Top 30 Songs of the '00s (part 1)

Music was awesome in the '00s. Incredible. I had a lot of trouble narrowing down 30 songs I liked. And even then I left out at least another 75 that I could have easily included. But yeah, this past decade was just incredible for unrelentingly good music. Here's my list. People will notice that I went for 'pop' rather than 'esoteric' or 'experimental.' This is because I love da pop music. There's nothing like a good tune.

Part II in a coupla days.

THE BEST SONG

LCD Soundsystem -- All My Friends [2007]



RUNNER UP

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- Maps [2005]



THE REST (in alphabetical order):

1) The Arcade Fire -- Rebellion (Lies) [2004]



2) Battles -- Atlas [2007]



3) The Books -- That Right Ain't Shit [2003]

No official video, someone made this one up:



4) Death Cab For Cute -- I Will Possess Your Heart [2008]



5) Explosions In The Sky -- The Moon Is Down [2001]



6) Feist -- 1-2-3-4 [2007]



7) Fleet Foxes -- White Winter Hymnal [2008]



8) Fujiya & Miyagi -- Ankle Injuries [2006]



9) Gorillaz -- Feel Good, Inc. [2005]



10) Low -- Sunflower [2001]



11) Master Cylinder -- Jung At Heart [2000]



12) M.I.A. -- Sunshowers [2005]



13) MGMT -- Time To Pretend [2008]

14) Modest Mouse -- Float On



15) Mogwai -- Friend Of The Night



Next 15 in a day or two.

Top 30 Songs of the '00s (Part 2)

16. The National -- Fake Empire [2007]



17. New Order -- Crystal [2001]



18. Okkervil River -- Our Life Is Not A Movie or Maybe [2007]



19. Outkast -- Hey Ya [2003]



20. Phoenix -- Too Young [2000]



21. The Postal Service -- Such Great Heights [2003]



22. Radiohead -- There There [2003]



23. Rhymefest -- Devil's Pie [2006]



24. Ulrich Schnauss -- Knuddelmaus [2001]



25. The Secret Machines -- First Wave Intact



26. Tinariwen -- Amassakoul [2004]



27. The Tings Tings -- Shut Up And Let Me Go [2008]



28. Vampire Weekend -- Oxford Comma [2008]



29. Kanye West -- Stronger [2007]

30. Paul Westerberg -- Crackle & Drag [2003]

Polly

Will post my Top 50 Albums of the decade shortly. Until then, here's something from 1995.

"God of piston, God of steel
God is here behind the wheel."

Inconcerated (all of it)

The Replacements -- Talent Show (live)
The Replacements -- Answering Machine (live)
The Replacements -- Anywhere's Better Than Here (live)
The Replacements -- Another Girl, Another Planet (live)
The Replacements -- Here Comes A Regular (live)

The Replacements -- Answering Machine (live)

In 1989, the Replacements put out an e.p. called Inconcerated, which was basically a promo CD for radio stations. It was a blistering 5-song live record of a show they did at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee to support their then-latest album Don't Tell A Soul. This was a rare CD, and I paid a lotta money to get it on ebay. Anyway, it rocks -- and in typical Replacements fashion, they never bothered to release the whole show which would have been too good to be true. Whatever. Danielle wanted to hear the live version of "Answering Machine." Here it is.

The Replacements -- Answering Machine (live)

It's A Wonderful Lie

Listening to mid period Paul Westerberg (the stuff that I don't really like) makes me feel uneasy. Paul began his solo career with the awesome 14 Songs but then quickly descended step-by-step into what I still consider AOR shlock. I generalize. Every album that he released after 14 Songs had a few drop-dead genius songs on it. But the other songs were so cliched, so much dead weight, that I could never make it through an entire album. I'm being too harsh. I think it's more that listening to those albums (Eventually and Suicane Gratifaction) made me depressed. There are few pieces of music that make me depressed. Usually, it's the other way around: I get depressed and then I listen to some music or other. But the stuff he put out in the mid to late nineties was just plain dour, maudlin. Later I find that Paul is a depressive and he's on some serious medication. Over the years, his edges dulled. What can I say.

After what seemed like a never ending slump, he finally (in 2002) showed up with a double album of sorts, Stereo/Mono, which (shock) was actually good. It took me a while to warm up to the albums, but they worked. He'd clearly changed his style. His music had gotten a lot simpler, he'd abandoned those clever chord progressions; and his voice had become more nasal, in a quasi-Dylan way that could occasionally be annoying. But if you got over that, his songs were still good, and at times brilliant.

