And now, for your consummate pleasure, the remainder of Racecar Brown's top fifty songs of the decade.
Ted Leo should either not work or be so much more popular than he is. The fact that he his career has traversed this strange, ambivalent middle ground just doesn't make sense; if the Thermals can make it onto TV shows with four chords and pristine melodies and the Gaslight Anthem can take New Jersey rock sentiments mainstream, then why was Ted Leo until recently on a record label that couldn't pay its artists?
Just look at "Parallel or Together?", an acoustic punk song that avoids the pitfalls inherent in that three-word phrase. It doesn't use acoustics as a gimmick to say "this is the soft song," instead using the furiously strummed chords and pummeling drums to make a track as propulsive and rollicking as anything in Leo's catalog. Leo's attempts to fit the little pieces of his songs where they belong may have not resulted in his deserved commercial success, but that may just because Leo and the mainstream aren't together at all. They're parallel.
Going big, musically, can be a double-edged sword. Sometimes its understatement and restraint that makes for the most profound musical moments, and those who try to do too much end up sounding like they're trying to do too much. Even if over-the-top is what a band is going for, the best big songs usually have a sense of effortlessness that make the big musical statements even bigger.
"Moth's Wings" is one of those tracks. Slapped between a glossy '80s dance number ("Little Secrets") and, um, a glossy '80s dance number ("The Reeling"), "Moth's Wings" succeeds because of that effortless sense, and the beautiful symmetry of having a song about unresolved discord actually have a hook that never resolves musically. It's big, but never sounds like it's trying too hard. It's yearning, but never sounds defeated. If there's one thing Manners and "Moth's Wings" proved it's that Passion Pit can wield the sword of Big.
Los Campesinos! have made their short career on, yes, bursting with unbridled energy, but also on mixing their high-octane musical pace with a sense of sentimentality that both contradicts and works with their explosive style, so uniquely theirs that it's almost even more mind-blowing when they work against it (re: "The Sea Is a Good Place to Think About the Future").
"You! Me! Dancing!" is essentially the group's mission statement, as it crescendos from a meandering guitar into a cacophony of bashed cymbals before the most addictive guitar riff this side of "Satisfaction" slips with a stomping drumbeat and crystalline bells as Gareth Campesinos! sings unabashedly about not being able to dance to a song that you can't not dance to. Hell, even Gareth can't as he defines what makes the group and song so great in six words: "It's you! It's me! It's dancing!"
Justin Timberlake is the greatest pop star on the planet, stuck in a time when pop culture is way too ADD and of the moment to do anything aside from chase the latest flavor of the week (I'm looking at you, Lady Gaga). He's only put out two solo albums, but both of them were pop music triumphs, both working so well within and outside of the confines of simple pop music. Pre-file sharing he'd have been the '00s version of '80s MJ. As it is, he's simply the greatest pop star on the planet and no one cares.
Take another listen to "My Love", one of the singles on an album where every song was strong enough to be one. This was just before Timbaland's futuristic electro-buzz became more grating than interesting, and JT's easy, seductive delivery created the perfect foil, and T.I.'s killer verse, showcasing the most verbal skills on a pop song's guest verse since Ludacris on "Yeah", kicked the track up another notch. While, surprisingly, it is the albums and not necessarily the singles that have made JT such an incomparable pop sensation, "My Love" stands out against them all.
Listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot a person has to wonder what exactly the record executives at Warner were thinking when they called it a "career killer." No, it didn't sound like either of their two previous albums Being There or Summerteeth, but wasn't there something universal about "Heavy Metal Drummer"? Something undeniably heartbreaking about "Reservations"?
"Pot Kettle Black" is by no stretch of the imagination one of the obvious standouts of Yankee. It sneaks up on you, slated between the non-diatonic guitar solos of "I'm the Man That Loves You" and the hazy piano ballad "Poor Places", a simple, subdued rock and roll song decorated by feedback swirls, dollops of strings, and Jeff Tweedy's ashtray voice that blooms into a chorus that sounds reluctant, but more touching for it. Sure, a song like "Pot Kettle Black" wasn't ever going to be a chart-topper, but there was certainly something shortsighted about calling it a career killer.
LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy has always had his finger on the pulse of indie culture and that's what makes choosing a single LCD Soundsystem track so difficult. Do you go with fantasy track "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House"? Or the simultaneously funny and scathing hipster indictment "Losing My Edge"? "Losing My Edge" may have been the most defining LCD Soundsytsem track, and arguably the most defining track of indie music, but it was "All My Friends" that made the cut because it didn't care about any sort of message, the kind of message that often obscured Murphy's actual music.
Instead, it rode haphazard piano keys, two chords, a machine-gun drumbeat, and Murphy's most emotional vocal melody for over seven minutes, melting brains in the best possible way. Never once does the song let up, a possibly claustrophobic move for a lesser talent, but instead an insatiably engaging move in Murphy's deft hands, less concerned with setting up for Daft Punk than with equaling the pure joy that band inspires.
Where have all the post-rock boys gone? In the early to middle parts of the decade groups like Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, and Canada's Godspeed You! Black Emperor battled along the post-rock landscape and left towering records like Young Team, The Earth Is Not a Cold, Dead Place, and Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven behind in their wake. The latter of the group was Godspeed's four-part neo-symphony, with the obvious standout being the first track "Storm".
"Storm" is everything you could want from post-rock, it alters tone from affirming to depressing, scope from epic to personal, volume from a whisper to towering pillars of sound that ebb and flow like the tide. With organic instruments and sampled sounds cropping up in unexpected corners and coming waves cresting only to suddenly die or explode witout notice, "Storm" was literally a force of nature, both a fitting introduction and swan song to a genre once king.
Stream available at this link.
While 2009's album from the Very Best, Warm Heart of Africa was brilliantly and undeniably full of life, packed with original music that communicated, well, the warm heart of Africa, pulling from African musical traditions and molding them with modern Western music to create a unique and affecting sonic blend. It was markedly different than their 2008 mixtape, which recalled a rapper's mixtape more than anything, placing Mwamwaya' soaring vocal harmonies over Vampire Weekend, M.I.A., and, most iconically, Michael Jackson's "Will You Be There."
The sweet fluff of "Will You Be There" was most famously featured on soundtrack to Free Will and while the extended choral intro isn't instantly recognizable, those first piano chords certainly are, and they're a great example of the emotional power of pop music. Wisely Radioclit leaves MJ's verses intact, but spruce up much of the open space with Mwamwaya's vocals. And nothing expresses what the Very Best are about better than Mwamwaya's echoing statement of "We love you," the last words you hear him say on the mixtape.
Apple has changed the way we listen to music, obviously. The iPod and file sharing combination, the new technology we had on our hands, was the tipping point that still has the music industry in turmoil. Apple was also the forefathers of the new standard of introducing music into the public consciousness through commercials, and there may be no better example than Feist's advertisement for Apple's iPod Nano Video, which featured the roaring "1 2 3 4".
All of Feist's album The Reminder is solid, but "1 2 3 4" was the obvious single even before Apple made it unforgettable. Built on a simple guitar figure that guides strings, banjo, a jazzy piano, a veritable backing chorus, finger snaps and a triumphant horn section, the song is a gorgeous, slow-burning flame that, when the "da da de da da" outro hits you can't help but throw your hands in the air and sing along.
There may not be a more appropriate song title for Spoon than "The Underdog". They've perpetually been underdogs, even with a string of albums as strong as Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight, even with being named Metacritic's most highly acclaimed band of the decade, it was still possible to underestimate and overlook the group.
With "The Underdog", Spoon made that same reaction impossible; it was featured in 17 Again for fuck's sake. Employing a joyous, off-kilter acoustic guitar riff, a burbling bass line, soaring horns and those fucking handclaps (can anyone get them right?), the song was insatiable, bouncing and smiling and assured everyone that heard it that they wouldn't underestimate Spoon again.
