Pitchfork's P2k: The Decade in Music

This IS ILM, right?

Overthinking About Pop Music.

yeah and I like that! it's just...overthinking about how a *list* was made and what it MEANSSSSS. I don't mean to single you out here, this thread has 2796 posts n'all.

I apologise for finding developments in a field I have worked in interesting and wanting to talk about it.

the field of lists?

I'd hope, as a reader, that in any end-of-year or end-of-decade list, there ought to be stuff I've never heard of, tantalising mysteries that make me want to investigate.

This list did exactly that for me. As I'd expect, given how easy it is to access music this decade -- via MySpace, LaLa, eMusic, and so forth -- the titles I had yet to investigate were those toward the middle and bottom of the list (i.e., those that hadn't received tremendous attention previously). Now I'll seek them out and listen to them.

That bar at the top of the thread makes me want to seek out and investigate some Haagen-Dazs.

haha yeah haagen dazs got hella free advertising from this thread

08. Sigur Rós
Ágætis Byrjun
[Smekkleysa; 2000]

It's a little fudged, as it was originally released in 1999. But Rolling Stone's number one album of the 80s (at the time, anyway) was London Calling, released in 1979. So whatever... but the stat nerd in me is cringing.

There's a top 10 disc I haven't heard, actually.

Not sure I've heard all of the Modest Mouse disc, either, but that's because the soundscans irritate me so much I can't get through them all. I don't get the appeal of that band at all.

Modest Mouse actually got more tolerable (to me, at least) the more famous they got. The two most recent albums are my favorites. I still wouldn't consider myself a stan, though.

Listening to the samples again, the Modest Mouse album is better (less irritating) than I remembered. I hated the Good News album, tho. Sold it to my used record shop for $1.00, I think.

the field of lists?

Well I've helped coordinate quite a few lists compiled by music journalists, yes.

Nick, I think you're falling into the "golden age" trap, as most of your criticisms could easily be levelled at print magazine polls way before the internet and the 00's.
That said, I guess it does seem impossible today that there might be a record loved by critics but unknown to the general public.

What 2009 albums would have made it if released a couple years earlier? Fever Ray? Maxwell? xx?

Yeah, I'm aware I'm a couple of years out of things and reminiscing.

This list reminded me why I checked out around 2002. I dislike nearly every album in this top 20. Sigur Ros makes the top ten for an entire decade? No fucking thanks.

There's a surprising lack of outrage over the worst (by far) of Sigur Ros' four 2000's albums coming in at #8. But then again, this list claims that *most* acts got steadily worse as the decade progressed (Animal Collective, incl. Panda Bear, are a notable exception).

Person Pitch ending up ahead of AC (with their worst album placing highest obviously) really sums up how little sense this list has made to me. that and this:

"i think it would be nice if albums were contextualized wrt music rather than "arular was the first true blog hyped success."

― samosa gibreel, den 2 oktober 2009 08:33 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink"

re:

08. Sigur Rós
Ágætis Byrjun
[Smekkleysa; 2000]

It's a little fudged, as it was originally released in 1999. But Rolling Stone's number one album of the 80s (at the time, anyway) was London Calling, released in 1979. So whatever... but the stat nerd in me is cringing.

come on, how many people in the USA or UK knew about Sigur Ros and that album in 1999.

In the UK it was DJ John Kennedy on Xfm 104.9 that was a champion of Sigur Ros and that was just before the album got released in the UK in the Autumn of 2000.

imma let you finish, but

late registration kinda sucks
mpp sucks
white blood cells sucks
person pitch really sucks
modest mouse totally fuckin' sucks
yhf sucks
funeral sucks

i guess everything else is decent

Modest Mouse does totally f---n' suck.

It upsets me that Pitchfork didn't ensure that its top 200 list matched my own top 200 list.

they shoulda called you--i mean you were available right?

I would have asked for a continuance of an upcoming trial, if need be.

Echoing above posts on YHF's obstinate "importance," which I couldn't put a finger on back then and am nonplussed anyone even remembers in 2009 but as an embarrassing paean to how far in the wrong you can be about something.

MPP should have been #1. The list serves only to generate discussion vis a vis Pitchfork's brand in contrast with others. To fall into the trap of re-canonizing the canon was a mistake five years ago. Today, it's a reputational disaster. You are what you hype.

damn ur really makin me think

it's a reputational disaster

why do certain yanks rate mediocre / unremarkable bands like Spoon and Modest Mouse so highly?

to generate discussion vis-a-vis our brands in contrast with others

Spoon are awesome, djmartian. About the best thing in the top 20.

All I can say is Love and Theft better be in the top 20, or I may be forced to write them a sternly worded letter.

― kornrulez6969, Thursday, October 1, 2009

Are you working on your letter yet? Let us help you compose it!

what a reputational disaster for pitchfork

Dear tone-deaf "tastemakers":

Echoing above posts on YHFMPP's obstinate "importance," which I couldn't put a finger on back then and am nonplussed anyone even remembers in October 2009 but as an embarrassing paean to how far in the wrong you can be about something...