Since then, he apparently doesn't leave his house in suburban Minneapolis. He's afraid of people and what not. He has a studio in the basement where he goes down and bangs out songs. The ethos is uncompromisingly low-fi with nary the slightest concession to polish or practice. Every few months he releases a bunch of songs on-line, songs that sound he like recorded them underwater. The drumming is usually awful -- he is a brilliant guitarist but he remains a terrible drummer. Paul, try and meet some people, for the love of God! You don't have to go to a bar, just put an ad out that you need a drummer! Jesus.

Anyway, a week or so ago, Westerberg released another e.p., this one called PW & The Ghost Gloves Cat Wing Joy Boys. Yeah, that's what it's called. Paul being Paul, he took a word from each of the six songs and made up a title. Some of the songs are really good. Hey, what the hey, indeed. [Go here for a free song from the e.p.]

One of Paul's favorite things to write about is: the sadness young men see in young women who never see it in themselves. He wrote a buncha those (see "Achin' to Be," "Merry Go Round," "Birthday Gal," etc. etc.). Those are good ones.

And then there are the requisite songs about dead people (cheery guy, he), including one about Sylvia Plath. In a terribly morbid poem titled "Edge," Plath wrote:

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

God, so gloomy, like a 16-year old goth chick. Paul, for whatever reason, wrote a song called "Crackle and Drag" (a lovely way to describe the static you hear when curtains move to close across theater stages). And he would sing it differently in various versions. The video below is an acoustic version, much better actually than any version he put on record. The other is a studio punk rock version. Both are brilliant.

But it's most important to understand that even when Paul puts out what could possibly be the shittiest album released by a human being in the entire decade of the nineties (Suicane Gratifaction), in his typically perverse way, the very first song on the album, "It's A Wonderful Lie," may be the best thing he wrote the whole decade. I hear it now -- I know exactly what he means.

Although Paul could give two shits about me, I still love the skinny bastard. I love his music. It changed my life. I don't listen to the old stuff that much anymore but that doesn't matter. Those buncha albums from the '80s that he and his bastards of young put out -- they are now imprinted in my DNA. Those who have loved me, and those who I have loved, know this about me. That I am one of those children by the millions, who wait for Paul Westerberg, to come home.

Paul Westerberg -- Crackle and Drag (unreleased live) [mp3]
Paul Westerberg -- Crackle and Drag (electric) [mp3]

Videos:

Hello Sunshine

Fall is here. It's almost October. Would love to go to Colombia one day. But maybe not by train.

Super Furry Animals -- Hello Sunshine [mp3]

Tinariwen - Amassakoul 'N' Ténére

Thom Yorke - Reckoner

Easy Listening

Somebody I know has teased me that my posts on this blog are very 'emo' -- presumably meaning that I emote, that I talk too much about emotions. So maybe I should be witty and ironic and acerbic and euphoric or something? If I am 'emo,' then it's probably because I try and generally avoid writing about the events in life, focusing instead on my (ahem) aesthetic preferences. But ... it's hard to write about one's preferences and not allude to how one feels. Which I guess leads to emoting. Hmm.

So ... I thought I would every explicitly emote in this post. Emoting about music is usually about remembering. It is usually about nostalgia. It is now 1.30 am, a suitable time for remembering. I'm listening to "Saudade" by Love and Rockets, the beautiful instrumental that closes their first album Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven. No specific memory associated with this album but vague images that run through my mind. The front of an apartment complex on Boyett Street. Being young. Being too young. Being skinny. Having a crush on a girl who didn't have one on me (until much later). Lying on the couch falling asleep during the day with a Calculus textbook opened on my chest. My roommate buying me a pack of cigarettes. A time that is most definitely not today. Not today at all.

Here is an excerpt from my rock'n'roll book about that time:

In Texas, there was either Austin, Houston, or Dallas to go to. The latter was the furthest, and therefore infrequently visited. But there was a memorable trip in the spring of 19_, memorable not because anything particular happened, but because on the drive there, as I was lazily watching the vista of the scenery move by from my passenger’s seat window, I saw a rainbow set, almost like a colored architectural (drawing) implement balanced over the horizon; in the foreground a cemetery with gravestones raced by until the headstones strobe-lighted through my brain into an image that I’ve never forgotten. Later, I wrote a poem-song called “Rainbow Cemetery Freeway” for that one memory—of movement and death and loneliness that I felt on that trip to Dallas.

