EDITORIAL #1: Old Souls, Beards, Interrobang & Parenthesis: A year and a decade in music.
Some decade, huh? The aughts are dead; long live the aughts!
Right?
Probably so, but not in any sort of way that we (humans) would wish for them to live: a presidential library named after, I am fairly certain, a man who cannot read; a troop surge in Afghanistan previously put on an eight-year hiatus so that we (colonialists) could focus on what (WHAT?!) really mattered, which, of course, was democratizing Iraq; vampires; Facebook, Tweeter, & the redefinition of the family; Subway commercials; The Real Housewives of Everytown, USA; et cetera.
It seems like only yesterday that we were bringing in the new millennium, when, congregated outside my Aunt Sheila’s house, my then-eleven year old cousin Roxanne had a nervous breakdown because she, not unlike everyone else in the world, had no idea how computers worked, as my mother let her (very short) hair down and got plastered off of screwdrivers while my stepdad was forced to work the night shift as, incidentally, a computer tech at Convergy’s, leading me, an incompetent then-fourteen year old who had never been behind the wheel of an automobile, to later offer to serve as my family’s designated driver.
Now those were the days.
The 2010s (twenty-tens) look to be promising – for me, anyway. So far, I’ve started drinking coffee without cream, I’m about fourteen pages into Atlas Shrugged, and I’ve set out an itinerary to watch the remainder of AFI’s 100 greatest films of all-time. I love my work. Even though I’ve only lived three places in my life, I’m convinced I live in one of the best cities in America, if not the world. I have a supportive and loving family whom I see about five times a year. And there’s a pretty fantastic lady in my life, who I am privileged to spend oodles of time with.
I am completely here. But over the last couple of months – and, more particularly, after I watched Adventureland (and then finished season five of Lost) – I have debated, with myself, as to what year I actually belong. What time period were there more people that were like me? Wasn’t there a time period where more people were like me? When did circumstance most cohere to my happiness? Where does my soul belong? There is not a straightforward answer to this, but it is a fairly interesting and worthwhile mental activity. And everyone likes to use their brain.
Right?!
---
I believe I am what is commonly and endearingly referred to as an old soul. I type on my (electric) typewriter and scrawl down notes in spiral, college-ruled notebooks; I mark up my own physical, paper copies of books; I collect and listen to vinyl records; I wear cardigans; I actively practice humility; I don’t much care for money; I’d prefer if the U.S. would take its foreign policy cues from Canada and Switzerland; et cetera. There are other people like me. They comprise the vast majority of the commenters over at videogum dot com, if you’d like to meet some. They call themselves monsters. I don’t know what to call them.
---
The word hipster gets thrown around a lot these days, doesn’t it? But does anyone really know what it means? I don’t, really. A friend of mine once told me that a mutual acquaintance of ours from college had told her that I was the most legitimate hipster that had ever walked that campus. I think I should have taken that as a compliment. I think the sentiments were flattering.
It seems to me that that term, hipster, though, includes far too many types of people for me to really want to be a part of it. For instance, take a person that classifies his- or herself as a “big time hipster.” What does that even mean? When you see that person on the street (or somewhere!), that’s a point in time where you might hear the word hipster get thrown around, but that doesn’t mean they (for example) read, and understand, and empathize with Jack Kerouac, who is hipster in its most pure and basic form. It doesn’t not mean that, but it doesn’t mean it either.
So, effectively, hipster sort of becomes like throwing around the word preppy. It’s using the word in a fashionable, near-meaningless sense. The person fashions his- or herself a hipster. They look a lot like all of these other people, in dress. But are we that overly-conscious and self-aware of what we wear? Do we call people that dress according to the status quo status quo people? Should we? Jack Kerouac was too interested in a person’s content, the things they were made of, to stop his search with such an easy and shallow shortcut. It’s literally not even skin-deep.
(This might be hypocritical. I’m sure there are people who try to say a lot with what they wear. I’m just not one of them, unless you consider not trying to say a lot with what you wear saying a lot with what you wear. And when I see someone in too, too skinny of skinny jeans, or a Slayer shirt, or a mink coat, I think, these are not my kind of people. And I think that – first, because – skinny jeans? Slayer? Mink? C’mon! – but also because these people have obviously overinvested themselves in what they choose to wear – they have created a shortcut to tell us about themselves. But maybe I have too and I just don’t think of it that way. But maybe neither do they.