In a way, including Dntel's original collaboration with Ben Gibbard when I already included a Postal Service song on this list feels like cheating. Even if "(This Is) the Dream of Evan and Chan" was on Jimmy Tamberello's solo album, it seems like a technicality, but one that I am certainly not above exploiting, if only because of how perfectly formulated "Dream" is.
In a decade where genre walls dissolved like breath mint strips it's easy to forget how strange hearing an indie singer mixed with the rhythmic electro-static of Tamberello's production when "Dream" first came out, and it can be partially blamed for that dissolution; Hearing Gibbard's heart-wrenching vocal melodies paired with such a well-crafted hazy, electronic bed made us want to hear more. Enough so where I just had to cheat on this list.
Every time Common comes out with another killer album it's, for whatever reason, thought of as a comeback. Partially it's because it's astounding to think of how long Common has been so very, very good. In the middle of the decade, shortly after declaring on The College Dropout, "They say Hip-Hop is dead/I'm here to resurrect me," he dropped his classic from the aughts, Be.
Hearing the opening title track it makes you feel nostalgic for J Dilla. Opening with that improvised stand-up bass before opening into the bouncing jazz riff, it's shortly joined by a buzzing synth, a playful piano, and uplifting strings, it's practically a religious experience long before Common riffs that the Messiah might return through his daughter. Sure, Universal Mind Control may have been a disappointment, but it's no use ever looking past Common. His nickname is Hip-Hop for a reason.
Miike Snow, whose members include Bloodshy & Avant, the production group behind Britney Spears' "Toxic", released their own album this year, hitting the festival circuit including Lollapalooza. Even though the Swedish group's album was enjoyable, they were never able to hit all the same terrific electro-pop moments they absolutely murdered on what is most assuredly Britney's best song.
What makes "Toxic" so great is its avoidance of typical pop tropes. It opens with those furiously bowed strings, that viciously strummed acoustic guitar before letting Britney's seductive coos welcome in the toxic waste bass line that slithers around the song's syncopated rhythm. Spears was never a mind-blowing singer, and she wisely sticks to her sultry pout that dances with Bloodshy & Avant's sexy bounce. Listening to this, it's impossible not to remember what sort of great pop talent we lost when Britney went apeshit.
Playing this song for a friend, he put it about as beautifully concise as I ever could when he said "It's such a good pop song that it's not a pop song anymore." Not to say there's anything wrong with pop music (Britney Spears was the last song, remember?) but his point stood. "Crown on the Ground" is so infectious that it transcends the radio pap that it indoctrinates into its sound.
"Crown on the Ground" obliterates normal conventions of what sort of volume is okay, pushing limits partially due to recording limitations, but also due to the aesthetic decision to be unflinchingly fucking loud, but all that noise can't cover up the destructively danceable beat or the undeniable pop hooks that make "Crown on the Ground" so repeatable. Such a good pop song, it's not a pop song anymore, indeed.
M.I.A. is the decade's most deceptive pop star. She started out simply as Diplo's genre-bending girlfriend singer, then an example of how much embracing file-sharing and blog hype can jump start a career. Finally, after the release of Kala, she became an international pop star, the astounding image of her at the Grammy's, nine months pregnant, forever stuck in the national consciousness.
"Paper Planes" was the song that sparked M.I.A.'s explosion, with massive radio play, a spot on the trailer for a huge movie (Pineapple Express), and its own laconic drawl. Falling easily into the undeniable groove of the slinky tremolo guitars and mid-tempo electro bounce, "Paper Planes" both exposes exactly why M.I.A.'s sing-speak is so effective, as it rides the beat like a needle in a groove, lending a global ease that justifies Maya's fame.
There was a small window when Interpol was the biggest indie band in the world. They brought back the dark, almost gothic edge of groups like Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure and, yes, Joy Division. A lot was made of singer Paul Banks' vocal similarities to the late Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis and, while it was at least marginally accurate, it - and those earlier comparisons - also obscured the fact that Interpol was a pretty good band in its own right.
After their first record, the band's inability to craft music both as dark and as listenable as their debut Turn On the Bright Lights was exposed and they (let's face it) deservedly faded into the background, their mastery of the style they brought to prominence ultimately hurt them, as the backlash had already begun shortly after Bright Lights became so big. What remains behind are the songs, wound insanely tight, every note in lockstep with the one before and after, with the violent "Obstacle 1" as the best of the group.