Nadeem had some old friends from __ who went to school at the University of Texas at Arlington. This was a little “town” located right between Dallas and Forth Worth. There’s nothing remarkable about any of these three places—although Dallas would figure a little bit in my life in the years hence: several times I flew kites over a suburb of Dallas. Nadeem had a friend who lived in Arlington whose name was Pappu, an incredibly skinny dude who dressed like a punk. He wore black all the time, made up his hair, had lots of piercings, and seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time making himself look good (which he did). We would always be late for shit, ‘cause Pappu was doing his hair. I looked positively suburban next to him. He put in some serious time with his sartorial eloquence. Well, Pappu had an album he was playing at the time, "Meat Is Murder," by a band I had hitherto not heard of, the Smiths. It sounded like warbling to me, definite signs of warbling and moaning. I was nearly ready for the Smiths, but not quite so. However, we heard the album dozens of times that weekend while smoking cigarettes and sitting outside his apartment.

Pappu had a gorgeous white chick for a girlfriend who also wore black all the time. One time I was sitting on the steps outside their apartment. Nadeem and Pappu were somewhere else. It was just me and her. She put on 'Meat is Murder' yet again. She said it was the only thing she could listen to. We sat there smoking cigarettes and not talking. This was a recurring theme in my American Adventure. The soundtrack, the cigarettes, and the silence. It was like being placed in freshly fallen snow on the side of a highway after a car accident that didn’t really hurt you that bad.

Pappu was later killed in a carcrash. I'm not sure what happened to his girlfriend.

There were other more deeper trips into Americana. On my first spring break out of College Station, in the late '80s, I went to visit my sister at her school, Wellesley College near Boston. I took a flight out of Houston, via Newark, and landed in Boston. It was the first time that I had been in the north, or indeed anywhere outside of College Station in America. She came and picked me up and first we went to Harvard Square. It was cold. We stopped at Au Bon Pain and we had some hot melts-in-your-mouth croissants, a food I had never tasted before, and actually, have not tasted since. No matter how many croissants I have eaten since that day, I have never been able to secrete the same juices of joy in my mouth as that winter day.

My sister had been in Wellesley for a little over a semester now, and I’m not sure how she was adjusting to it, but it seemed clear that life wasn’t exactly easy for her in terms of money, school, social life, etc. Wellesley was this beautiful isolated oasis in the middle of nowhere, with the most picturesque backdrop one could imagine, especially in the winter—with wide lakes and tall pine trees and distant forests and gliding hills and mysterious pathways that led off to shaded hollows. I met a few of her new friends while I stayed in her room. I remember the big hit on the radio at the time was a song called “Easy Lover,” a duet by Phil Collins and the former lead singer of Earth, Wind & Fire whose name I can’t remember now. I wrote many (love) letters to S__, sitting in my sister’s dorm room. I don’t think S__ ever replied to them. My sister did her best to take care of me, but I think I was a lost case. I was right in the midst of my deep chasm of feeling lost, just having come to America, so it must’ve showed on my face.

While at Wellesley, I decided to go visit an old friend who was a freshman at Brown University. __ was the ex-girlfriend of my ex-best friend. She was beautiful to look at, maybe a bit too much, and I was never sure why she was so fond of me at the time. She really devoted a lot of care to our friendship over the years but it was that first trip that cemented something new. I took a Greyhound bus from Boston to Providence with my bags, not really knowing where the hell I was supposed to meet her. I remember leaving the Greyhound station in the bitter cold with two heavy bags walking around the city trying to look for a small college building where I was supposed to meet her. I walked for miles, finally convinced I was lost. My shoulders hurt. I didn’t have her phone number either. I sat down on a corner street and huddled up in the bitter cold as night fell and it was snowing. I smoked a lot of cigarettes. I walked to the campus of Rhode Island College. Amazingly, out of the blue, she showed up in a friend’s car, leapt out of nowhere and hugged me. They took me back to her dorm, where __ immediately told me to take a shower because I smelled bad. I don’t remember the rest of what we did. But I do remember that I smelled bad. Later, after a couple of days, __ hugged me goodbye and we began writing letters regularly to each other, her chronicling her tumultuous love affairs and me chronicling my imaginary ones.

Throughout that trip, I had a small walkman (remember those?!) with me and a few cassette tapes. One of them, stolen from Shammu, began with the song “I.G.Y.” by Donald Fagen—a beautiful, lilting, and absurdly cheesy song if there ever was one. Except, listening to it just made me more wistful, and eventually pitifully nostalgic for “what a beautiful world it used to be.”

"I.G.Y" remains an oddity. It's one of the few songs I've ever heard that is about the euphoric joy of expecting a bright future. The narrator is a kid in 1957 (hence the International Geophysical Year or IGY), just after the launch of the Sputnik satellite into space. And he's excited. He's excited about going to space, about the new space age upon us. The song might as well have been written for me as a ten year old. It's weird that as you get older, the songs that often move you are the ones you remember as a kid, the ones that are willfully discarded as lowbrow (or worse, middlebrow) by the arbiters of good taste. But, really, who could resist when Fagen sings:

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free.

Donald Fagen -- I.G.Y. [mp3]