« There Will Be Lists
Top Twenty Albums of 2009 »

Top Fifty Albums of the 2000s

Behold! The first of this decade’s stocktakings is complete.

  1. The Dismemberment Plan: Change
  2. Radiohead: Kid A
  3. Joanna Newsom: The Milk-Eyed Mender
  4. Jay-Z: The Blueprint
  5. Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
  6. Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
  7. Deerhoof: Friend Opportunity
  8. Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend
  9. Radiohead: In Rainbows
  10. Modest Mouse: The Moon & Antarctica
  11. Joanna Newsom: Ys
  12. OutKast: Stankonia
  13. Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam
  14. Death Cab for Cutie: We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes
  15. Elliott Smith: Figure 8
  16. Mastodon: Remission
  17. The Hold Steady: Boys and Girls in America
  18. Arcade Fire: Neon Bible
  19. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
  20. Cut Copy: In Ghost Colours
  21. Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
  22. Eminem: The Marshall Mathers LP
  23. Interpol: Turn on the Bright Lights
  24. Björk: Vespertine
  25. Fugazi: The Argument
  26. Burial: Untrue
  27. Sonic Youth: Murray Street
  28. The Shins: Chutes Too Narrow
  29. Interpol: Antics
  30. Dirty Projectors: Rise Above
  31. Arcade Fire: Funeral
  32. Broken Social Scene: You Forgot It in People
  33. My Morning Jacket: Z
  34. The Joggers: With a Cape and a Cane
  35. Coheed and Cambria: In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3
  36. Panda Bear: Person Pitch
  37. The Decemberists: The Crane Wife
  38. Menomena: Friend and Foe
  39. Deerhoof: The Runners Four
  40. M.I.A.: Arular
  41. Kanye West: Graduation
  42. Deerhunter: Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
  43. TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain
  44. Strength: Going Strong
  45. Sleater-Kinney: The Woods
  46. Fuck Buttons: Tarot Sport
  47. Mastodon: Leviathan
  48. Q and Not U: Different Damage
  49. Animal Collective: Feels
  50. Battles: Mirrored

The best year for music this decade? As I confidently asserted at the time, it was 2007, all ten of whose Top Ten finalists made this list of fifty.

The artist of the decade? The raw numbers would suggest Radiohead. If we restrict ourselves to artists who first emerged this decade (and we hopefully can agree on a definition of “emerge” without too much back-and-forth), it looks pretty sweet for Joanna Newsom.

No matter the top dog, it was a delightful and consistently surprising ten years for music, and I think the list reflects the diversity of the pearls that this unpronounceable decade had to offer. I don’t know why Change still seems so insuperably brilliant to me all these years later—maybe it’s me—but it’s possible that it really is one of the best albums of all time.

Thinking of slapping some genre-specific sub-lists together (metal, hip hop, etc.). I feel pretty good about this one, though.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Culture, List, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Top Fifty Albums of the 2000s”

  1. Luc Perkins Says:
    December 27th, 2009 at 6:13 pm

    You will NEVER convince me that “Change” is brilliant (or that “Ellen and Ben” is a good song at all), and you know this, so I’ll avoid the subject. Instead, I’ll just post some musings:

    –I never knew you were as big a fan of “And Then Nothing…” as this. I’m assumig your affection has grown in the past few years. That might be my favorite album of the decade–not “the best” in the sense that I would expect other people to like it as much as I do, but it is certainly the one that makes me ache and sigh and smile more than any other.
    –I expected “Turn on the Bright Lights” to go higher
    –I’m pleased that you followed through on your “Coheed and Cambria” commitment
    –I’m still not sold on Deerhoof, and I’ve come to value Atlas Sound over Deerhunter, which has returned to sounding average to me (mostly by way of comparison)
    –I heard a song from the next Joanna Newsom album on Duke radio about six weeks ago and I almost cried. In a car full of people.
    –I suppose I expected the Shins to go higher
    –I’m glad to see that the Northwest has been amply represented
    –No Blonde Redhead? Fleet Foxes? And I knew “Merriweather Post Pavilion” wasn’t going to go as high as other AC albums, but its disappearance is surprising.

  2. Will Says:
    December 27th, 2009 at 9:11 pm

    Hey Luc,

    Thanks for reading! I’ll try to address all your points.

    I had no idea you didn’t care for “Change.” I know most people prefer “E&I,” but “Change” is nearly perfect to my ears. It might have quite a bit to do with the fact that it’s the first one I owned and listened to regularly. I really love “Ellen and Ben” too and am surprised to see you direct such hostility toward it! I guess we’ll have to chat about this sometime.

    I’ve always loved “And Then Nothing…” and actually haven’t even given it a proper spin in five or six years. I have to surmise that it never came up between us. I, for my part, didn’t know YOU were so crazy about it, or at least (certainly) not enough to call it your #1. [For the record, our evaluative criterion seems to be pretty much exactly the same: personal pleasure-delivery. After all, what else is there?]

    “Turn on the Bright Lights” features about four of the best songs I’ve ever heard, and about three more really good ones, and then some undeniable filler. If it were more consistent, it’d be more handsomely placed. I’d say the same about the Fleet Foxes album too, if you’ll permit my disrupting your sequence of comments here; between the LP and the EP, Fleet Foxes came out looking like one of the best bands going last year, but the LP on its own also drags the weight of some filler, and as such doesn’t quite make it. Most of my favorite songs of theirs were on the EP. If I had permitted myself to consider the two as a single piece, it would have scored very well; judging the LP on its merits alone, I’d grant it an honorable mention.

    I can’t deny Coheed and Cambria. That album has some clunkers on it too, particularly the directionless ten-minute secret track, but its best songs showcase a more potent cocktail of emo and 80s metal than I ever thought possible. If you can get past Claudio’s voice (which I’ve surprised myself by actually growing to like), and his lyrics (which make the opposite of sense and lack poetry and are really best ignored), the riffs and drumming carry the day.

    If “Friend Opportunity” doesn’t sell you on Deerhoof, nothing will. I find that album staggeringly brilliant; from track to track, and often within a single track, the music never goes where you think it will. It goes somewhere better. Nothing thrills me like that.

    Blonde Redhead’s real decade of glory was the last one, to my mind. I might be persuaded to give another HM to “Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons,” but neither of the two albums that followed really did it for me. Naturally, those were the two that everyone else loved.

    “Merriweather Post Pavilion” is my fourth-favorite AC record at best. I totally adore “My Girls,” and that’s it; I can’t name another song that I’d give better than a 7 out of 10. I think it drags with particularly terrible might all through the middle; I listened to it again just last week after not bothering for many months, and I liked it a bit more than I remembered, but still: around “Summertime Clothes,” I just tuned out, and didn’t snap back into it until the start of “Lion in a Coma.” I still don’t understand why this is being held up as their masterpiece. I don’t even think it’s all that good.

    That ought to do it! We hanging out again before you venture back east?

  3. Andrew Says:
    December 29th, 2009 at 9:02 am

    51. William Shatner: Has Been

Leave a Reply