Pitchfork's P2k: The Decade in Music

http://pitchfork-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/media/p2k/decade-headers/haag-centered.gif

As one of ILM's resident indie kids who regularly posts about Pitchfork, I feel it is my duty to begin this thread.

Pitchfork have just announced that they'll be posting a bunch of end-of-the-decade stuff starting August 17 and going to October 2: http://pitchfork.com/news/36153-presenting-p2k-the-decade-in-music/ . They're calling the whole thing "P2k: The Decade in Music."

I wish people would wait until the year is over. I know that's probably unrealistic of me since everyone wants to be first.

Top Albums of the 2000s article will include, roughly in order, Kid A, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Merriweather Post Pavillion, Dear Science, Ys, Person Pitch, and The Meadowlands.

In the post I linked to above, Mark R. also writes:

In the meantime, the half-decade albums and singles lists that we ran in 2005 give some indication of what we thought of the first five years. Of course, a lot has changed since then. I mean, surely, a better album has come along since Kid A, right? (...Right?)

I think there's still a good chance Kid A will take the top spot, but then again I really don't think P4k would want to post a list putting the same artist on top, although of course it's all up to which critics vote for which albums, and I have a feeling most of them won't put Kid A in the top spot.

Rockist Scientist: I was thinking earlier today that this seems kind of early, but I'm guessing it takes a lot of work to put something like this together, and once this is over they'll still have to put out their typical end-of-the-year stuff for 2009. Being early can't hurt either, I guess.

I'm also really looking forward to the essays they'll be publishing:

August 24: Eric Harvey on the social history of the mp3

August 27: Tom Ewing on the decade in pop

(...)

September 14: Marc Masters on the decade in noise

September 16: [nabisco] [.] on the mainstreaming of indie

lol @ the nabisco line

I say there NO WAY that Kid A will take the top spot. And it shouldn't. It's not the best album of the decade. It's not even the best Radiohead album of the decade.

No hip-hop article? Also, has Jay-Z done enough to sully his reputation that The Blueprint isn't a lock for top 5 anymore?

If I had my way:

(1) http://crawdaddy.wolfgangsvault.com/uploadedImages/Wolfgangs_Vault/Crawdaddy!/Copy/Articles/Issue148/ExPostFacto-large.jpg

(2) http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_IHL4cs57bg4/R2nTMv7cvoI/AAAAAAAABqY/aepcAhYvzXE/s320/Joanna+Newsom+-+Ys.jpg

Johnny, which do you think is better? Amnesiac? HTTT? In Rainbows?

To the contrary, I think Jay is one of the only *big* rappers from the first half of the 00s who's still making anything worth a damn in the second half of the 00s. But from what I gather, my love of the American Gangster album/sdtrk puts me in a big minority. xxp

Johnny, which do you think is better? Amnesiac? HTTT? In Rainbows?

It would be hard to pick between Amnesiac and In Rainbows.

Why doesn't any other music mag/sites do ambitious lists like this anymore?

I like HTTT a lot more than Kid A but it will never appear in anyone's best-of-the-decade list.

It's not like pfork has a monopoly on listing things

Other obvious choices for P4k's best-of-the-decade list: You Forgot It In People, Silent Shout, Funeral (How did I forget that one until now?), something by Grizzly Bear, something by Deerhunter, the first Interpol record, something by The New Pornographers, Murray Street. . .

I remember getting Rolling Stone's "Best of the 80s" issue sometime in 1990 and that was like a bible for me for a little while. I had 100 albums to seek out, more than half of which I'd never heard. Granted, I was 16 and the internet was still in the distant future and I lived in a town with only one really decent record store, so my lack of exposure to many cool things might've made the RS list seem more like a revelation than it should've. But yeah... I applaud Pitchfork for doing this thing, even though there's a good chance I'll hate the result.

i had the feeling they did this one before, but i guess those were the nineties....

I mean everyone complains about pfork lists, but no one else does it. How hard would it be for the staff of a magazine to put together a list of 200 albums?

Why doesn't any other music mag/sites do ambitious lists like this anymore?

In my case, I wasn't interested in a sequel.

Maybe Popmatters or whatever will do something? The only site that I can think of that would have done, had it still existed, was Stylus.

*would have done ONE

Johnny: It's hard for me to pick a favorite, but I like In Rainbows and Kid A equally as albums. I love HTTT, but I also think it's somewhat of a mess at times, and "I Will" and "Go to Sleep" are two of my least favorite RH tunes.

All the UK mags will do it. They live on be-all/end-all lists.

