as we approach the end of the 00s, as far as it's worth caring about these things from a critical pov, what is the ONE thing that has pleased you most about popular music developments since 2000?

DJ Khaled

Elvis Presley: 76 tracks on 3CDs for £3 at Woolworths

decentralization of distribution - everything is available always everywhere now.

of course, this has its downside too.

but actually I don't listen or even really pay attention to any music that's remotely "popular" anymore so my opinion probably doesn't count for shit.

chart r&b has gotten incredibly great; even though I dig Quiet Storm, Whitney Houston, and New Jack Swing, putting on the local r&b station these days is impossibly awesome compared to the 90s.

actually guaging what's "popular" seems increasingly impossible these days. its like everyone is listening to their own private subset of music that bears no relation to any kind of commonly recognized popular culture.

x-post

simply the positive side of my complaint on the other thread. whether i pay for it or don't (and i do more and more, as the services improve) i get to hear and own a lot of music from the present and past via the internet. very hard to imagine hearing so much of what i've heard and now love otherwise. despite all the problems and consequences (inc 'too much choice') it's never been easier to get lost, nor to escape.

now if i could just get back to trying to make my own stuff that'd be nice...

btw scik i hope you typed this thread title out in full instead of just copying and pasting from the other one

I like the reemergence of mutually-viable regional hip-hop scenes

ascendancy of rap/hip-hop in mainstream culture, and thus, ass worship.

flipside of what i posted in the other thread - the industry may have been slow and incompetent re: digital developments but consumers have not. it's improved and sharpened my taste in ways that wouldn't have been possible (due to time & money reasons) prior to this decade. the idea that my taste was once tied to music which charted, or featured in magazines, or even released in this country, seems so quaint in a year when my favourite track doesn't even officially exist

also paris hilton's album <3

yeah blueski articulates what I was trying to say, basically.

in actual concrete musical terms there is still plenty of new stuff coming out that I find engaging; maybe I'm not as emotionally bound up in it as I was as an adolescent, and maybe its become less of a communal experience as I've grown older, but I am still listening to a ton of shit and I love it (maybe on different levels and in different ways than I did before). The aggressive cross-pollination of relatively random genres and traditions that can now be taken for granted as a standard approach still produces stuff that's new and surprising and fun to my ears

For somebody living as remotely as me, there's no way I would like the music I like, I'd have to do with a more available one ten years ago.

I mean, it's still exciting if I see a Tortoise CD in a music shop here. That one time.

when my favourite track doesn't even officially exist

ha ha, what is this?

seeing as most of us would say variations of 'the internet opening things up', i'm trying to think of a thing from artistic pov. the fact that i'm not quite bored of new pop yet may do - happiness always around the corner/tomorrow never comes cop-out tho it may be.

Everyone else is saying 'reverse of what I said on other thread', so I will do the same. Favourite pop development this decade: the songs that I have written (the best creative work of my life); the records that I have been able to make with other people of whom I am deeply fond (must add up to something like ... 40 or 50 tracks released? - let alone dozens or hundreds more unofficially); and the fact that a small number of other people have listened to some of these, liked them a lot, thought and felt things about them and let me know.

http://991.com/newGallery/Britney-Spears-Blackout-417568.jpg

(sorry)

that really is the worst album cover of the decade ('hard Candy' and 'The massacre' running it close)

hard candy is worse.

when my favourite track doesn't even officially exist

ha ha, what is this?

'turn the lights off' by cassie! i emailed her pr about it and she hadn't even heard of it.

not a popular music development, per se, but the 00's have been the decade of the Lost Classic: Found!, and thank God for the proliferation of such labels as Water, Dusty Grooves, Soul Jazz, Wounded Bird, Rev-Ola, etc. for bringing us the love...

There appears to be a group of British bands breaking through who will vie each other to produce more and more daring, ambitious music. Hopefully.

nothing, lets get this decade over with already!

I am going to start caring again on January 1st 2011.

That's when the Strokes revival starts, right?

www.pitchforkmedia.com

The new-folk/freak-folk/new weird America/psych-folk/Dark Britanica bands. The resulting renewed interest in folk-rock.

Have you been reading my diary, Ned?

Actually, the Ipod was my favorite development of the decade. A lot of dudes liquidated their record collections after they digitized them.

Yay for used record stores!

^^^yah, but the Death of the Record Store certainly belongs on the other thread...

Good decade for pure pop, not bad for underground dance.

Well I know plenty will disagree but I genuinely have loved the minimal (and, yes mnml!) of the 2nd half of the 00s so far. Especially as i was a little more ambivalent about the first half of the 00s.

Getting more and more into rebetika and lautari which would have been much less likely to happen without the internet, and plenty of other musics that I am currently barely aware of

The fact that there are good nights to go to almost all of the time and music I like is played at them

The fact that nobody (in person anyway) bats an eyelid, questions motives, or second guesses me for liking Deodato or Shalamar or things when it seemed like they used to in the past

The fact that despite the supposed ubiquity and inescapability of music that has supposed to have arisen I rarely find myself exposed to it in that way and feel I only hear what i want to for the most part

The fact that just as girls will never stop being pretty in a myriad of infinitesimal and imperceptable ways, i feel the same about music

^^^yah, but the Death of the Record Store certainly belongs on the other thread...

-- henry s, Wednesday, August 6, 2008 5:32 PM (32 minutes ago)

I like it fine here

Bob Dylan had his best decade since the 1960s.

not a popular music development, per se, but the 00's have been the decade of the Lost Classic: Found!, and thank God for the proliferation of such labels as Water, Dusty Grooves, Soul Jazz, Wounded Bird, Rev-Ola, etc. for bringing us the love...

