Pitchfork's P2k: The Decade in Music

yeah CAD for the record I'm not entirely disagreeing with you -- sometimes you get a situation where like a dozen people think Band X released the best songs of the decade, but don't automatically agree on which one ... and since nobody makes tracks like where the top 10 is all their favorite artist, it can help to try and find some consensus pick, however artificial. thing is, that can actually work for pop singles, too: you can have a dozen people who all think Jay-Z or Missy Elliott released the best singles of the decade, but not automatically agree on which one! so yeah, there's a desire to look for broad "important" consensus picks and not just vote your weird personal favorite.* and sometimes with pop acts that means gathering around the big single; sometimes with "album" acts it means gathering around album centerpieces and "statements" and the like.

I guess more of my point was that this happens anyway, outside of lists -- that pop singles and album centerpieces/statements create a consensus that This Is the Important Thing totally outside of critics and lists. often I think that's the point of them -- that the indie band putting together that album anthem is trying to define what it's about every bit as much as the pop star putting together a new single.

* (we would probably get more interesting and singlesy lists if people didn't do this, but of course they'd be super-weird: a bunch of critics who all thought Jay-Z recorded the best single of the decade, and all thought "Toxic" was okay and merited #97, might come up with a list topped by Britney with no Jay-Z on it at all.)

their mainstream pop/hip-hop and r&b choices are way less inspired than they were in 04/05

the rap equivalent of the grouper album

Trying to imagine what sort of record this would be...

i think the three highest hip hop tracks were "a milli" (this deserves it), "flashing lights" (barely even an 08 single) & "live your life" and "no matter what" (lol what) - mid decade pfork rap renaissance had much more inspired & nuance taste than the hip-hop voters do now

(basically what i mean is that the 'indie voters' or w/e can push the grouper album into the top 50 but there's no one to push the rap equivalent of the grouper album into the top 50, which is basically what happened when beanie sigel made the top 50 list)

― sailor goon (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:42 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i dunno maybe it's just that i personally thought '08 was a VERY weak year for rap (not R&B) singles, but i dn't feel like that's so offensive really. woulda been nice if "Put On" was higher, i guess, but for the most part what little i did like wasn't stuff i'd have expected to see on that list anyway.

xpost haha what jaymc said

yeah nabs that makes sense and ftr i think most of the time that model works. there are other times where maybe i missed the consensus or wasn't around for it, and a few that leave me genuinely questioning.

i'm not sure i can define what the difference is between "we all heard the new jay-z single and thought it was great" and "we all bought yankee hotel foxtrot and decided that 'poor places' is one of the best two or three songs on the album" but i think it is something and i think it might be significant.

o_O. Things like Two Weeks, or Rebellion (Lies), or A-Punk etc. were all proper singles and had videos that were all over the web and got played shitloads in clubs and on the radio and stuff.

I think it's a question of audience size, though. An R. Kelly or Jay-Z single might be heard by 100 times as many people as hear the whole album, the ratio might be more like 5-to-1 for something like Vampire Weekend. I'm making those numbers up, the margin may be way smaller (or way bigger) but there's definitely a significant margin.

xp let me know what clubs you go to so i can avoid them.

"rebellion (lies)" was nothing less than a big 'ole booty-blastin single here in montreal, as were neighborhoods 1, 2 and 3, so i am not surprised at all to see some of them near the top of this list.

haha CAD can we reach a point on ILX where we take that kind of joke as a given and don't need to actually make it every time?

I can easily imagine a Pitchfork writer who wouldn't have otherwise bothered with Vampire Weekend but saw that his colleagues voted "Oxford Comma" onto the 2008 list and so he listened to it and decided he liked it and, even though he still doesn't care so much about hearing the album, he might give the song some love at a later date. I think a lot of the support for those seemingly random album tracks becomes codified just through a small group of people liking something and other people getting curious and picking up on it -- it doesn't even have to be a conspiratorial voting bloc or anything, just people saying "hey, what's the one song I need to hear from that Dirty Projectors album?" or whatever. A lot of that popularity certainly reverberates in the indie culture at large, as Nabisco notes, but I presume some of it just happens on the staff message board or in conversations among friends.

lol i don't know if the ilx platonic ideal will ever be within reach--down here in the real world some things just need to be said xp

Yeah -- maybe people are nicer and less territorial about their indie rock than I am. I tend to love the bands I love deeply and aggressively ignore the stuff that doesn't seem like my bag, even if they have an OK single or two.

