integral to music in the 90's. To say nothing of the fact that Harvey's two subsequent records - Uh Huh Her and White Chalk probably could have been on this list somewhere.
But they're not, neither is Sleater-Kinney's One Beat, Aimee Mann's Lost In Space, Liz Phair's Liz Phair, or Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, though I loved them all. Their great times are behind them, I suppose.
Somehow I also talked myself out of including Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP - it too was released in 2000 and not especially relevant. I can't quite say why, but it didn't seem right on this list. Neither did The White Stripes Elephant or The Killers' Hot Fuss, though they may feel right to other list writers.
This list feels right about what we went through in this decade, and it had some great music. Let us sit back and appreciate what we had, even if it feels, sometimes, that this decade had the long shadow of its previous, parent century restricting any of its freedom. This list is dominated by 90's artists who got angrier, rowdier, older, and wiser - and is, indeed, topped by one who did all of those things, gloriously.
The 20 Best Albums of the 2000's
1. Green Day American Idiot (2004)
For a minute, the rage in 2004 reached the fury, electricity, and relevance of our great musical past. This is the album that out-sold their 90's standard bearer Dookie, dared to add conceptual weight and operatic tendencies to their approach, and for all purposes, worked. Even when songs like "Extraordinary Girl" lost you in their attempt at story and consistency, the consciousness of the record elevated everything around it. "Holiday" sounded like profound rebellion and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" took anxiety into the 00's pop pantheon like no other single did, becoming a ubiquitous anthem of the down and out.
That can be said of the record, too, whose true subject is the ultimate failure of rebellion, the hopelessness of those who "beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies." Not only was it the true record of the dawning of the rest of our lives, it had the bravery to see the clouds in the dawn.
2. D’Angelo Voodoo (2000)
It seems strange to reward an album released merely three weeks into the decade, but here it sits, a brilliant, unforgettable anachronism - a sonically explosive r/b record built on musicianship, endless jams, soul grooves, and the audacity of an artist. D'Angelo used his liner notes to decry the state of modern r/b, so he took it back a couple of decades. "Playa Playa" overwhelms with horns and harmonies, "Devil's Pie" adds a turntable, and "Left & Right" brings in Method Man and Redman - it moves as far forward as it plunges backwards. Its climax too, the breathlessly naked (like its video) "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" is the ultimate soul catharsis - a building of music and ideas expressed in beautiful confession.
3. TV On The Radio Dear Science (2008)
TV On The Radio managed to incorporate everything, yelling, "Hey Jacko, fuck your war" in one breath while intoning poems to the dead over synth and guitar noise in "Halfway Home" with the other. 2008 seemed to me, in a way, as the best year of the 80's - when we embraced our synth and performer greatness and lost the hairgel and spandex. TV On The Radio is the document of how much we've learned - appropriating guitar and keyboards where we need them, hip hop if it fits - but only to serve the poetry, the goal of the record. Science and Science intone and demand answers, yet look to the future, seeing the "Golden Age" coming round. The record ends with a ballin' masterpiece, "Lover's Day" that is sexually explicit alright, but it's also so sweet about what it is - a simple declaration of "I'm gonna take you home."
4. Beck Sea Change (2002)
I get into trouble for telling people my true feelings of Beck - that I found Odelayand Midnite Vultures empty, ultra hipster excuses to start dancing and not feel bad about it. I think Beck's run in the 00's outdid his work of the 90's, by so much, and it's because he gets released in Sea Change to explode with meaning, with sadness, with the realization that "These days, I barely get by." It was a smash - it turned Beck from a weirdo with a two turntables to an artist of range and feeling. It turned the line "I'm tired of fighting for a lost cause" into a radio friendly refrain, even as it made you long for a drink. Sea Change was perhaps incorrectly labeled our modern-times version of Blood On The Tracks, but there's no denying that if this decade need a document to express how people truly, deeply felt, they could begin with the acoustic strumming that opens "The Golden Age," and end with the guitar that learns to "let it pass by the side of the road."
