Director's cut version of a piece written for the final issue of The Boar of 2009, and hence the decade, listing our top ten records of the 00s. It is, as acknowledged, both incomplete and over-complete, for the obvious reasons. To get a little perspective: the main list, devised by Dave Toulson, had Manic Street Preachers' Journal For Plague Lovers as its number one. This list was the only one to include any albums by hip-hop artists, or indeed any non-white artists. Aside from Jess Colman's inclusion of Belle & Sebastian's Dear Catastrophe Waitress in a number one slot, this was the only one to include any work by female musicians. That gives you an idea what students listen to these days.
To get everything upfront: this list is redundant. Not enough dust has settled even since the beginning of the decade to make sense of ten years marked by perhaps the most fevered processes of cultural expansion and proliferation the world has yet seen. The increasingly obvious collapse of Britain's old pop media – radio, newspapers, magazines and the monoliths of the corporate pop industry – in the face of the internet has eroded the old models of how we listen, how we consume and love records. Even the CD format, except for small pockets of bloody-minded opposition, manifested as lavish packaging, seems to have its days numbered. There is now far too much music being released every year for anyone, fan or professional critic, to get a handle on it all. Looking at an entire decade, you can fucking forget it - I haven't even heard the most of the records that made most other critics' top 10s, the readymade elect. Lists, ranking and comprehension are for the Nick Hornbys of this world now. Consensus, in a universe of listeners atomised onto their own islands of taste, must be manufactured.
Perhaps the closest thing to a genuinely popular, zeitgeist-reflecting – and, not coincidentally, avant-garde – music was the astonishing renaissance of hip-hop and R&B that accompanied the end millennium: ruthlessly capitalist, relentlessly neophilic, rhizomatically spawning new and alien forms. There were Timbaland's productions, of which his collaborations with Missy Elliot on 'Get Yr Freak On' and the accompanying album Miss E... So Addictive, were the pinnacle; Outkast's psychedelic masterpiece Stankonia, the most feverishly inventive product of the Dirty South; the stoned high-low art absurdism of Madvillain's Madvillainy (Tristan Tzara in a hustler get-up); Cannibal Ox's book of revelations, The Cold Vein; the long-awaited Hell Hath No Fury, on which The Neptunes' production and Pusha T and Malice's oiled and vicious flows meshed like V8 innards; the genesis of grime in London, bent into extraordinary shapes by the artistic will of Dizzee Rascal on Boy In Da Corner; the purest flowering of Kanye West's pop talent in the form of Late Registration.
No surprise that indie simply couldn't compete with this overcharged germination, going, for the most part, into an ever-worsening slough of aesthetic conservatism and emotional infantilism. Where it chose to engage with these artificial intoxications, it produced the shimmering, Platonic dream-pop ideal of Panda Bear's Person Pitch, and Richard Youngs' suite of digital incantations The Naive Shaman – ecstatic accesses to the heart of nature, through the dreamworld of technology.
Shadowing this excitement, in a decade riven by disaster – 9/11, the Iraq War, the market crash – has been a sense of grief, dissolution and trauma, exemplified by Burial's Untrue – the rave burnt out into a world of shadows haunted by the memories of love, the spectral jungle of his first album hollowed-out to a translucent perfection. Coil's ...And The Ambulance Died In His Arms, recorded at their 2003 ATP performance, shortly before the death of frontman Jhonn Balance, was the aching, haunting, end to one of the most brilliant bodies of work of the 20th century. Forbidding, but gripping this listener like barbed wire: the apocalyptic wasteland of Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven sprawled over the first half of the decade, while The Drift, Scott Walker's first album in more than 10 years, appeared as the most fully-formed, profound and insurmountable artefact of this decade.
What of all this will last? Try me again in 2020.
