Pitchfork's Best Songs Of The Decade

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to bother listing all 500 - here's the link: http://pitchfork.com/p2k/ and here's the Top 20:

20. The Walkmen - The Rat
19. R. Kelly - Ignition (Remix)
18. Hercules and Love Affair - Blind
17. Annie - Heartbeat
16. The Rapture - House of Jealous Lovers
15. The Knife - Heartbeats
14. Jay-Z - 99 Problems
13. LCD Soundsystem - Losing My Edge
12. OutKast - Hey Ya!
11. Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
10. Arcade Fire - Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)
9. Animal Collective - My Girls
8. Radiohead - Idioteque
7. Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps
5. Daft Punk - One More Time
4. Beyonce ft Jay-Z - Crazy in Love
3. M.I.A. ft Bun B and Rich Boy - Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)
2. LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends
1. OutKast - B.O.B

(I voted in this and did a few blurbs, by the way. The top 200 have blurbs and IMHO they are an excellent way of whiling a few hours away)

Comments

Canon Fired

[koganbot]

Is the overlap between "it's canon" and "it tops retrospective best of lists" not 100%?

Quick answer is "No, not remotely." So, to take issue with both dubdobdee and alexmacpherson:

Although I have nothing in principle against canons, and in fact have something in principle in favor of them - I don't think you can study the past without them, even or especially if they fundamentally serve as a list around which one organizes one's opposition to it - I think it's wrong to believe that this list, or recent P&J's, for that matter, come remotely close to identifying a canon, even the canon that serves a particular variant of a social subgroup. That's because even the subgroup, this decade's critics and quasi-intelligentsia, haven't come within light years of consensus or canon-forming. Never since 1968 has there been such confusion or indecision as to what belongs in a canon as in the current decade, except maybe for in the previous decade. Or the one before that... Anyway, I doubt that the people who created and blurbed the Pitchfork list think that they've got a better sense of the form and direction of the last 50 years of music than the American Idol theme weeks have, and an individual Idol contestant can accidentally reshuffle the canon in a minute and a half. ("Results 1 - 10 of about 88,800 for carrie underwood heart alone. (0.17 seconds).") I mean, among critics in 1979 there was a rock canon competing with a glam-punk-revisionary-futuristic countercanon, with funk and disco and reggae destabilizing both, but I couldn't write an equivalent summary for 2009. "Indie versus pop" hardly illustrates what's going on. (The problem not just being what the hell is indie, but what the hell is pop, and what the fuck!)

I'm told that when my dad was shown the list of pallbearers for his younger brother's funeral in 1955, he paused, nodded his head, and said, "a balanced ticket." In any event, a balanced ticket isn't a canon, and the Pitchfork 20 isn't even a balanced ticket. "B.O.B." is a placeholder, not a consensus choice or even a representative of a tendency (despite what the blurb tries to assert). That the twenty doesn't include Britney, Eminem, 50 Cent, Rihanna, Taylor, and Lil Jon isn't just a quirk of the voting, it's the systematic exclusion of what a lot of critics near the Pitchfork orbit like that a lot of readers and other critics can't hack. But even that sentence is too clear. What about Amy, Tashbed? Miranda Lambert (the country gal that postpunkers actually latch onto)? And no one seriously thinks "99 Problems" is canon. It's just crossover.

I don't think we could pool our intelligence to make a list of what's in the canon, even what's in the canon for a particular sensibility. At the moment, a canon isn't to be had. We can predict what will top P&J in any particular year, but we can't arrive at anything close to a consensus that what's on top is particularly good.

(Btw, and this takes us beyond the canon question, and I know that such lists are supposed to choose quality, not influence, but I'd be hard pressed to say that any track in the Top 20 is more important than Fat Joe's "What's Luv?" which got maybe four votes at the most in Pazz & Jop, and probably won't even make it out of its poptimists heat. I didn't vote for it in P&J either; had it penciled in at eleven behind Brandy, but ahead of Missy and the Dixie Chicks. Not even in contention for my list were R. Kelly, House Of Jealous Lovers, The Knife, or LCD Soundsystem.)

not a tl;dr, just can't resist the one-liner

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Apart from Radiohead.

(F'reals, Radiohead is canon, the only canon from this decade I can think of in the sense everyone means, to the extent that not liking Radiohead basically would exile me from "indie" in my offline life if I admitted it. If I had to define "what/who is pop if pop is not!indie" in one sentence, it would be "not listening to Radiohead.")

Re: not a tl;dr, just can't resist the one-liner

[koganbot]

I love "Creep"!

But I'm probably in the "not listening to Radiohead" category. But so are my parents.

Re: Canon Fired

[koganbot]

I might say that early '00s Timbaland is canon for the sort of people who are likely to put someone like Timbaland in a canon.

Re: Canon Fired

[petronia.livejournal.com]

IME "indie" people put Timbaland in a canon and "pop" people think I'm talking about Justin Timberlake.

(Which is not to say that pop people don't rate Timbaland tracks, quite the contrary)