5. Radiohead Kid A (2000)
In a way, Kid A defines Radiohead more than even OK Computer did. This was the record, in 2000, was the album that turned the band into the chroniclers of digital technology's fearful, occasionally bankrupt ascendancy. It put conceptual weight into the notion of words and ideas that betray us. "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon," Thom Yorke sings on the album's opening, "Everything In Its Right Place," a song of such sinisterness you truly believe nothing to be in its right place. His aftertaste was ours - sour, ferociously angry, saddened, silenced. The paranoia would define a second significant Radiohead and Yorke decade, and Kid A would remain unequaled in their work.
6. Kanye West The College Dropout (2004)
The truly great, occasionally forgotten accomplishment of Kanye West is that he actually managed to sneak humanity back into rap - especially in a decade of so much posturing and look-how-every-chick-in-the-club-wants-me bravado. There is one song of that bravado on The College Dropout, and it actually doesn't say that every girl wants West, it says every girl likes to groove out to Anita Baker. "All Falls Down," the song that truly showed West's pop capabilities, is a song about the way images and self-consciousness are crippling, humanizing feelings. In a flow as smooth and inviting as West's, it felt like a true, welcome, even brave breakthrough.
7. DJ Danger Mouse The Grey Album (2003)
The moment technology really began to change music - Danger Mouse's still-not-quite-legally-released triumph is to take two albums and make them better. I mean that. I mean that because it bridged music in a way we didn't know we could do. It acknowledged everything we could do had already been done, so we had to work with what was there. And it made us realize our idols weren't that far apart - creating a digital idol all his own.
8. Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings The Flood (2006)
It makes sense that in a decade of reappropriation, its greatest, most "artistic" new voice would come from one singing in a manner that made her sound like Patsy Cline - a throwback to the wild, soothing women of country's past. Yet Fox Confessor is an album of modern anxiety, a magnificently full treatise on the notion that speaking the truth takes all of you and can leave you vanquished, forced to speak. She sings of the "Star Witness" who sings when she runs, the widows of St. Angel reveling in their husbands' ashes, murder victims, and even John the Baptist saying what must have seemed - to him - the Truth. Yet by locking her ideas so deeply inside her inscrutable, luscious productions, she created a fascination that was entirely, wonderfully new.
9. Sleater-Kinney The Woods (2005)
Had it not been Sleater-Kinney's curtain call, The Woods would have been the album that turned Sleater-Kinney into psychadelic legends - or at least, to the extent these indie 90's holdovers could be. The Woods finds fury in a manner the already furious post-punkers didn't think they could grasp - not to the Punk recent past, but to the classic rock of decades ago, trading on Keith Moon drums, Hendrix guitar riffs, and pure protest anger. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein sang of ripping themselves open, and they do, on track after track, scream with more command and excitement than they'd ever done before. "The Fox" is so loud and virulent, that by the time they lead you wondering about political bs'ing in "Wilderness," you know longer recognize this band you loved. By the time "What's Mine Is Yours" adds some sex into the mix, you like whose shown up even better.
10. Blackalicious Blazing Arrow (2002)
Ten years after A Tribe Called Quest and Pharcyde, Blackalicious mastered the alternative hip hop creation. Blazing Arrow was and has been unsurpassed as the smoker's rap/soul record for the spoken word and poetry slam crowd, and might have been just as irrelevant and underground if it hadn't been so fun, so wild, and, most importantly, so vast and unrelenting. Blackalicious, and its loquacious, un-stutterable leader Gift of Gab spew forth rhymes at a pace that seems beyond comprehension, but find it evoking positivity (as in the Gil Scott Heron guesting "First in Flight") just as easily as it decries urban decay ("Sky Is Falling"), or wanders into stoner-rock with "Brain Washers," spoken word with "Release, pts. 1, 2, and 3", or experimental music with "Chemical Calisthenics." The album is 75 minutes of pure hip hop heaven, casting a light on the possibilities of rappers, poets, thinkers , and dancers alike who want to cram all they can into one, bold, encompassing statement. By the time the final, gorgeous soul number "Day One" promises to "get your soul back," you think it may in fact have done just that.
11. Girl Talk Feed The Animals (2008)
12. PJ Harvey Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea (2000)
13. Outkast Speakerboxx/The Love Below (2003)
14. Bob Dylan Love and Theft (2001)
15. Jay-Z The Black Album (2002)
16. Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001)
17. Madonna Music (2000)
18. The Dixie Chicks The Long Way Around (2006)
19. LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver (2007)
20. Queens of the Stone Age Songs For The Deaf (2002)