That being said, "Wolf at The Door," "There There," "Where I End and You Begin," "Scatterbrain" . . . so many favorites.

I bet you Tiny Mix Tapes or Cokemachineglow will do some end-of-the-decade stuff too.

and they'll all display the same cliches/ol' canon mediocrity. (the unknown gems probably would be in the individual lists of the contributors)

Re: the Pitchfork list... I wonder where the first CYHSY album will rate, seeing as it was God's gift to music for six months in 2005.

I don't understand this 'no-one makes large lists' thing. Hell, this week NME put out another fucking top 100 list. Every music/film/other-type-of-thing-that-can-be-listed publication going will do a big and silly list/commentary type thing for the end of the decade AND year within the next couple of months.

I can hardly wait for Paste's decade list. lol

whiney's just fukin w/ everybody u guys

I think it would be almost more interesting to just publish the individual writers' lists. Someone unaffiliated with Pitchfork would probably sit down and tabulate a final score for each record anyway, and I'm sure people do want to see a final list of 200 records, but it might be more interesting if there was no formal ranking.

Or perhaps just have all the contributors list their 10 favorite records of the decade in alphabetical order or the order in which they were released?

Yeah, screw ranking. List them alphabetically or whatever.

y'allz can lol at me if you want but if someone held a gun to my head and told me to name the best record of the 00s, it'd be this one
http://z.about.com/d/folkmusic/1/0/s/E/GillianWelch-Time.jpg
will it even be mentioned in pfork's list?

(I understand the impulse to rank, though... whenever I think about making a list, it's more fun once it starts narrowing down to the top 10 or 15) xp

will it even be mentioned in pfork's list?

If so, no higher than #80. :(

I understand the impulse too, but for me once I narrow a list of favorite records down to, say, twenty records or whatever I couldn't rank them without being kind of dishonest. They'd all be my favorite records, but I'd have different reasons for loving them all.

I really love Wilco's a ghost is born. They're my favorite band, and I think it's their best work, but I couldn't honestly say I love it more or less than Joanna Newsom's Ys, another record I really, really treasure. I would rank them differently depending on my mood.

September 16: [nabisco] [.] on the mainstreaming of indie

Oh good, we were just arguing on that Wavves thread about whether indie was in fact more mainstream or not.

I'm not fuckin. I'm saying no one goes as hard as pfork in the "making lists" dept. Who else is gonna do 500 songs/200 albums?

How will this hold up: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5358-the-moon-antarctica/

Which I assume is why I assume there's a thread about it

Re: the Pitchfork list... I wonder where the first CYHSY album will rate, seeing as it was God's gift to music for six months in 2005.

You know, that album only finished #18 on PFM's 2005 list. It got a 9.0 because Brian Howe loved it, and the site to a certain extent wanted to get behind it, but from what I understand there were quite a few staffers who didn't give a shit about it at all. Can't imagine it will finish particularly high.

i dunno i feel like lists are basically what music magazines do nowadays? didn't rolling stone do like a 500 greatest albums of all time? xp

100 greatest guitarists / 100 best singers etc

http://mentaldefective.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/illinoise.jpg

^ I wonder how high this will make it, too.

I think Wilco's "At Least That What You Said," which won't chart, should be in the Top 10 for best songs of the decade.

Good shout on Gillian Welch. Sun Kil Moon's Ghosts of the Great Highway and April would both be top ten for me... It's bound to be Kid A for Pitchfork isn't it?

Why doesn't any other music mag/sites do ambitious lists like this anymore?

Because the decade isn't fucking over yet?

Johnny, which do you think is better? Amnesiac? HTTT? In Rainbows?

____________________________________________

It would be hard to pick between Amnesiac and In Rainbows.

Good man! I bet CYHSY isn't in the Top 10. But Silent Shout has to be!

Ghosts Of The Great Highway would be a terrific choice, too. Maybe The Clientele!

(Sorry for so many "!" Kinda looking forward to this).

appreciated from a distance = "Cool record, bro. Now I'm gonna play something I actually enjoy."

Cunga OTM re The Drift. I can't listen to something that harrowing regularly. If I had to listen to even just, fuck, "Jesse" on a daily basis I'd go fucking crazy.

That being said, I'm really glad to hear you rank Ys highly too, Owen! It seems like there is a small contingent out there that thinks that album is immense, although to my mind that contingent is way too small. This will be a cult record like "In The Aeroplane Over the Sea," I think, although the cult will always be much smaller. That Neutral Milk Hotel record is far more immediate, and it takes much more to engage with Newsom's masterpiece.