Moving right along.)
I am certainly not fashionable. As objectively as should be humanly acceptable, here is how I might accurately describe myself: I am an over-educated, suburbia-raised, independent-thinking, bearded, left-handed, left-leaning, secular, socialist-humanist, overanalytic, opinionated, thrifty, mild-mannered, level-headed (when-not-driving), witty, easily-amused, somewhat charming, love-capable, affectionate, well-meaning, vulgar, snarky, sarcastic, engaging, socially-anxious, humble, music-, tv-, movie-, book-, food-, basketball-, & irony-loving, modest, wordy, hungry, genuine person. So what does that make me? A monster?! I think that just makes me me.
“My being has many facets.”
-Ignatius J. Reilly.
My point is, hipster is an overgeneralized, bastardized term – used, like all generalizations, so that humans can naively go on believing they understand other humans – and should really be further qualified, else altogether removed from our vocabularies, if it’s going to have any significant meaning.
---
A large part of this whole soul debate has to do with pop culture. What music, what movies, what books, what technologies can I do without? Eventually, I will get to a list of the best albums of the aughts – the decade, due to my liberal arts studies and my ever-burgeoning ability to grow a beard (among other things), that has proven, and will probably long-prove, to be my most formative. But I wonder, could I do without them? Couldn’t I have studied and burgeoned sometime else? How many of these albums will ever have a place among the best albums of all-time? Eight? Nine? And I probably didn’t even listen to them.
Was there a piece of literature written in the aughts that compares to anything Mark Twain or JD Salinger or Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Wolfe or Hermann Hesse wrote/have written? To wit (and in my humble opinion), there are the works of Dave Eggers, Chuck Klosterman, and David Sedaris, and A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. But do they really compare? Wouldn’t centuries of previous literature do?
And who are today’s Paul Newmans and James Stewarts and Peter Sellerses? George Clooney? Johnny Depp? Paul Giamatti? Really??
There is just so much good out there to pay very much attention to the contemporary.
---
I’m not going to pretend that my opinion on music matters.
I, by fate, I am sure (whatever that means!), somehow wound up in an archives class last semester. And in a lot of appraisal theory, it is understood that the archivist should have a full knowledge of the universe they wish to document in order to be qualified enough to be entrusted to make valid appraisals. And that’s sort of the way I feel about music critics. Unless they are intimately familiar with the music universe, or one particular genre of the music universe, including how to make that music, what does a critic’s opinion matter? It’s only as valid as your own, if not less so.
As I am suffering from anxiety for even thinking about tuning my new Djembe, I cannot claim to have an opinion on music that should be taken with even a minute amount of legitimacy. You like what you like, and I like what I like, and that is fine. My lists are opinions, shared as recommendations, or conversation-starters, or karass-finders – not (necessarily) statements that my taste is better than yours, but rather that my brain works this way (in list-form), and that I like these albums, and I think you might too. It’s an About Me.
---
One of the perks of Facebook is that it allows you to see how other people classify themselves, and their interests. For instance, under the Music category, my stepdad has consolidated everything he listens to into one word: eclectic. And that is the perfect word to describe it. It’s way better than just listing a bunch of genres. “Try me,” it unpretentiously suggests. I like that. And I think you could say the same about the music I choose to listen to, but I think there might be a qualifier that works equally well: sad. Fact: I listen to sad music. Also a fact: I could empathize with it earlier on in the year, when I really started to dig my toes in and begin to figure out who I am. What I figured out is that I am an old soul.
The last four months or so of my life have probably been the most completely and genuinely happy I have been since the days of spinning around in circles for the hell of it, where my only worries were slipping on the monkey-bars, or that no one besides me understood what the word “flexible” meant, or that my mom accidentally smeared mayonnaise instead of mustard on my sandwich. But then I didn’t know better.
Still I find that the music I actively appreciate the most is rooted in sadness, or, as it were, the blues. And here is the reason: it is the best music that has ever been made. It isn’t music for music’s sake; it’s music that says something. And all the things that are worth saying, and putting to music, are fundamentally sad, or moving in some way. It is filled with soul, and the people that sing it, or play it, sing and play it like they mean it, because they mean it. And there’s nothing better than it.
