Pitchfork's P2k: The Decade in Music

i enjoyed carl newman mocking his own mundane taste.

I was glad to see so many early 00s records show up at all, because journalists and music writers have this "weathercock" problem of only repping what has been cool for the last two or three years- I find a lot of these summing up the decade list-making activities are heavily weighted to the recent past- looking over so many of these lists people's repression of electroclash and Fischerspooner and Crossover and W.I.T. and Peaches and Adult and all the stuff they rocked out to circa 2000/2001 is kind of, er, amnesiac, innit?

What is the Benjamin quote, "nothing is less erotic than our parent's fashions"?, i.e. the recent past is a little embarrassing, it seems.

i enjoyed carl newman mocking his own mundane taste.

Yeah, that was funny. "Let's throw Neko Case's Fox Confessor in here as well and be done with the nepotism. I love you, woman." I LOVE YOU, TOO, WOMAN!

I thought it was funny how the same early '00s albums kept popping up on everyone's lists -- Kid A, Vespertine, Is This It and any Black Dice record. It reads almost like clockwork...

Sure there's going to be a lot of commonly-chosen discs. But consider the many, many novel and interesting choices some of the artists made, e.g., Carl Newman (of The New Pornographers) choosing The Rock*A*Teens, Sweet Bird of Youth; Britt Daniel (of Spoon) choosing Cliff Martinez, Solaris OST; J0hn D. choosing Christine Fellows' song Vertebrae; Tim Ruttilli (of Califone) choosing Mighty Flashlight/Mike Fellows, Self-Titled/Limited Storyline Guest; and on and on.

Yeah, that's a good point. I'm trying to prepare a decade-end list of my own, and every time I think about including a personal favorite that doesn't get much love, I fret about the classic album I'm invariably omitting to make room for it. Musicians usually don't give as much of a shit about this.

^^that often makes me re-evaluate the "classic" album though, often along the lines of "how much do i really feeling like listening to it" &c. if a "classic" album deserves to be there, you'd think of it as a personal favourite.

True.

+1 on J0hn's choice of Vertabrae, that song (and that song alone) once reduced me to a blubbering mess

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdnY9d0Zuzk

^ not an official video.

i found it really funny that the xx dude went on about fwd, it means i have regularly gone clubbing w/them.

i think what distinguishes what i consider classic albums from my personal favourites is maybe the opposite of what lex said? a personal favourite was an album i was deeply in love with at a certain time, and is preserved in a glossy, bright haze by the glory of those memories. alot of these albums are imperfect in a lovely way, aren't albums i would expect the average critic to rate highly. when i listen to it, i don't necessarily rediscover a new wonderful aspect of it, but it's a nice warm hug. a classic album is one i can never really digest, and although i might go months without listening to, will be blown away every time i do reach for it.

This is going to turn into "When you say 'greatest' you can't possibly mean 'favorite' because they're like separate things," isn't it?

It's the same thing, but I think there's a difference between private favorites and critically approved favorites. You may like them both equally, but as a critic you may feel like you're on safer ground when you extol the latter.

as a critic you should be saying "fuck being on safer ground as a critic"

its so much more complicated than that dudes

at some point you have to admit that making a list is all a bunch of fronting & consciously constructing your 'taste' and your 'favorites' -- a wholly unquantifiable thing -- for the world to see

This is going to turn into "When you say 'greatest' you can't possibly mean 'favorite' because they're like separate things," isn't it?

You were close!

so when someone says 'greatest' vs. 'favorites' theyre just articulating different impulses that both go into everyone's list making activities to some degree or another

at some point you have to admit that making a list is all a bunch of fronting & consciously constructing your 'taste' and your 'favorites' -- a wholly unquantifiable thing -- for the world to see

I'd agree with that. I often find myself aware of the fact that there are certain albums I like in part because I want to like them. It doesn't mean my enjoyment of them is phony at all (I'm not pretending to like them), but it might indicate that I've given them more of a chance than some other albums I've encountered. And surely on some level I do this because I want to think of myself as a certain kind of person, the kind who likes albums like that.

I think these debates can get tied up in defining terminology, as if, were we able to satisfactorily work out what "favourite" or "greatest" means, suddenly our top 100 albums of the decade list would be straightforward and obvious.

For me these choices are more mundanely construed, like "how do I compare the album I listened to every day for six months but don't much listen to now against the album I listen to once every three months but like more every time I do?"

This is a personal issue but the idea of "greatest" feeds into it, because often what stimulates me to pull out an album again is reading people talk about it - this habit of mine privileges stuff that is commonly liked and considered great over my obscure (or simply unheralded) personal favourites. Like, I tend to think of M.A.N.D.Y.'s Body Language mix as my go-to selection for an early 05 electro-house-into-minimal dj mix, because that's the one that I get reminded of all the time (partly because of its more erm canonical track selection, partly because it predicted the future so successfully). But at the time I liked Damian Lazarus's Rebel Futurism #2 equally and listened to it more often.

Not sure if the individual writers lists will be published. Mine was done very hurriedly and I left off a whole bunch of favourite albums (the second Rio Baile Funk comp, Last Exit, Finery) so I feel a bit bad about it.

On topic, I loved that Bob Stanley's single of the decade was "Flowers".