The locked-in guitar strums, the robotic precision of the drumming, the machine-like efficiency of the bass line, they all wind the verses into tightly coiled tension wires that threaten to burst - never more violently than in that open pre-chorus that whips suddenly into the explosion of the chorus that still causes chills when Banks lifelessly comments that "You'll go stabbing yourself in the neck." For awhile, they were the biggest indie band in the world, and "Obstacle 1" displays why.
Taylor, I'm really happy for you, and I'ma let you finish (could I really resist?), but Beyoncé had one of the greatest songs of the decade. Strangely, the whole Kanye West/Taylor Swift situation just shows the unbridled power of "Single Ladies". Passion for such a great song and video almost ruined Kanye's career, which simultaneously catapulted Taylor Swift into greater visibility, especially when Beyoncé herself brought Swift out at the end of the MTV VMAs where the incident took place.
Beyoncé has had more than one monstrous single. If it weren't for my self-imposed one-song-per-artist limit "Crazy In Love" would have definitely cracked this list and probably even the top fifteen. That makes the fact that "Single Ladies" blows away any of her other songs even more impressive. Even Jay-Z's wild verse on "Crazy In Love"'s jubilant horns can't touch it.
If anything, "Single Ladies" proved that you can never have too many hand claps. That joyous little human rhythmic device opens and drives the song, accented by what sounds like the jumping noise from the original Super Mario Brothers video game, as you can practically hear Beyoncé's heels stamping on the dance floor with force as she aggressively belts out her taunting tale. And check how those massive synths that envelop the chorus' second repetition push and pull at B's lines, injecting the most tasteful dissonance in a pop song this decade. In a way, it's hard to fault Kanye West. He simply loved this song too damn much. Who can blame him?
You would think that The Carter, the forthcoming Lil Wayne documentary that blew up the festival circuit, would be more entertaining than provocative, but something about it caused Wayne and his people to try and sue the creators, and watching the trailer gives you an incredibly interesting look into an artist that often seems to be the class clown. But remember your class clowns? Weren't they always the most tortured people you knew?
It's easy to be distracted by his occasional forays into the scatological and gynecological, and mistake Wayne for a shock-value rapper. His sometimes disgusting lyrics - like where he compares himself to a venereal disease (like a menstrual bleed) on "A Milli" - can disguise the fact that Wayne's mind has to be going a thousnd miles an hour; he mostly freestyles his entire albums and never, never, writes anything down.
But even more impressive is his willingness to play with conventional rap song structures; he's the only major rapper today really fucking with the formula at all, and it resulted in one of his unequivocal successes in "Shooter." Wayne doesn't even begin rapping until over a minute in, instead allowing Robin Thicke's syrupy voice to flirt with the buoyant bass-driven beat before Weezy kicks down the door of the studio with so much bile directed at all the haters who he pushes aside with one line, "They got a whole lot to say, but I don't listen/Call me automatic Weezy, bitch, I keep spittin'." A spiteful, vicious line from an artist who is far more than the goofy impression he can give out.
Canada's Broken Social Scene have almost become a franchise at this point, with solo records from Brendan Canning and Kevin Drew being released with the opener "Broken Social Scene Presents...", as if they're the movie Hostel, trying to grab a few extra viewers by advertising the movie with Quentin Tarantino's name plastered everywhere. Though Canning and Drew's albums were certainly not as displeasing musically as Hostel was theatrically.
There's a reason for this, of course. Just as Tarantino's name inspires loyalty in movie goers, the Broken Social Scene band name has cultivated an equally fervent following with terrific releases like 2002's You Forgot It in People and 2005's self-titled release that made challenging, innovative and lovable pop music that flirted with a bucketful of interesting genres. But it was one of their simplest songs, "Anthems For a Seventeen-Year Old Girl", that marked their arrival.