---
That said, and without further ado, here is a list of my favorite (not to be confused with the best) twenty-five albums that I, on my very humble budget, acquired in 2009:
(1) Why? – Alopecia
(2) Dawes – North Hills
(3) Talking Heads: 77
(4) The Flaming Lips – The Soft Bulletin
(5) Born Ruffians – Red, Yellow & Blue
(6) Dr. Dog – Easy Beat
(7) Otis Redding – Otis Blue
(8) Jurassic 5 EP
(9) Violent Femmes – Hallowed Ground
(10) Modest Mouse – No One’s First, and You’re Next
(11) The Beatles – Rubber Soul (U.S. Release)
(12) Dan Auerbach – Keep It Hid
(13) Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears – Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is!
(14) The Smiths – s/t
(15) Beach Boys – Pet Sounds
(16) Wilco – (The Album)
(17) Cat Stevens – Tea For the Tillerman
(18) Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue
(19) Something Else by the Kinks
(20) The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday
(21) The Costello Show – King of America
(22) Okkervil River – Don’t Fall in Love With Everyone You See
(23) Brian Eno & David Byrne – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
(24) The Polyphonic Spree – Beginning Stages Of…
(25) Deer Tick – War Elephant
One could then extract from this (and other) list(s) that my fifteen favorite albums that were released in 2009 were as follows:
(1) Dawes – North Hills
(2) Modest Mouse – No One’s First, and You’re Next
(3) Dan Auerbach – Keep it Hid
(4) Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears – Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is!
(5) Wilco – (The Album)
(6) Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue
(7) Elvis Perkins in Dearland
(8) Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
(9) St. Vincent – Actor
(10) Why? – Eskimo Snow
(11) Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
(12) Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
(13) Japandroids – Post-Nothing
(14) Monsters of Folk – s/t
(15) Dark Was the Night
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The year an album was released is really a secondary detail, isn’t it? And a NOTE: I don’t have these lists down to a science (yet). In ten years, a look back at the best albums of 2009 is going to be much different. This ranking system is ephemeral, as of January 4th, 2010, and nothing more. I acquired Embryonic by The Flaming Lips, and The xx’s debut, and the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack, and Ain’t that Good News by Sam Cooke, and Eno & Byrne’s first album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in the waning days of the year, and they have not been given enough attention to accurately incorporate them into either list, as of January 4th, twenty-ten. But they are all good!! Listen to them!!
---
The main reason for this neglect is that I have been thinking more about this decade-long, best of the aughts list. And I have given it a laught of thaught. Before I present it, though, in addition to the above-expressed information on my music-listening habits, I must also caution you with this: I started college in August of 2004. Having no older siblings who had gone to college before me, and no one, really, that wanted to press their music upon me, August of 2004 marked the beginning of my long journey in discovering what having taste really means. That isn’t to say that I have taste, but rather that, for the most part, I only started listening to music that I currently find tasteful halfway through the decade, and not in y2k proper. Thus, the list is ’04-to-’09-heavy, and is similarly ephemeral, to the extent that I, on my still-humble budget, have yet to acquire what are probably the best albums of the entire decade, and that I have also only recently acquired obviously great albums like Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot it in People and The Hold Steady’s Separation Sunday which, if placed above any of the below albums, would be doing a disservice to my habits over the decade, as well as the definition of the word favorite.
How many should I include on this list? Let’s make it my favorite twenty-five albums of the aughts:
(1) Dr. Dog – We All Belong
(2) What Made Milwaukee Famous – Trying to Never Catch Up
(3) The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow
(4) Spoon – Kill the Moonlight
(5) Cold War Kids – Robbers & Cowards
(6) Why? – Alopecia
(7) Dawes – North Hills
(8) Delta Spirit – Ode to Sunshine
(9) Okkervil River – The Stage Names
(10) LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
(11) Radiohead – In Rainbows
(12) Band of Horses – Everything All the Time
(13) Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
(14) Arcade Fire – Funeral
(15) The Black Keys – Attack & Release
(16) Born Ruffians – Red, Yellow & Blue
(17) Vampire Weekend – s/t
(18) Kings of Leon – Youth & Young Manhood
(19) Kevin Devine – Make the Clocks Move
(20) Kings of Convenience – Riot on an Empty Street
(21) Okkervil River – The Stand-Ins
(22) Spoon – Gimme Fiction
(23) Grizzly Bear – Yellow House
(24) Fleet Foxes – s/t
(25) Say Anything…is a Real Boy
I can only hope that you’ve enjoyed reading. Questions? Comments? Rebuttal lists? Feel free. Otherwise, here’s to twenty-ten, and we’ll see you again in twenty-‘leven.