― cee-oh-tee-tee, Friday, 2 October 2009 12:53 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

fixed... obviously could have done this with any record I didn't like.

I'm listening to "Nautical Disaster" by Tragically Hip now ... thanks for the tip.

Re: "Agaetis Byrjun" being released in 1999, I think the P&J custom of "voting for the album/song in the year it made the most impact" is more important that the exact release date.

Damn, CNN.com wrote a a pretty serious story about the pitchfork decade list

massive lolz

If people are picking holes in the Uncut and Pitchfork lists - just imagine the laughter awaiting 00s lists from Rolling Stone, NME, Q, Spin etc

i dunno, i would have liked to see more aging boomers and hot topic stars in this list

COME ON UP FOR THE RISING!

Mark R, if you are still around these parts, your Kid A blurb is fucking excellent

at least with NME it seems less predictable which bag of shite they'll put at #1 now (btw i like Kid A but whatever)...probably Arctic Monkeys tho?

Southall: I hardly think we are pandering to our audience. One thing that a lot of you all, those of you who have been watching P4k very closely all decade and who spend som much time discussing music on the internet forget, is that you guys are the tip of the audience iceberg. How many people regularly congregate here, or at SOMB or lostatsea or Metacritic or HPN or DIS or whatever forums? I mean regularly: A few thousand? At the absolute most 10,000? OK, maybe the site doesn't surprise those people-- how could it at this point without being untruthful in some ways? Meanwhile, more than 2 million computers logged onto P4k over each of the past two months. We obliterated our pageview record last month, a record that was set the month before. I don't bring that up to be a dick but to point out that the vast, vast majority of the people coming to the site have never head *of* many of the records in our top 200, let alone heard them. It's still a difficult, eclectic, weird, nonmainstream selection of music to most people; once Stereogum posts something today, those comments will be about how pretentious and phony it is precisely because some of it is eclectic and weird to them. And I suspect those individuals are also readers who are more in tune to a larger amount of music than the "average" reader. (sorry to be reductive, obv not everyone fits in neat little categories like this.)

At first I was little bummed that all of those online forums, from what I saw, could rather easily nail down our top 20; but actually I think it's some sort of compliment. We've created a little part of the Internet in which records by the Knife, Avalanches, Panda Bear, Spoon, Ghostface, are to people "obvious" top 20 of the decade material. And yet they won't be anywhere else I imagine (the Knife will be with Sweden's Sonic Magazine, but nowhere else in the US/UK). I don't know what that means, but at the very least it means people pay very close attention to what we do. Including Nick, I guess, you.

Mark R, if you are still around these parts, your Kid A blurb is fucking excellent

He hits at exactly what I hate about "Kid A" -- other bands made catchier/dancier/more creative/etc. music, but "Kid A" "captured the complex feeling of the era", ergo, it wins. That's just projecting a load of social significance onto the album, which has nothing to do with the quality of the music itself.

I mean, if we're going to talk about e.g. the "gorgeous Brian Eno-like interlude of 'Treefingers'", then if this is the album of the decade then we should be talking about one of the greatest ambient pieces ever recorded. But it's not, and I don't think many people would claim that it is. How did the "drones and the hissy beats in 'Idioteque'" manage to capture the times any better than Autechre did with exactly the same drones and hissy beats recorded seven years earlier?

I mean, if we're going to talk about e.g. the "gorgeous Brian Eno-like interlude of 'Treefingers'", then if this is the album of the decade then we should be talking about one of the greatest ambient pieces ever recorded. But it's not, and I don't think many people would claim that it is. How did the "drones and the hissy beats in 'Idioteque'" manage to capture the times any better than Autechre did with exactly the same drones and hissy beats recorded seven years earlier?

OTM

Because Radiohead took those Autechre beats, married them to some much more accessible pop sensibilities and exposed them to a much wider audience right at the same time that mainstream America was figuring out how to use the Internet as a research tool and a source for music files.

This shouldn't be rocket science but it's NEVER just the music that makes a particular album great or memorable to a large number of people; it also has to occur at the right time and the right place. That is precisely what happened to Kid A. Is it highly derivative of a bunch of stuff I'd already heard? Yes. Had the vast majority of music critics, let alone the audience Radiohead had built off of their first three albums, heard and, more importantly, understood where that music was coming from and the emotional power it can have? No. Do I begrudge Radiohead for combining their cult of personality with someone else's musical ideas to make an album that basically checks off every box on a music critic's "best album of the decade" list? No, because I think it also happens to be a good album.

tl;dr version: lighten up and enjoy music more

the top 20 works pretty well as an artifact of the decade in indie sensibility, which is probably as it should be.

also how far do you want to go - a c major chord was first played in 10000 bc on a mammoth bone piano, how does Radiohead capture any better etc etc

Personally, I think Kid A works as a coherent album and reflects its times better than anything by Autechre or Eno.

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