"I love it but would it look good above the mantlepiece?"

Ys took a long time for me, with the weirdly chopped up VDP arrangements, but it's a stronger argument for "analog recording forever" than any Tape Op manifesto or Albini diatribe.

You really can't go wrong with the team of Albini and O'Rourke. If I ever put out a record, those would be the exact two people I'd want to help me produce it.

Lots of great details on the making of Ys in Erik Davis's wonderful profile for Arthur:

http://www.arthurmag.com/2006/12/23/nearer-the-heart-of-things-erik-davis-on-joanna-newsom-from-arthur-no-25winter-02006

Yeah, that Arthur article is great. Didn't it win an award? Although I'm totally with you on the lauding of the name-brand engineer and mixer, I equally love Parenthetical Girls' "Entanglements", which was recorded by Jherek Bischoff with many overdubs on an M-Box.

I don't know if it won an award, but it was in Best Music Writing 2007.

I've never heard the Parenthetical Girls' record, but I'm listening to the samples on Amazon right now and it sounds incredible!

^ Don't hesitate. It's my favourite record of the decade. It is a challenge, it is extremely rewarding.

My feathers ruffled about that Scott Walker "appreciated from distance" remark just because it's this sort of attitude is exactly why Pitchfork's version of the 00s appears to be so conservative. The 10.0 rating system relies upon a quantitative analysis, one that makes the pretense of exhaustivity. And if you're going to start assessing The World's Albums on a quantitative level, you're going to start eliminating the "less functional" records, such as The Drift.

Floridity vs. formality, I guess -- it may be strange to call The Drift florid, but this discussion reminds me of how the Associates are just seen as a hard to get into indulgence when the insanely expressive genius of Fourth Drawer Down and Sulk rises far above the enjoyable functionality of many of its peers.

on the other hand pfork by addressing music the way they do is making a list of LESS functional records ... purely by the nature of treating music commerce as art ... a song doesnt get praised on some "this would be such a dope song to hear at weddings" type shit (or rarely does -- might have been a defense of a couple R&B singles on the list lol)

Since when did 8.3 become the new 9.0? Remember this?

10.0: Essential
9.5-9.9: Spectacular
9.0-9.4: Amazing
8.5-8.9: Exceptional; will likely rank among writer's top ten albums of the year
8.0-8.4: Very good
7.5-7.9: Above average; enjoyable
7.0-7.4: Not brilliant, but nice enough
6.0-6.9: Has its moments, but isn't strong
5.0-5.9: Mediocre; not good, but not awful
4.0-4.9: Just below average; bad outweighs good by just a little bit
3.0-3.9: Definitely below average, but a few redeeming qualities
2.0-2.9: Heard worse, but still pretty bad
1.0-1.9: Awful; not a single pleasant track
0.0-0.9: Breaks new ground for terrible

what's that from, evan?

spectacular > amazing because music is supposed to be spectacle?

yeah those top three are silly

they're all pretty silly which is why they don't post that on the anymore

^^^yup

I'm not against rating systems but it's silly to have a 100-point scale for something so vague and imprecise as music criticism. even moreso for something so vague and imprecise as Pitchfork music criticism.

That was the old "Rating Key" on Pitchforkmedia in the old days.

I always liked the very functional model of "Skip it" < "Try it" < "Buy it".

Although, now that music is free, it could be further simplified to "Yes" and "No".

Thats the model they have over at soundopinions.com. The Chicago radio show with Jim and Greg.

Haha I like the Yes No model.

Yes, No, best heard through someone else's earbuds, five seconds worth hearing via a passing car, movie trailer option...

The download high consumption culture has gotten so bad that when I gave a bunch of old albums to my teenage cousin to check out, she ripped them and deleted the album information so it was all songs. She had such a disinterest in the "album" that she didn't even want to know how each track was sequenced, since she had been brought up on a lot of these sideways haircut pop rockers and I guess treats every song like a single. I don't what the explanation is and if she told me I was too shocked to remember what she said. It probably was just a "I don't know" kind of thing. I'm still very disturbed.

That'll be a story in the next decade: what do we do about music fans who grew up with the shuffle button and don't have the patience for an entire album. Maybe bands will adapt to changing attention spans and start releasing more EPs, but people will have to adapt.

what do we do about music fans

Nothing? (Who's the 'we,' after all -- which I realize your post grapples with.)

We being anybody who takes a big interest in music - either making it, reviewing it, talking about it with others, marketing it etc.

when Evan gave his cousin the albums he assumed she'd listen to them as albums, and not as a collection of 8-20 songs to be dumped into her mp3 player or an external hard drive and heard inconsistently and out of sequence.