All of my platonic love,
Right?
Probably so, but not in any sort of way that we (humans) would wish for them to live: a presidential library named after, I am fairly certain, a man who cannot read; a troop surge in Afghanistan previously put on an eight-year hiatus so that we (colonialists) could focus on what (WHAT?!) really mattered, which, of course, was democratizing Iraq; vampires; Facebook, Tweeter, & the redefinition of the family; Subway commercials; The Real Housewives of Everytown, USA; et cetera.
It seems like only yesterday that we were bringing in the new millennium, when, congregated outside my Aunt Sheila’s house, my then-eleven year old cousin Roxanne had a nervous breakdown because she, not unlike everyone else in the world, had no idea how computers worked, as my mother let her (very short) hair down and got plastered off of screwdrivers while my stepdad was forced to work the night shift as, incidentally, a computer tech at Convergy’s, leading me, an incompetent then-fourteen year old who had never been behind the wheel of an automobile, to later offer to serve as my family’s designated driver.
Now those were the days.
The 2010s (twenty-tens) look to be promising – for me, anyway. So far, I’ve started drinking coffee without cream, I’m about fourteen pages into Atlas Shrugged, and I’ve set out an itinerary to watch the remainder of AFI’s 100 greatest films of all-time. I love my work. Even though I’ve only lived three places in my life, I’m convinced I live in one of the best cities in America, if not the world. I have a supportive and loving family whom I see about five times a year. And there’s a pretty fantastic lady in my life, who I am privileged to spend oodles of time with.
I am completely here. But over the last couple of months – and, more particularly, after I watched Adventureland (and then finished season five of Lost) – I have debated, with myself, as to what year I actually belong. What time period were there more people that were like me? Wasn’t there a time period where more people were like me? When did circumstance most cohere to my happiness? Where does my soul belong? There is not a straightforward answer to this, but it is a fairly interesting and worthwhile mental activity. And everyone likes to use their brain.
Right?!
---
I believe I am what is commonly and endearingly referred to as an old soul. I type on my (electric) typewriter and scrawl down notes in spiral, college-ruled notebooks; I mark up my own physical, paper copies of books; I collect and listen to vinyl records; I wear cardigans; I actively practice humility; I don’t much care for money; I’d prefer if the U.S. would take its foreign policy cues from Canada and Switzerland; et cetera. There are other people like me. They comprise the vast majority of the commenters over at videogum dot com, if you’d like to meet some. They call themselves monsters. I don’t know what to call them.
---
The word hipster gets thrown around a lot these days, doesn’t it? But does anyone really know what it means? I don’t, really. A friend of mine once told me that a mutual acquaintance of ours from college had told her that I was the most legitimate hipster that had ever walked that campus. I think I should have taken that as a compliment. I think the sentiments were flattering.
It seems to me that that term, hipster, though, includes far too many types of people for me to really want to be a part of it. For instance, take a person that classifies his- or herself as a “big time hipster.” What does that even mean? When you see that person on the street (or somewhere!), that’s a point in time where you might hear the word hipster get thrown around, but that doesn’t mean they (for example) read, and understand, and empathize with Jack Kerouac, who is hipster in its most pure and basic form. It doesn’t not mean that, but it doesn’t mean it either.
So, effectively, hipster sort of becomes like throwing around the word preppy. It’s using the word in a fashionable, near-meaningless sense. The person fashions his- or herself a hipster. They look a lot like all of these other people, in dress. But are we that overly-conscious and self-aware of what we wear? Do we call people that dress according to the status quo status quo people? Should we? Jack Kerouac was too interested in a person’s content, the things they were made of, to stop his search with such an easy and shallow shortcut. It’s literally not even skin-deep.
(This might be hypocritical. I’m sure there are people who try to say a lot with what they wear. I’m just not one of them, unless you consider not trying to say a lot with what you wear saying a lot with what you wear. And when I see someone in too, too skinny of skinny jeans, or a Slayer shirt, or a mink coat, I think, these are not my kind of people. And I think that – first, because – skinny jeans? Slayer? Mink? C’mon! – but also because these people have obviously overinvested themselves in what they choose to wear – they have created a shortcut to tell us about themselves. But maybe I have too and I just don’t think of it that way. But maybe neither do they.
Moving right along.)
