The current decade — the “aughts” seems to be the closest we have to a consensus on this — is coming to a close, which is, of course, a great excuse for rampant list-making. I’m starting here with my own Top 50 albums and singles of the decade, counted down over the next month. End-of-decade material on film and local music will follow.
- This rootsy songwriter you probably haven’t heard of (Amy Rigby) will be making an appearance on this list.
Since this is a personal list and is rooted in personal biases, a few notes are in order. A committed generalist and lifelong record addict, I like to think I have a broad and open-minded interest in pop music, but am certainly not without my own musical blind spots. (Feel free to skip on down to the list if you don’t care about any of this, but it feels necessary.)
The bulk of the music on this list comes from three general areas — guitar rock of most types and any level of popularity, hip hop both mainstream and indie/underground, and country both Nashville and alt. For me this is where most of the action has been, with strong contributions from three other general areas — R&B/soul, African music, and chart pop. (I lack a better term for what is typically dred ’90s teen pop all grown up.)
There are a few more song-oriented examples of the disparate dance musics I’m ill-informed/gauche enough to still collectively call “techno,” but generally I don’t know as much about this stuff as I’d like to. If I’d expanded the list out to 100 (and believe me, I was tempted) there may have been token blues (Corey Harris) and jazz (James Carter) entries, but the former has sadly not produced many records that break out (or even deserve to break out) of its niche and the latter is more tangential to the music I care about. There is, I believe, one non-English-language/non-African record on the list. If I had more access and more time it would not be so lonely. As for other genres, I’ve never been able to drum up much interest in dancehall and I’m lost with metal that has any degree of purity. Anything else is pretty much off my radar.
- This rootsy songwriter you’ve already heard way too much about (Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy) *will not. (*Though I do like some of his records.)
The album list pretty much runs the gamut of these interests. The singles list is a little different. I tend to conceive of singles in terms of shared experience — mass-audience music, the kind that you can’t avoid rather than the kind you have to hunt for. For that reason, the singles list is heavy with hip hop, R&B, chart pop, and country. It’s light on rock because I don’t think much of the really popular guitar rock of the past decade has been particularly interesting. The mainstream has been much more fruitful in those other areas.
Finally, where this list will veer from critical consensus the most will be on the presence of mainstream country (which critics don’t take seriously enough) and African music (a personal interest most of my demographic ilk don’t share) and the relative lack of the tasteful indie rock that outlets like Pitchfork Media and NPR have helped turn into cultural status items for educated, liberal white people. The way I heard the past decade, semi-obscure songwriters like Amy Rigby, Todd Snider, and Bobby Pinson had a lot more to say about the world than Beck, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, or Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.
Those caveats out of the way, here we go. I’ll be counting down albums and singles in pairs at the rate of a new post every day or two (25 total) throughout the next month:
