P2K: The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 20-1

Inspired by the poll results, I went and listened to some more tracks off of Discovery, and I found one that I like - "Face To Face"! So maybe it's just the robot voices I'm having trouble with.

kill the moonlight is so obviously ahead of their other albums in my mind. so amazing that everybody doesn't agree with me.

uh i don't agree nor do i see why this is amazing. tbh the last four spoon albums probably sound pretty similar to non-fans and among fans having different favorites isn't exactly shocking.

yeah I find it more amazing that someone could enjoy one spoon album that much more than the others...you either dig the aesthetic or you don't, but they'vene be remarkably consistent

*they've been

KtM is the one that sticks out to me as super minimal, the rest have a pretty interchangeable aesthetic

ha but no one agrees what the "best" spoon album is. i mean girls can tell would probably get the most votes in the lame-ass ilm poll but we've had this argument a bunch of times and pretty much every album has its proponents (and i think girls can tell is their worst album)

i don't blame ned though, they are kind of boring live

i've made a promise to myself never to see them live.

One time Spoon dude Britt Daniels walked around our lameass CD store before a show he was playing that night. Everyone was like "wow it's the Spoon dude, don't look at him". Our store sucked so he only spent about 2 minutes in there, only stopping to pause and look through the Spoon CDs we had. Or maybe it was Spiritualized or Stone Temple Pilots. Then he left and all the girls were like "what an ass". The end.

oh, I meant "what an ass" as in "wow, his ass is really nice. I like that ass". Sorry, didn't mean to be ambiguous.

I saw his ass at Pitchfork Fest last year in line at Chipotle -- not nice.

in fairness, nothing looks good at Chipotle

Seeing them live (having never heard them before) is what got me to check out their albums.

nb: i, personally, have no time for my chemical romance or fall out boy or the bands in that vein. just don't like 'em. BUT various smart people i know have written about them in such a way over the past few years that my position has moved to ignoring them to taking them seriously and affording them a certain level of respect, regardless of whether my ears can take the music.

Lex, to go back to this point you made last week (I think), I'm curious: does this mean you distinguish between music you dislike but "respect" (e.g. fall out boy) and music you dislike and disrespect (e.g. animal collective)? And if, so, on what basis?

Like, I really like albums this year by FOB, Paramore, Animal Collective and Atlas Sound. Is my enjoyment of the first two more respectable?

Ned I agree with you that the music of Spoon is very boring music! I have never been able to understand why people like them. They make me relate to those people who are neurologically unable to piece sounds together as music.

^^I saw them live at a festival maybe a yr and a 1/2 ago, it was the boringest thing of all time

happy jay beat the arcade fire

so did Pitchfork never release the individual lists?

Nope.

probably some discontinuity between the individual votes and final tally

Didn't it say somewhere that the individual lists would be published early next year? maybe I'm wrong, but I remember something like that.

I can't remember P4k ever publishing individual lists for any of their polls.

nah they always do for EOY lists

Rather than complain about relative placement of faves and unfaves, I made a playlist of the ones I have (about 65% of their list) and have been listening to it on random for the past several days. Overall, it's great stuff. It's the first time I've listened to Jay-Z, Ghostface and Kanye in a long time, because they're not big personal favorites. I definitely prefer them in smaller chunks on random play rather than an entire album.

This is a good exercise for me to start thinking about my own list, which I probably won't complete until after the decade is over. I'll probably make another playlist of my favorites that didn't make Pitchfork's, like Asian Dub Foundation, Amon Tobin, Cafe Tacuba, NERD, Kassin+2, Sussan Dayhim, Hawksley Workman, Opeth, Electrelane, Colour Haze, Nação Zumbi, Anti-Pop Consortium, Dalek, Tony Allen, etc. and see how they hold up.

Some friends are whining in the context of how the music measures up to other decades, which is problematic, especially for geezers around my age (40). Most people are going to prefer the music from their youth when everything was fresh and exciting.