I am certainly not fashionable. As objectively as should be humanly acceptable, here is how I might accurately describe myself: I am an over-educated, suburbia-raised, independent-thinking, bearded, left-handed, left-leaning, secular, socialist-humanist, overanalytic, opinionated, thrifty, mild-mannered, level-headed (when-not-driving), witty, easily-amused, somewhat charming, love-capable, affectionate, well-meaning, vulgar, snarky, sarcastic, engaging, socially-anxious, humble, music-, tv-, movie-, book-, food-, basketball-, & irony-loving, modest, wordy, hungry, genuine person. So what does that make me? A monster?! I think that just makes me me.
“My being has many facets.”
-Ignatius J. Reilly.
My point is, hipster is an overgeneralized, bastardized term – used, like all generalizations, so that humans can naively go on believing they understand other humans – and should really be further qualified, else altogether removed from our vocabularies, if it’s going to have any significant meaning.
---
A large part of this whole soul debate has to do with pop culture. What music, what movies, what books, what technologies can I do without? Eventually, I will get to a list of the best albums of the aughts – the decade, due to my liberal arts studies and my ever-burgeoning ability to grow a beard (among other things), that has proven, and will probably long-prove, to be my most formative. But I wonder, could I do without them? Couldn’t I have studied and burgeoned sometime else? How many of these albums will ever have a place among the best albums of all-time? Eight? Nine? And I probably didn’t even listen to them.
Was there a piece of literature written in the aughts that compares to anything Mark Twain or JD Salinger or Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Wolfe or Hermann Hesse wrote/have written? To wit (and in my humble opinion), there are the works of Dave Eggers, Chuck Klosterman, and David Sedaris, and A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. But do they really compare? Wouldn’t centuries of previous literature do?
And who are today’s Paul Newmans and James Stewarts and Peter Sellerses? George Clooney? Johnny Depp? Paul Giamatti? Really??
There is just so much good out there to pay very much attention to the contemporary.
---
I’m not going to pretend that my opinion on music matters.
I, by fate, I am sure (whatever that means!), somehow wound up in an archives class last semester. And in a lot of appraisal theory, it is understood that the archivist should have a full knowledge of the universe they wish to document in order to be qualified enough to be entrusted to make valid appraisals. And that’s sort of the way I feel about music critics. Unless they are intimately familiar with the music universe, or one particular genre of the music universe, including how to make that music, what does a critic’s opinion matter? It’s only as valid as your own, if not less so.
As I am suffering from anxiety for even thinking about tuning my new Djembe, I cannot claim to have an opinion on music that should be taken with even a minute amount of legitimacy. You like what you like, and I like what I like, and that is fine. My lists are opinions, shared as recommendations, or conversation-starters, or karass-finders – not (necessarily) statements that my taste is better than yours, but rather that my brain works this way (in list-form), and that I like these albums, and I think you might too. It’s an About Me.
---
One of the perks of Facebook is that it allows you to see how other people classify themselves, and their interests. For instance, under the Music category, my stepdad has consolidated everything he listens to into one word: eclectic. And that is the perfect word to describe it. It’s way better than just listing a bunch of genres. “Try me,” it unpretentiously suggests. I like that. And I think you could say the same about the music I choose to listen to, but I think there might be a qualifier that works equally well: sad. Fact: I listen to sad music. Also a fact: I could empathize with it earlier on in the year, when I really started to dig my toes in and begin to figure out who I am. What I figured out is that I am an old soul.
The last four months or so of my life have probably been the most completely and genuinely happy I have been since the days of spinning around in circles for the hell of it, where my only worries were slipping on the monkey-bars, or that no one besides me understood what the word “flexible” meant, or that my mom accidentally smeared mayonnaise instead of mustard on my sandwich. But then I didn’t know better.
Still I find that the music I actively appreciate the most is rooted in sadness, or, as it were, the blues. And here is the reason: it is the best music that has ever been made. It isn’t music for music’s sake; it’s music that says something. And all the things that are worth saying, and putting to music, are fundamentally sad, or moving in some way. It is filled with soul, and the people that sing it, or play it, sing and play it like they mean it, because they mean it. And there’s nothing better than it.