"Anthems", with its whispery banjo that grows and unfurls into a sighing bed of lilting strings, gentle bass and meditative guitar, stood out not just from its undeniable beauty, but due to its unique use of Emily Haines' vocals, which were recorded over and over, then processed almost to the point of incomprehension without losing an ounce of soul or melody and when her words, literally a set of anthems for seventeen-year olds, include the demands "Park that car/Drop that phone/Sleep on the floor/Dream about me" it's impossible to do anything but acquiesce.
I referenced the gradual public opinion downfall of Kanye West's career earlier in this post, particularly the latest of his awards show breakdowns when he took the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV VMAs in defense of Beyoncé. In the wake of that, the culmination of many events just like it, it's easy to forget that it wasn't too long ago that people fucking loved this guy. Not just liked, but unabashedly loved this guy.
If Spoon was an underdog story, then Kanye West's was the underdog story. A Chicago-born producer who, despite being the primary creative force behind Jay-Z's masterpiece The Blueprint, couldn't catch a break as a rapper. Even the label that paid his rent by recognizing his considerable production skill was off-put on the idea of putting out his album, even after they had heard the tracks. Like Kanye marvels at the end of The College Dropout, "I played 'em "Jesus Walks" and they didn't sign me." Even more inexplicable is how they couldn't sign him after hearing "All Falls Down".
"All Falls Down" is a pop song in the truest sense, with those bright acoustic guitar chords, that dynamic bass line, and the bombastic beat that highlight some of Kanye's most intelligent verses. His lyrical performance on "All Falls Down", with its cautionary tales on the dangers of self-consciousness, is so strong that even Syleena Johnson's vivacious vocals can't distract from Ye at his most sympathetic, both denying and admitting his own arrogance on the same line ("We're all self-conscious, I'm just the first to admit it"), and showing us just exactly why we used to fucking loved this guy.
Right now Jay-Z is the only living superstar rapper whose career isn't in question. T.I. just bounced from jail, Lil Wayne is on his way in. Kanye will have to lay low for a little while longer before people begin regarding the Taylor Swift incident as humorous as opposed to appalling. Nas thinks hip-hop is dead. Eminem's career has been a horrific parody of what it once was for awhile now. It could be argued that Jay tried to do himself in with The Blueprint III, but "Empire State of Mind" was just brilliant enough for him to survive that blow.
In a way, he's got absolutely nobody to look at that can even remotely challenge him. The five mentioned above are pretty much the only rappers that can touch Hov's popularity and, hell, he's done guest spots with every damn one of them. He's got absolutely nothing to prove anymore, which is part of the reason that The Blueprint III lacked his typical spark.
Nowhere is that spark more prevalent than on his delivery of the Kanye-produced "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" on MTV Unplugged. The music itself was so much more alive, with the Roots backing him, the strings live and vibrant, the backing vocals effortless and real, that clacking drumbeat given a human touch by ?uestlove and those stabs of delicate flute. The tempo was upped just a bit for the live performance, and Jigga spits his words with a vivid candor that can't mask the emotion in his words when he declares "To try, to fail/The two things I hate/Succeed and this rap game/The two things that's great" with a passion that his current incarnation simply can't conjure.
Forget about the fact that Robert Kelly is batshit crazy for a moment. Forget child molestation trials, forget Trapped In a Closet (I wish I could), forget hilarious episodes of The Boondocks (I'm glad I can't). Even forget his early career, with him singing "I Believe I Can Fly" in Space Jam to Michael Jordan dunking on mutant monster Charles Barkley. Remember instead the very first time you heard "Ignition (Remix)".
The first time I heard "Ignition (Remix)" was when I was seventeen, driving around at night in my car with some friends and some pretty girls and no particular destination, one of the girls running her hands through my hair at the appropriate line and none of us thinking about how fucking hilarious it would seem to look back and realize that this song came from an album called Chocolate Factory, with both it's pedophilia and scatological implications.