I mean, maybe "Oxford Comma" isn't the best example because there were a couple of other songs from that Vampire Weekend that also got a lot of attention, so it seems like you'd probably end up listening to the whole album anyway if it piqued your interest -- but "The Rat" might well have gotten as high as it did because of a situation like that. I mean, I'm pretty sure I downloaded it after seeing it on either Pitchfork's or Stylus's half-decade list and was like "wow, this is fantastic," but I've sort of gotten the impression that the Walkmen haven't done anything else as good as that, so I've never even bothered to seek out their albums.

I've sort of gotten the impression that the Walkmen haven't done anything else as good as that

You can say that again.

Yeah, that's a great example. Maybe some others can be found in the kinds of rock tracks nobody here would question: lots of people listened to McLusky in an album way, right, but I'll bet not even that many of their superfans second-guess "To Hell with Good Intentions" as the one that goes on lists and mixes.

Hard to beat "Lightsaber Cocksucking Blues," IMO...

Yeah, what the hell, "Alan is a Cowboy Killer" is the McLusky track I got on a mix and I've never heard another half as good.

I have a mix from a superfan with Without MSG I Am Nothing on it--but I think Mclusky Do Dallas is considered the best album by superfans

Using the "one song people can rally around" criterion doesn't seem to apply to the very peculiar set of songs that comprise the 20009 entries on this list, though. Even among the singles discussed by Pitchfork this year, some of these - "French Navy", "Velvet", "Rain On", "Young Adult Friction", for example - were not even the best reviewed. It does seem like there are several tracks, even from indie albums, that have sparked more of a critical consensus this year. Is this really the best group of songs we've had for the first 2/3 of the year?

They seem to be the ones that the Pitchforkers who participated in this remembered the most.

There hasn't been a monster pop song this year, maybe? No Umbrella or Sexyback or Crazy in Love or something like that.

i think if "blame it" or "birthday sex" were r. kelly songs and not jamie foxx & jeremih songs, pfork types would be all over both of them on some "ignition (remix)" shit (at the very least on some "i'm a flirt" shit)

or if "turnin me on" was a rihanna song - it just seems like pitchfork got turned on to pop/rap/r&b back in the mid decade and have gone back the opposite way now while still keeping the door open for those big mid-decade artists.

again, the r. kelly mixtape had a track review up within one or two days of it leaking to the internet, but you can't read jack shit on pfork about any other good & successful r&b this year.

fwiw my mclusky track would be dethink to survive. mclusky on this list is exactly what i'm talking about.

same thing with ciara - "oh" & "goodies" & "lose control" were big pop/r&b singles back in the mid-decade, so now pitchfork runs a review of the new ciara cd with a 3.2 rating (or whatever it was). who does this serve? pop fans by and large certainly don't care about what pfork has to say about ciara. pitchfork's core readership isn't going to be tempted to check out ciara based on that review, and if anything it's just going to cement suspicions that pop stars are just empty artless robots.

why couldn't that ciara review space been used for a good r&b album like, say, the-dream's?

There hasn't been a monster pop song this year, maybe? No Umbrella or Sexyback or Crazy in Love or something like that.

Let's not mention the two biggest songs of the year, both created by a band whose name rhymes with Schmack Pie Bees.

man mclusky are so awesome

J0rdan's last post was otm.

a band whose name rhymes with Schmack Pie Bees

I give up. Black Eyed Peas? What are the songs?

Re the effect of a The-Dream review on Pitchfork: I don't think it would win many people over at all actually. The impression I get is that my reviews are mostly left alone from an editing perspective (bar taking out pointless asides and unnecessarily detailed track descriptions etc.) because - omg WHAT - the proportion of site visitors who read them is infinitesimally small.

JT was one exception: I got a lot of angry emails from readers about that review, simply because of the fact that everyone knew JT and they were shocked it was even being covered by the site. Whereas their eyes glide right over, say, Amerie, let alone The-Dream... And I don't think it's coincidence that my JT review was one where the editors were much more involved in shaping the final result (not overall judgment or the score, just the usual structure-tinkering, "that bit doesn't make sense" kinda stuff).

Daniel, "Boom Boom Pow" broke a record on the charts this year, didn't it?
xpost

Don't know. I'm out-of-the-loop with respect to a lot of pop stuff.

But I'm glad to hear about it. I'll try to YouTube a clip.

no! don't listen to the Black Eyed Peas! Don't do it, Daniel!

haha guys I didn't mean that there wasn't disagreement about which McLusky tracks people like best, just that it didn't seem to me like anyone would be all "by what logic did 'To Hell with Good Intentions' wind up getting chosen?" -- although possibly I was really wrong in that presumption! maybe it's just me or people I talk to or Pitchfork writers: for some reason that just seems like a case where people listen to the band's stuff and somehow come to an organic consensus that that track is the big broad stand-out thing that somehow works as a "face." maybe not! substitute Life Without Buildings' "The Leanover?"

lol. Too late, Mr. Que. Too late now.