---
That said, and without further ado, here is a list of my favorite (not to be confused with the best) twenty-five albums that I, on my very humble budget, acquired in 2009:
(1) Why? – Alopecia
(2) Dawes – North Hills
(3) Talking Heads: 77
(4) The Flaming Lips – The Soft Bulletin
(5) Born Ruffians – Red, Yellow & Blue
(6) Dr. Dog – Easy Beat
(7) Otis Redding – Otis Blue
(8) Jurassic 5 EP
(9) Violent Femmes – Hallowed Ground
(10) Modest Mouse – No One’s First, and You’re Next
(11) The Beatles – Rubber Soul (U.S. Release)
(12) Dan Auerbach – Keep It Hid
(13) Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears – Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is!
(14) The Smiths – s/t
(15) Beach Boys – Pet Sounds
(16) Wilco – (The Album)
(17) Cat Stevens – Tea For the Tillerman
(18) Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue
(19) Something Else by the Kinks
(20) The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday
(21) The Costello Show – King of America
(22) Okkervil River – Don’t Fall in Love With Everyone You See
(23) Brian Eno & David Byrne – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
(24) The Polyphonic Spree – Beginning Stages Of…
(25) Deer Tick – War Elephant
One could then extract from this (and other) list(s) that my fifteen favorite albums that were released in 2009 were as follows:
(1) Dawes – North Hills
(2) Modest Mouse – No One’s First, and You’re Next
(3) Dan Auerbach – Keep it Hid
(4) Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears – Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is!
(5) Wilco – (The Album)
(6) Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue
(7) Elvis Perkins in Dearland
(8) Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
(9) St. Vincent – Actor
(10) Why? – Eskimo Snow
(11) Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
(12) Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
(13) Japandroids – Post-Nothing
(14) Monsters of Folk – s/t
(15) Dark Was the Night
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The year an album was released is really a secondary detail, isn’t it? And a NOTE: I don’t have these lists down to a science (yet). In ten years, a look back at the best albums of 2009 is going to be much different. This ranking system is ephemeral, as of January 4th, 2010, and nothing more. I acquired Embryonic by The Flaming Lips, and The xx’s debut, and the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack, and Ain’t that Good News by Sam Cooke, and Eno & Byrne’s first album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in the waning days of the year, and they have not been given enough attention to accurately incorporate them into either list, as of January 4th, twenty-ten. But they are all good!! Listen to them!!
---
The main reason for this neglect is that I have been thinking more about this decade-long, best of the aughts list. And I have given it a laught of thaught. Before I present it, though, in addition to the above-expressed information on my music-listening habits, I must also caution you with this: I started college in August of 2004. Having no older siblings who had gone to college before me, and no one, really, that wanted to press their music upon me, August of 2004 marked the beginning of my long journey in discovering what having taste really means. That isn’t to say that I have taste, but rather that, for the most part, I only started listening to music that I currently find tasteful halfway through the decade, and not in y2k proper. Thus, the list is ’04-to-’09-heavy, and is similarly ephemeral, to the extent that I, on my still-humble budget, have yet to acquire what are probably the best albums of the entire decade, and that I have also only recently acquired obviously great albums like Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot it in People and The Hold Steady’s Separation Sunday which, if placed above any of the below albums, would be doing a disservice to my habits over the decade, as well as the definition of the word favorite.
How many should I include on this list? Let’s make it my favorite twenty-five albums of the aughts:
(1) Dr. Dog – We All Belong
(2) What Made Milwaukee Famous – Trying to Never Catch Up
(3) The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow
(4) Spoon – Kill the Moonlight
(5) Cold War Kids – Robbers & Cowards
(6) Why? – Alopecia
(7) Dawes – North Hills
(8) Delta Spirit – Ode to Sunshine
(9) Okkervil River – The Stage Names
(10) LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
(11) Radiohead – In Rainbows
(12) Band of Horses – Everything All the Time
(13) Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
(14) Arcade Fire – Funeral
(15) The Black Keys – Attack & Release
(16) Born Ruffians – Red, Yellow & Blue
(17) Vampire Weekend – s/t
(18) Kings of Leon – Youth & Young Manhood
(19) Kevin Devine – Make the Clocks Move
(20) Kings of Convenience – Riot on an Empty Street
(21) Okkervil River – The Stand-Ins
(22) Spoon – Gimme Fiction
(23) Grizzly Bear – Yellow House
(24) Fleet Foxes – s/t
(25) Say Anything…is a Real Boy
I can only hope that you’ve enjoyed reading. Questions? Comments? Rebuttal lists? Feel free. Otherwise, here’s to twenty-ten, and we’ll see you again in twenty-‘leven.
All of my platonic love,
Posted by grawlrus