I'm willing to bet that the first time most people heard "Ignition" was similar, maybe not at a party, but on their own personal version of the night out that Kelly's casual triumph depicts. That's what makes "Ignition" such a brilliant track; the squiggly guitars, the squelching bass, the laid-back scratches of the beat, and "bounce bounce bounce bounce" may have been most appropriate for a night of Cris-tal poppin', but it was really a celebration of, well, celebration, whatever kind was the best for you. Probably the freakin' weekend, baby. Have some fun.
The standard Wikipedia page or band biography will state that the band Sigur Rós comes from Iceland, the same country that gave rise to Björk's precocious strangeness. Which makes sense. If any country on the planet could have inspired the breathless, crystalline beauty of Ágætis Byrjun, it would have to be Iceland. But there were moments when Jónsi Birgisson's falsetto and those ethereal melodies seemed completely alien, like they simply couldn't have come from this planet.
It's not just the foreign language or Birgisson's incredible falsetto that seem otherworldly, it was also the impeccable, glacial flow of the band's music, the way it seemed to be echoing from some distant place and time, like our own future or beamed to us via satellite from another planet thousands of years ago. It was the subversion of that quality that made the third track from their second album "Starálfur" so brilliant.
Unlike the untouchable quality of "Svefn-g-englar" or anything off of ( ), "Starálfur" was the first moment that predicted the more immediate material that would find its way onto their last two albums. The sweeping, orchestral strings and circular piano melody gave the track a personable warmth absent from much of Ágætis Byrjun, the same warmth that breathed terrific life into the climactic scene of The Life Aquatic. As dramatic and epic as anything else the band had recorded, it was the more tactile humanity present in "Starálfur" that made it strike such a chord.
Radiohead have become such an omniscient force in music that it's hard to come up with anything interesting to say about the group. At this point, it's necessary to say something outlandish and obviously attention-seeking to make much of a point at all, like Spin Magazine did when they called the quality of Radiohead's music a myth while at the same time claiming they created some of the most significant music of the last fifteen years.
So I'm going to try and avoid saying anything about the band and instead talk about the song. The choice of "How To Disappear Completely" over a monstrous track like "Idioteque" - which also probably would have made the top ten of this list - was probably the most personal choice of a song here. "How To Disappear Completely" was the musical personification of both my growth as a music fan and as a person, weaving itself into my life at some of its most defining moments.
The ever-present, tense haze of strings in the background and that deliberate bass-line that complimented the echoing guitars,acoustic strums, and Thom Yorke's insistence that "I'm not here/This isn't happening" seemed to be a catharsis to any moment you may have wanted to disappear yourself, and when the heartbreaking strings swelled in the bridge you felt like you could almost do it. t worked as desire and self-fulfilling prophecy, every time you wished you could disappear, the cinematic tension of the song itself ripped you away and floated you down the Liffey.
The very first time I heard anyone say something about Arcade Fire was in 2003, shortly after the Unicorns' album Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? came out and the band was touring like crazy on its heels. A few of my friends got tickets and went to one of their shows only to come back raving about the monstrous energy, the undeniable electricity of the opening band, some group called Arcade Fire who didn't have an album out yet and, yeah, their EP didn't really communicate the quality of their music very well, but man, you just had to see these guys.
It's an illustration of how the Arcade Fire seemed to appear from thin air. They weren't a band that had gathered a huge, dedicated following over the course of years working themselves up or improved over the course of several albums, they just suddenly were there, opening for the Unicorns, playing bizarre instruments, bouncing around the stage like they couldn't contain the sensitive joy bursting forth from them from just playing this music.
And if there was one song that was a microcosm of everything the Arcade Fire stood for it was "Wake Up". Epic from the very first guitar strum, with it's massive vocal hook that no one could help belting out when they heard it - the same one that made that trailer for Where the Wild Things Are such an instant classic - and its immaculate arrangement, "Wake Up" was the decade's most uplifting track, a fireworks explosion of wide-screen yearning.
"Wake Up" was throwing hands in the air, reaching for some unattainable high, defeated and triumphant simultaneously, screaming "I guess we'll just have to adjust" at the top of your lungs, but mostly it was feeling communally a part of something bigger. Something hopeful and earnest and true. No other song this decade was in touch with human emotion in quite the same way.
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