Top Fifty Albums of the Decade, The Finale: 10-1

So, after days of waiting and delays, we've finally come to the end of all these lists. It's been both fun and challenging, writing about so many different pieces of music in such a short amount of time, but I hope you've enjoyed reading about them, listening to the ones that you hadn't heard before, and hopefully thinking about the music you had heard in a different way.

So, the overdue conclusion to all this shit, Racecar Brown's top ten albums of the decade...

Top Fifty Albums of the Decade, Part Four: 20-11

NOTE: Due to site loading issues, I am going to be replacing all album streams with links to streaming versions of the album. This may require you to sign up for a Lala account to hear the streams, but it's free so whatever.

And it continues...

Top Fifty Albums of the Decade, Part Three: 30-21

The next ten...

Top Fifty Albums of the Decade, Part Two: 40-31

NOTE: Forgot to mention this yesterday and, even though I clarified in yesterday's comments, I feel the need to re-note this information here. For the top albums of the decade list I decided to open it up a little bit and allow myself two albums per artist. Allowing myself one song per artist allowed me in some cases to make more personal or interesting choices that I felt made for a better reading list. But doing the same for albums felt surprisingly more disingenuous than the for songs. So, yeah. There's that.

Without further delay, the continuation of Racecar Brown's top fifty albums of the decade.

Top Fifty Albums of the Decade, Part One: 50-41

NOTE: As my jobs are picking up it's harder and harder finding time to write this as much as I'd like to. As result, I'm going to have to delay things yet again and release this album list in groups of ten as opposed to in groups of twenty-five. This will probably knock out the first Midweek Music Review of the New Year as well. Thanks for understanding and I apologize for the delay.

If I can state the obvious, music changes over the course of ten years. At the beginning of the '90s we had alternative rock, from Nirvana to the Smashing Pumpkins, and by the end of that decade it was boy bands that ruled the landscape. Coming into the aughts there was a very distinct separation between what was popular and what was underground, and there were equally distinct barriers between genres. When we saw a rock band do an electronica album we freaked, when we saw an emo singer and a glitch producer come together we cooed.

As the decade wore on and these kinds of collaborations became more and more common those genre barriers began to erode. We had Timbaland culling from Egyptian music on "Big Pimpin'", M.I.A. mashing up global genres into a cohesive pop-music whole, Afropop exploding onto the indie scene with Vampire Weekend, and Girl Talk combining, well, everything. Of course it wasn't always inclusion that made the best music, pop-rap, bar-rock, punk and indie all made their marks as well, but the sheer variety of sounds made this one of the most musically diverse decades of all time.

It was that diversity that marked Racecar Brown's top fifty albums of the decade.