In great part my People’s List is a memorial to the years I was consciously giving a shit about current albums, roughly 2001-2005, and to my obsessions and concerns during that period. (It is also, inevitably, a memorial to my present perspective on the years in question; otherwise the late 90s would be represented exclusively by weedy Christian rock.) When I was compiling it, I went through my Top 100 of the Oughts to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything major, and felt all over again the absurdity and injustice of any set of dumb old albums no matter how good being forced to represent the real diversity and color and joy and weirdness and giddiness and overreach and disposability of that decade (and a bit on either side). If I was going to mix singles and albums, none of my top ten albums of the period would break into the top fifty of all recordings. I’m not sure any of those albums’ singles would, not even “Countdown” — that’s how solid the era was with singles.

Once upon a time I had a 60s-centric vision of music, in which the British Invasion, folk-rock, Motown, Stax, and garage rock formed the backbone of the pop ideal. After that, I warmed to an 80s-centric vision of pop, in which post-punk ideals, the remnants of disco, the beginnings of indie, the synth revolution, queer aesthetics, and the scrambling attempts of the rock generation to keep up combined to create another ideal. Today I think of the early-to-mid 00s as being the height of pop music — and this time there’s nothing Anglophilic about it, no sense in which the Brits are doing it better or explaining it to us or setting the terms of engagement. (There’s no British equivalent to Kanye or Andre 3000, much less a UK Britney or Beyoncé.) But in another sense, I now look back and see that what I loved in the music of the 60s and the 80s is the same thing I love in the pop of today/a few years ago: color, motion, vividly expressed emotions, rhythmic drive, unique textures, interesting stories being told.

I get little of that from albums, whether my favorites or anyone else’s. Sometimes, sure, for the space of a song; but the more complete a song is in itself the less necessary it seems in the flow of an album, and the more pointless the flimsy drapings of the album are to cover up its charms. Albums are longform works, at their best when they luxuriate in a mood or approach a single topic from multiple angles. Or, alternately, on the rare occasions when they’re able to function as greatest-hits collections or multi-artist compilations — the best of this second kind of album, like Revolver, Exile on Main St., or London Calling, are so dense with diversity that they feel more like listening to a great radio playlist than to an album. There have been very few albums of that kind made in the post-millennium years, and virtually none since Andre 3000 and Big Boi split. But while I’m usually down to listen to a great radio playlist, I’m less often willing to surrender to a mood or subject myself to even the catchiest treatise for an hour-plus. Which is why I basically stopped listening to albums after 2006, with a slight uptick in the last couple of years when I felt the artist in question had earned my attention.

Huh. I could have sworn I had nothing to say about this.

18 Notes/ Hide

  1. rgr-pop said: yeah, the oughts was such a killer singles decade, really, it felt gross having to choose “albums.” albums are totally a construct and a lot of really good pop—the best music of the oughts—is losing out in this system.
  2. jonathanbogart posted this

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