can someone tell me why 2001 was 'the best year for music in recent memory'?

is the trumpeting of 2001 as 'exciting,' etc sheer hype, or hope? i would say it's a mix of the two, with more emphasis on the latter. (think pangloss.)

i called it the best year for music in recent memory because when i was putting together my own faves of 2001 list (note how i didnt say best of) i had 50 fucking cds and almost as many singles, more than any year in easily the last six. (and thats not even counting the reissues.) i have not been monitoring the ups and downs of the music industry proper, the sales figures or the market trends. and frankly i dont wanna. it would more than likely depress me and i would recant. maybe the whole entertainment industry is about to collapse in a toilet of it's own making. on one hand: yay! bye bye. no..wait...that's the only hand. so maybe - for you, for everyone else - it wasnt such a good year. but compared to the scorched earth policy advertised by that fucking salon essay it was the land of milk and honey.

As I stated in a thread in June, I think the quality of music overall actually stays the same from year to year due to the overwhelming number of records released in every imaginable genre. The real question is what the individual listener actually had an opportunity to hear, not whether what was out there was good or not. How can somebody call a year in music "good" or "bad" when there were 50,000 records released and s/he only heard 200 - 300 at the very most?

Accepting this logic, I can see why someone might be a tad disappointed by this year. It's a bit difficult to get away from one's personal experience when talking about this, but I didn't see a lot of really invigorating things happening this year -- plenty of great, great releases, but very little that seemed like a great door being kicked down, very little that would make you, twenty years later, feel happy to have been around listening to music in this particular year. The only place I felt that -- and this was possibly just the IL* influence in effect -- was in terms of pop, which I think came through this year feeling very strong and very vital. (If nothing else, a superb indicator of this is the number of new and at least mildly interesting pop stars to emerge and take root this year.)

That's completely just me, though -- and the first part is not really a complaint, as I've had a great year of genre expansion and new discoveries. But, I dunno ... granting that we're talking in that historical sense, what big wonderful developments have you guys come across this year?

But I have to agree w/ Maura etc. that there's not a New Thing that I'm really excited about--that is, there were few non-reissues I heard this year that made me want MORE STUFF LIKE THIS! RIGHT NOW! the way that, say, hip-hop in general affected me in '88 or the !!! 12" did a couple of years ago...

I just went to the barber's and 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' was playing on a screen. I was slightly enthralled, out of the corner of my eye, by Kylie Minogue.

Later 'If You're Not The One' came on and I was reminded of how I once had to stop and hang around a market stall where that song was playing, so I could hear it to the end. But maybe that wasn't 2001. Still, it was a earlier-00s pop #1.

2001 was pretty good. Depends what kinda stuff you're talking about tho...

'If You're Not The One' came on and I was reminded of how I once had to stop and hang around a market stall where that song was playing, so I could hear it to the end

This is inconceivable. I would pay money to not hear this song ever again.

pinefox is completely right here, i am on the verge of tears or should be.

2001 was a fun year to be reading ILM that's for sure.

Hot Albums

1. Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory
2. Britney Spears - Britney
3. Backstreet Boys - Black & Blue
4. Enya - A Day Without Rain
5. Janet Jackson - All For You
6. Blink-182 - Take Off Your Pants And Jacket
7. Alicia Keys - Songs in A Minor
8. Destiny's Child - Survivor
9. Creed - Weathered
10. Aaliyah - Aaliyah
11. 'N Sync - Celebrity
12. Staind - Break The Cycle
13. Nickelback - Silver Side Up
14. System of a Down - Toxicity
15. Pink - M!ssundaztood
16. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP
17. P.O.D. - Satellite
18. Michael Jackson - Invincible
19. Jennifer Lopez - J.Lo
20. Necrophagist - Onset Of Putrefaction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_100_No._1_Hits_of_2001_%28USA%29

2001 sucked

this^^

Onset Of Putrefaction is classic

2001 was a lousy year in almost every respect (rip a.c.c.)

I am genuinely agog at the high position of Enya there.

In canon-building terms, 2002 has surely trumped 2001? It's hard to think of any other year that compares, really.

1987. 1988. 1989.

Enya is one of the best albums on that list!

sad but true

10. Aaliyah - Aaliyah

wait how the hell did Necrophagist make that list

<3<3<3<3 2001

No. Cause it wasn't. 2002 was (as in best since 1996, that is)

haters are fucking insane

What is so canonical about 2002? According to either Matt or Geir standards?

I thought the consensus was that 2002 was a great year for singles but not so much for albums... Whereas 2001 had both in spades.

It's probably reflective of more recent obsessions on my part but 2002 now seems like this horribly strange year in between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, and everything else just looming in the background, gearing up...

2001 was ok. If only every year could include an album as brilliant as Discovery...

C'mon and kick me

My top thirty albums for that year would be something like:

Discovery
Iron Flag
Rooty
Aaliyah
Ayia Napa 2001
The Blueprint
Fever
Total 3
Miss E... So Addictive
The Hot Shots II
Revelling/Reckoning
Broken Silence
Superlongevity
Rock Action
Vespertine
Hypercity
The Cold Vein
The Sound of the Pirates II
Tarantula
Bodily Functions
We Love Life
Is This It?
Whatever
Survivor
Amnesiac
In Search Of...
Pop Ambient 2001
Wanderlust
Geogaddi
Dark Days, Bright Nights

I'd really struggle to come up with as strong a list for any other year this decade.

2000 was a much stronger year for albums than I realised at the time, too.

^^^^
proof

2001 signaled the beginning of the fall of the record industry empire

before opening this thread I assumed it was started this year. so ^^ is prescient, as obvious as it seemed at the time to anyone listening to music on their computer, or even to me! yet in 2001 the bizzers and mainstream critics were burrowing deep in their holes. 'the men don't know but the lil girls understand'

come to think of it, I think it's odd to compare years of pop music. I can't imagine why 2001 would be better or worse than 2002 or 2003, really. I was probably listening to similar records in all of them. The main differences between years, I suppose, are a) the odd record comes out that distinguishes a year (but even these things are hard to pin down: 69 Love Songs is a case in point, people probably can't even agree when it was released, let alone when it impacted on them), b) we change, and we have contingently different experiences of various instances of pop.

But otherwise I probably couldn't really say any year this decade has been better than any other for pop.

Bands reformed
Devourment
Electric Light Orchestra (with new members except for original members, Jeff Lynne and Richard Tandy)
Level 42
Monkees
Roxy Music
Zebra

What is so canonical about 2002? According to either Matt or Geir standards?

Lots of great albums by really good veteran acts that had been around for ages. The music the kids are into hasn't been worthy of attention since the mid 80s anyway, with a possible exception for the mid 90s Britpop boom.

2002 also saw a slight improvement in chart pop, though, as R&B and hip-hop - at least here in Europe - got less dominant and was partly replaced by 80s influence electro pop and Blondie-influenced "punk pop".

The music the kids are into hasn't been worthy of attention since the mid 80s anyway I was a kid.

-- Geir Hongro, Monday, March 24, 2008 4:12 PM (2 minutes ago)

geirbot.jpg

Daft Punk's "Discovery" came out this year, so it was a good year.

The top ten doesn't reflect how good this year was.

What a great year!

Lifehouse – Hanging by a Moment

I luuuurrved this song (only semi-ironically). It became a gag with my significant other; I would belt the heck out of the chorus at the slightest provocation.