It's . . . meh. Nothing as compelling as the pop songs I mention above. I'm not surprised it didn't make Pitchfork's list.

I do like that they say Mazel Tov, tho.

the leanover is probably the best choice (and i think it is a single too!) but there are two or three other defensible ones i think for lwb. maybe it's curiosity about how these consensuses (lol is that the plural??) come about. the phenomenon you are describing seems perfectly reasonable for any small group but are all these groups, everywhere, coming to similar conclusions? i guess they probably are.

tim, i suppose i meant it would win over people who read it. i guess if they were really concerned about all the reviews getting read as much as possible they wouldn't be out on these limbs writing about this stuff at all. i mean that amerie song was their #2 single of 2005--probably SOME people got into it based on that.

"rebellion (lies)" was nothing less than a big 'ole booty-blastin single here in montreal, as were neighborhoods 1, 2 and 3, so i am not surprised at all to see some of them near the top of this list.

― samosa gibreel, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 4:15 PM (2 hours ago)

yeah i'm sure arcade fire being from there had nothing to do w/ that

tim, i suppose i meant it would win over people who read it. i guess if they were really concerned about all the reviews getting read as much as possible they wouldn't be out on these limbs writing about this stuff at all. i mean that amerie song was their #2 single of 2005--probably SOME people got into it based on that.

You're right. I think sometimes though people ascribe more power to pitchfork to change its audience's mind about stuff than it actually has. Foisting the new indie hope on people is something pitchfork does well because people go to the site looking for that new hope.

Sites like ILX are much more effective at actually challenging people's aesthetic blinkers than a site like Pitchfork can be. If you got all those Stereogum posters onto ILX probably two thirds of them would sound very different within about six months.

IT'S HERE AND I LIKE IT

re: nabisco many xposts back

I know you weren't saying I did, but I should just point out that I have no objections to the indie album tracks picks at all. Neighborhood 1 is amazing, as is Jesus Etc. and Poor Places. I was just looking at it from the perspective of the aforementioned pop/hip hop singles v indie tracks thing. Mostly wondering how people gathered around those particular ones. Rebellion and Power Out were the big Arcade Fire songs around here, as they were played at indie clubs ad nauseum, so for me finding the consensus would be looking at places where I saw the most communal appreciation. I'm not sure where that same appreciation came for Jesus Etc. over Ashes of American Flags, though I'm not saying it didn't.

Neighborhood 1 is the first track on the album, and I think it brilliantly announced what the band were doing and what they intended. It wasn't a single as far as I know, so to me it's a representation of the album. I have no doubt that you're right about the communal gathering around it, I just didn't experience the same thing, and thought of other tracks as more immediately popular.

What you say about the ballads is interesting, because listening through the list I noticed a lot of the indie songs were ballads. The Liars track off Drum's Not Dead is a key example (wonderful song I had neglected for too long, I should add).

Idioteque is an interesting one. There was a makeshift video for it, even if it wasn't a single, and it's also more likely to be played at indie clubs than any other off the album. I think it might have been chosen for historical significance, as it was both classic radiohead but also a massive departure, and in some was represented the electro-bent indie music/fans would take over the coming years.

Which takes me back to the choices as more historical significance rather than best songs. I find it difficult to believe that B.O.B. is actually considered the best song of the decade by so many people, but I also recognize that there was a lot in it that predicted what was to come, or perhaps what could have been.

I think that's a good thing, by the way.

if anything i feel like "Idiotheque" shouldn't be so highly rated now because the novelty or boldness of them doing a track like that has worn off and it's just, oh, one of many many good dance/beat-oriented tracks by rock bands this decade.

Well, no, it still sounds cooler than any other Radiohead song to my ears; its sonic boldness or novelty has nothing to do with it (okay, little).

Erin Mcleod took over the reggae/dancehall monthly column after Stelfox moved on, but now the column seems to have disappeared. They have one guy who reviews Afropop reissues on ocassion, but no monthly column for him, alas.

substitute Life Without Buildings' "The Leanover?"

The only reason why it makes sense to me that "The Leanover" is the big go-to LWB track is that there was an acoustic version that was floating around that it seemed like people were pretty into. But I love that whole album, so every track's a winner for me.

I want that Life Without Buildings album!

man mclusky are so awesome

I like his new band the Future of the Left even better.

Tom Ewing on "The Decade in Pop": http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7703-the-decade-in-pop/

thread got long but did you guys determine who liked the-dream first?