This is a worse white-sausauge-fest: http://bit.ly/1fco29

"Dälek"

Daft Punk - Discovery 38
Part of me wants to ask why, part of me just wants to sadly nod and move on.

I don't love anything out of that lot, but if I had to pick I'd go with Stankonia.

haha i was coming here to post that after relistening tonight the lack of votes for stankonia is totally wack

Eh. Great album, but I'd be hard-pressed to vote for an act's 4th-best as the greatest album of a decade.

well it's my fav of theirs, so that's why i would think that

I want to just throw out one thought on the "taste is sacronsanct" debate. I have no doubt that taste is socially conditioned in various ways, that it's not just somehow an independent act of the individual. At the same time, I think it's really difficult to tease out exactly how taste in a given individual (or, I think I'd also say, taste as represented by the sort of aggregated scoring under discussion here) has been shaped by those social forces. I tend to think it's so difficult to unravel that, that it's better to be really cautious about saying that this or that preference is sexist, racist, etc.

As a practical guideline, "taste is sancrosanct" makes a certain amount of sense to me. But I think it's pretty indefensible as a strong philosophical claim. And as others have pointed out, people's sexual preferences are at times the object of criticism or at least question, as in this old somewhat discomforting thread: Being sexually attracted to (or repulsed by) certain racial types: the acceptable face of racism?

Again, my tendency would be to leave those preferences be, but I can understand why others might want to analyze them in terms of larger social considerations.

Frank kogan had a good post about this

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/175403.html

Frank's article almost implies that there's no "value judgment" involved in our taste in sexual partners - whereas perhaps the difference between musical taste and sexual taste is that magazines feel less comfortable commissioning articles announcing "this person is the Best One Night Stand of the '00s."

More generally Frank's spot on that writing (or even talking) about music involves a value judgment, and the writer or talker has to take responsibility for that by backing it up.

People's outrage or contempt at our taking Mariah and Taylor and Ashlee seriously (to take Dan's triumvirate of dislike) isn't outrage at our taste, at our personal preferences, but at our thinking that we're at least in some way right, and that those who dislike those artists are wrong, and at our thinking these women are worthy of time and space, the reader's or listener's time as well as our own - and those who won't give them time can fuck off with their opinions (except that such opinions are usually a sociological gold mine).

This is kind of a massive misrepresentation of my position.

First off, I don't dislike Ashlee Simpson. She didn't release an album I would consider as one of the greatest of the decade but I do not dislike her.

Secondly, I dislike a lot of Mariah's newer material but some of it (particularly "It's Like That" and, to a lesser degree, "We Belong Together") is very good. Still, I would not pick her as a top artist of the decade, largely because in comparing her 00s work to stuff she released in previous years, a lot of her earlier stuff causes what shine I see on her newer stuff to fade.

Taylor Swift I totally cop to disliking but I don't dismiss her because I think she's unimportant in the grand scheme of music or not worth anyone spending their time on. I dismiss her because I hate her vocal production and I hate the juxtaposition between her Barbie-doll looks and her "woe is me, no one will ever notice me because I'm not pretty" songs. She is, however, one of the nicest people currently working in the music industry.

I am absolutely certain there are people out there picking out these artists and saying "pah, this is disposable pop music unworthy of my time". I have never been one of them and it's pretty galling to see my name attached to it; dismissals and dislike can still take music seriously, and in fact should take the music seriously.

I do agree with the core conceit he's working with re: value judgments in how people rank music but how different people's judgments rub up against each other is a function of the people making them and can't have a blanket statement like the one I quoted thrown over them.

i dont think hes accusing you of being contemptuous, dan--just of disliking those three.

It's a by-proxy thing; sticking my name on there implicitly ties me to that mindset. Also, as I said, I don't actually dislike 2 of the 3!

Yeah I agree with you Dan - the mindset he's describing exists elsewhere.