This certainly isn't a definitive answer but I second this post - not that this doesn't come with its downsides but I think the fetishisation of music scenes that died before the people fetishising them were born, and a bunch of forgotten records being overrated in a oneupsmanship pissfight, are small prices to pay

^i wouldn't have 80% of the music i listen to if not for this trend. so 3rded.

That's a good call about Dylan! ... except ... hold on - he's only made two records ... Time out of Mind was 1997 ... and Blood on the Tracks + some other 1970s LP (eg Desire or Street Legal) probably beats the two 2000s records, right?

Unless you're talking about rereleases, No Direction Home, etc, but come on that's 1960s / 1970s material.

Really great decade for the semi-mainstreaming/increased interest in weird shit: noize, psychedelic nonsense of every sort, wayback obscurities, black metal, etc.

Add "access to" the weird shit in that last post, but X 1,000...

The three greatest inventions: YouSend it, Rapidshare, Megaupload.

The three greatest inventions: YouSend it, Rapidshare, Megaupload.

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn

Everything I like since '00 has pretty clear pre-'00 antecedents (I mean, even Napster began prior (though only by, like, six months).

But my tastes run wide and shallow, rather than narrow and deep, so the '00s have been pretty kind to me.

I've liked the broader popularization of "glitchy" sounds in electronic music, especially as that's translated to hip hop and r&b. Things were pretty good for regular ol' rock and roll for a while in the early '00s, then they seemed to fall off, and now they're on the upswing again (but I'm totally basing that off of my show-going perceptions, and admit that other folks may have had better luck).

I like having access to full albums that I would have never heard of through sharity blogs.

And, as just mentioned, since I like noise and freakout jazz, I've liked finding more and more of it.

Everything I like since '00 has pretty clear pre-'00 antecedents (I mean, even Napster began prior (though only by, like, six months).

-- I eat cannibals

this isn't really "popular" music at all.

but anyway one thing this decade is that my outlook on music was probably more local than ever...i've listened to and bought more records by local mpls/st.paul bands than ever before, and i feel lucky that there were a lot of great bands that i could see on a regular basis at small bars, etc.

which isn't some great trend in music at all, or really important but it was important, is important to me.

That's a good call about Dylan! ... except

He may still release another one. But even if he didn't, the two that he did release are two of the decade's best. Add to that Chronicles, No Direction Home and the rest, and it's clear Bob's never been as culturally relevant since the 60s.

Groovy.

I partially buy that... but isn't a bit like saying that Shakespeare is the greatest playwright of the decade or something? (one cld probably argue that some of the greatest productions were of his plays.) No Direction Home was mainly 1960s Bob. Then again, true, it had new Bob interview material in it, and Chronicles is a staggeringly vivid and hilarious text.

You think he'll release another? I doubt it. And to be honest, I don't think Modern Times is as good as "Love & Theft", and I don't think the latter is as good as Time Out Of Mind (though that's arguable; L&T is more dynamic and fun maybe).

can't think of a thing

I'll take Love and Theft over Time Out Of Mind any day. I'll take it over just about any Bob record that's not Highway 61, come to think of it. Or any other record of the 2000s.

the death of the music video

Actually, the lack of much development at all, the fragmentation which means everyone can get a lot of what he already knows he likes.

The Oughties have brought a lot of great music for me, and in a sense they are one of the best decades ever. Only I don't neccessarily agree with the kids about what is the good stuff anymore.

we're not kids

"Napster's totally a 00s thing. Existing for a few months in '99 certainly doesn't make it a big part of 90s culture, and what it presaged has arguably been the biggest thing to happen to music since the early 20th century."

Yeah, but there was the usenet for music swapping before that (though, yeah, bigger drives and the popularization of the mp3 coincided with napster).

and usenet had a user base of like 2,000 people

http://991.com/newGallery/Britney-Spears-Blackout-417568.jpg

I really like this cover!!

decentralization of distribution - everything is available always everywhere now.

of course, this has its downside too.

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, August 6, 2008 4:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

the industry may have been slow and incompetent re: digital developments but consumers have not. it's improved and sharpened my taste in ways that wouldn't have been possible (due to time & money reasons) prior to this decade. the idea that my taste was once tied to music which charted, or featured in magazines, or even released in this country, seems so quaint in a year when my favourite track doesn't even officially exist

-- lex pretend, Wednesday, August 6, 2008 4:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

yep

the rise of the south in rap

this has been the decade where nearly every new release has either flat-out sucked or had really obvious antecedents that I thought were better, so I've been enjoying the opportunity to spend less money while bulking up on the canon.
also the legalization of MP3s has been especially nice, to the wallet and the shoe leather.

in 1999 my mp3 library would not have included albert ayler, bishop lamont, the hold steady, & steve reich. downloads have made possible an expansion of taste that would have been financially implausible before.

for me it's not so much financially implausible as it reduces or eliminates the paradox of too much choice- it's hard when you walk into a good record store to find some things that in the back of your head you've been wanting to check out for forever, because you get lost and forget, but online I can just be like "oh right steve reich and dave axelrod and chris & cosey and shit duhhh" and kaboom

Podcasts I think are truly wonderful. It's like if radio was all lots of different John Peels with different music tastes. And you can pick which one you want to listen to at every given moment! I always felt like, as a kid, I wanted to like radio but never could. And then during the period I was living in London the pirate scene was kind of lame so I never really had that either. But now I can listen to Lovefingers or 1xtra or all sorts of goodness from RA and hear interesting people's music taste in a radio-type format.

They should have ads in them, though, really. That way people could get paid.

rave synths in rap & r&b