I used to think that I could objectively determine my favorite albums through iTunes playcounts, since 95% of my album listening happens on iTunes/iPod, but then I realized that there are lots of albums I put on quite often, especially at work, because they're pleasant or familiar or unobtrusive, but which I may not really be particularly passionate about. (I call this the Sea and Cake Factor.)

yeah play count can say a lot but no way can it say everything

at some point you have to admit that making a list is all a bunch of fronting & consciously constructing your 'taste' and your 'favorites' -- a wholly unquantifiable thing -- for the world to see

no one said otherwise

sorry, thought you were responding to me directly. maybe you were, I don't know. but yeah, that's pretty self-evident.

last.fm play count will be invaluable simply for not forgetting anything.

"how do I compare the album I listened to every day for six months but don't much listen to now against the album I listen to once every three months but like more every time I do?"

absolutely true, and also stuff like "how do i compare this album with 6 songs i can't stop listening to and 6 songs i don't care about, to this album with 12 pretty good songs which i rarely obsess over individually?"

ultimately, instinct is a pretty solid way to go to judge these things.

Yeah exactly, I don't know how you'd really do it otherwise. But then I feel like my instincts themselves can ossify somewhat - the more you say "x is my favourite album of y", the easier it is to say that again almost without thinking next time.

oh yeah, but i'm always pretty aware of when something becomes my default, and it's usually in cases where there's no real actual answer. fav album ever? aaliyah! fav madonna single? "deeper and deeper"!

Yeah "Deeper & Deeper" is a great example for me too! If I'm honest there's about five or six Madonna tunes that could stand in for it but it's easier just to choose one and stick with it.

Loved yesterday's The Decade In Noise feature. This sentence --

Many followers now think of it as not just harsh sonic assaults, but also abstract improvisation, ecstatic free jazz, lo-fi pop, outsider avant-rock, minimalist drone, power electronics, and more.

-- brought a lot of this decade's "noise music" together for me.

I don't really like the piece on noise but maybe because they have to do a lot of introducing in it. Like the Pop piece had the luxury of just naming names and drawing its own contexts since the canon context is so well established and well-known that it allowed Ewing to be kind of playful and not have to explain everything. But I suppose the noise thing is in a way a sort of primer and if you've had any sort of interest in noise music over the last ten years it just sounds quite a lot like a synopsis of stuff you already know, I can imagine a similarly registered piece on something like, I dunno, the last ten years of dancehall or country or something I'm completely oblivious to being really interesting and informative so YMMV.

i didn't like how it started off with an animal collective analogy.

i was gonna say that too but I thought that was just clusterfuck incitement

also how it kind championed noise bands becoming less noisy, embracing song structures and whatever. not that this is a BAD thing, and obviously a site like pitchfork would welcome it, but it's gotten to the point where weird bands are all supposed to have a progression towards socalled maturity, like every noise band has to follow the sonic youth archetype in order to receive attention.

yeah perhaps i shouldn't have-i even like animal collective, but reading that i was just like "man can you guys not mention animal collective for like five seconds?"

tbh, I only really read the first page

also how it kind championed noise bands becoming less noisy

I see your point but they've also championed noise bands while they were at their noisiest. At least that's my (eroding) memory tells me.

(xp)

its that same thing that bothers me when ppl talk about, say, eno, and they're all "he takes all these avant garde ideas but has really good tunes AS WELL"

99.9% of critics expect bands to adhere to a narrative of progression (from noise to songs, from struggling drug dealer to rap star, etc) Woe betide the musician who does not meet these expectations.

or fit the paradigm etc.

Frankly whenever I read/hear someone talking about music in these terms I tune out immediately.

some post about AC where dominique talks about how he gradually lost interest in them as they got more song based that is pretty otm about all of this as far as I am concerned

i do actually like this article, though. and yeah i might have exaggerated the extent to which the narrative was valued, dude obviously knows his noise.

Just read that ... it was definitely a synopsis of what I already know. He acknowledges Oakland at the end, which made me happy.

the noise -> songs thing is only one part of the narrative. The thing that I noticed most about the article was that it focused on acts and developments that would be most of interest to the Pitchfork readership. It definitely privileged more "popular" or "crossover" acts.

yeah, it kinda raises the whole "noise" vs. "noisy _____" debate (i.e. "Noisy rock", "noisy jazz", "noisy rhythms", "noisy pop", etc.) discussion that we had on ILX once. There was a time when power electronics and hard Japanese noise had turned noise into a genre name, but it's just as functional as a kind of freefloating modifier for all sorts of genre-entangled formats and scenes that are not "noise" per se, and Pitchfork readers care more about the latter than the former, but all along it's been a fuzzy boundary. Spacerock and psychrock and kraut was hiding in the background of the aesthetic of a lot of the old guard in Japan (Hijokaidan, Masonna, Merzbow) and jazz is one context through to locate European and US folks like Voice Crack and Borbetomagus, so it may be that the myth of noise purity was always overstated.

were hiding, obv

I've only made it through the first two pages so far, but it seemed like the narrative was more about regional scenes bringing noise back out of the woodwork than bands developing cleaner sounds.

(xpost)

There was a time when power electronics and hard Japanese noise had turned noise into a genre name, but it's just as functional as a kind of freefloating modifier for all sorts of genre-entangled formats and scenes that are not "noise" per se

I think if I were to try and summarize the developments in noise in one sentence, this would be the thesis.

Good overview for sure. I think one of the big things it leaves out is the role labels like Troubleman/Load/5RC had in pushing this stuff out to indie rock kids. Pretty amazing in these economic times to think of the money spent on noize just five years ago

You forgot Skin Graft.

Even 31G to a big extent

I guess the question is, how much did those labels come out of regional scenes? Marc does mention Load and a few others in the article, but mostly in the context of regional scenes and artist-run/community enterprises.