Following these links led me to this AMAZING short discussion on internet snark that Tom blogged:

http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/212276849/why-snark-works

oh wow that is fantastic

the snark argument is wrong wrong wrong for many reasons, some kinda obvious.

if all the critical voices i know who disliked taylor swift justified their dislike in as clear and sensible terms as dan, i'd have no problem with them disliking her. as it is i assume that 75% of taylor dismissers are basically assuming that a blonde teenage american girl cannot be a great songwriter and not bothering to listen to her songs.

^ nah

the definitive taylor swift song was recorded 18 years ago tbh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb2K6TsMmgo

BTW Lex maybe you didn't see my question for you a little bit upthread w/r/t Fall Out Boy et. al.

the snark argument is wrong wrong wrong for many reasons, some kinda obvious.

Expand?

Read that Kogan piece a few days ago. Was bothered by the implication that I'm failing to perceive the value judgments contained in our expressions of artistic taste. My argument is more that, where deep taste* is concerned, such value judgments are often little more than an intellectual smokescreen used to rationalize and universalize an atavistic response. Obvious caveat that deep taste isn't clearly distinct from any other sort (see Rudipherous' point above), so it's hard to draw a clean line between what this applies to and what it doesn't.

FWIW, I regret introducing the destabilizing comparison of musical taste to sexual taste/orientation into this discussion. Should have known that things would go pear-shaped from there on out, no matter how well-intentioned my argument. I intended only to draw a connection between a form of "taste" that we regard as beyond criticism, and one that we don't -- and to question the mechanisms involved. But I could and should have picked a less inflammatory example.

I agree with Kogan that the critical arguments we use to communicate our value judgments can and should be subject to criticism, analysis, etc. But I see such critical arguments as separate from (though necessarily related to) our underlying tastes, which, it seems to me, are never right or wrong. That's why I'm hesitant to draw conclusions regarding the political implications of even collective expressions of taste -- Pitchfork list, etc.

* "Deep taste" being the sort that seizes us from within and leaves little room for intellectual/aesthetic equivocation: "I LOVE THIS SONG!!!"

"Deep taste" being the sort that seizes us from within and leaves little room for intellectual/aesthetic equivocation: "I LOVE THIS SONG!!!"

This isn't an actual category though. There's always room for intellectual/aesthetic equivocation. It's just that we don't always need to - our taste in the music and our value judgment that the music is deserving of enjoyment simply overlap so well that the issue doesn't arise.

But the "taste" part isn't necessarily more "deep" than the value judgment part. In fact, in many instances people's tastes appear to change quite rapidly while the underlying value judgments remain constant; indeed, the value judgments determine - or, rather, constrain and delimit - the tastes.

See where yr coming from, Tim, but respectfully disagree - to some extent. I believe that value judgments and the intellectual devices that support them are very flexible, or at least can be, depending on the person involved, but that what I'm calling "deep taste" (a phrase for which I feel I must apologize) is very difficult for any of us to consciously alter. That's a presumptive and unjustifiable argument, I admit, but it reflects my personal experience and at least seems to be true of the people I've known.

That said, I'd never deny that value judgments never influence taste, or that taste in general isn't extremely flexible.

"...I'd never deny argue that value judgments never influence taste, or that..."

Something I haven't said and that maybe isn't clear from what I have said: I feel that intellectual equivocation regarding deep taste is a form of lying, or worse, self-delusion, and that this kind of lying/delusion is very common among people who pride themselves on having "good taste". I.e., it's not so much that you can't think your way around your fundamental tastes, but rather that you shouldn't.

Tim, I'm not ready to argue the point (especially with you), but I haven't observed in myself or others that value judgments about music appear to be more constant than taste in music.

I tend to be sympathetic with what I think contenderizer is saying that reasoned accounts in defense of value judgments are frequently ad hoc attempts driven by taste. I don't see some underlying value judgments as driving taste.

I also agree with contenderizer's view that taste is not particularly easy to alter (certainly not through submitting to other people's arguments about music*). I can think of times when I've tried to nudge myself in the direction of a certain genre or artist, and it's "taken," but I can also thinking of plenty of times when it hasn't.

*I don't think the many years I've spent reading ILM have changed my taste much.