So if he gave her the Stone Roses debut, it's possible she won't hear it in sequence and all at once, but she'll first hear "She Bangs the Drums" on her iPod while jogging, in-between something by the Killers and T.I. Then she might hear another song some other time, she may listen to a few songs in a row if she's curious - but she may not ever hear every song, and she probably won't hear it altogether in one sitting. So they're experiencing the music in two different ways, and that'll impact what they think of it in the end.

Yeah I mean its one thing if she just ripped them and shuffled them, but she DELETED the evidence to what albums they are from and the order. There was effort involved in making sure she didn't know anything about how these albums are put together. Thats what was significant to me. I didn't realize segments of music fans were at that point in our culture yet until then.

And the Stone Roses debut can be heard as a collection of great songs (so the experience won't suffer that much), but what happens if he gave her an album that's greater than the sum of the songs? So by "how do we deal" I mean how do we reconcile the new ways some people are actually listening to and discovering music with the way things we done before.

x-post

that's kind of cool tbh! i kind of wish i could hear half my record collection that way again - divorced from the context entirely so i can just, i don't know, hear it

it's one of my favorite things about radio imo - i'm hearing the song for what it is and just that. obviously i want to know the context later - who it is, what year it came out, what kind of role it played in the context of its genre, etc, which may separate me from someone like your cousin who doesn't want to know at all who it is. but i definitely think there's a huge value in hearing stuff separated from the context

a lot of albums come w/ all kinds of crit & cult baggage that sometimes i just don't give a shit about, and that can actually make me feel less inclined to give an album its time

obv it works the other way around too - that baggage makes me want to check it out. but there's something kind of cool & intriguing about your cousin's way of listening that i kind of admire. even tho it might drive me crazy eventually

I'm with you- I love listening to albums out of context too, but to delete the album information completely is another thing altogether. Its like a statement. I don't know.

and start releasing more EPs

I think this would be kinda cool; I often find myself with either too little time or lacking the attention span to engage with a full album, but would still like to listen to a "totality" of sorts.

And I'm not one of the mp3-age kids, I'm 40 and grew up with albums. OTOH, those were vinyl LPs plus cassettes, so actually then there was a natural partition (sides) into approximately EP-sized chunks. For many albums I know and love well, the two sides have very different, um, shapes and colours in my head.

I wonder if, from a PR standpoint, it would be more profitable in this celebrity-hero age for a pop star to have 4-7 songs out every 12 months, as opposed to one album every two years.

Probably. Then more songs can be treated as singles, keeping the artist fresh to a culture where you are old news after half a month.

Plus pop-star fans and casual listeners would buy albums for a song or two, these days you can just download those specific songs without the rest of the album. If they were released in smaller increments people might pay attention to all, say, four tracks being released at a given moment, where otherwise three out of four of those tracks may be almost totally ignored.

...if released all together on a eleven song album.

xpost

Thanks, Owen. I'll check out the Parenthetical Girls and get back to you here if I remember! :-)

there should be a poll of which album had the best write-up. i'd vote silent shout:

There are certain aesthetics so whole and singular that we use them as shorthand to refer to other things-- stuff can be Lynchian, Dickensian, Pynchonesque. Repeated exposure to this record makes it tempting to start describing things-- say, a bird of prey circling an ice-covered lighthouse-- as Silent Shout-ian.

I wonder if, from a PR standpoint, it would be more profitable in this celebrity-hero age for a pop star to have 4-7 songs out every 12 months, as opposed to one album every two years.

― Cunga

Was thinking about this yesterday (in response to this thread, I think). About the idea that record companies might become more like writer/producer/performer stables, releasing a steady stream of singles & videos based on whatever seemed to be working best at the time. No pressure to produce complete albums as artist statements, no incentive to release distracting filler of any sort (except maybe as a bonus for fans). Just crank out singles with someone's name on them, and when this or that name starts to attract attention, arrange tours and licensing deals.

Ppl are already working under the singles model. Rappers pretty much don't even make albums anymore

^that's a pretty wide brush you're using, dude.

Whiney v. Whitey.

I'm just saying with the mixtape/street single model, it's basically just throwing a bunch of songs at the wall and seeing what sticks.

well I'll try to remember some of the hip-hop mix (not in order.. the only same artists back2back were Blackalicious and Flynn Adam.. I regretted the Flynn Adam being back to back because they are too similar.. the 3 tracks with Pigeon John are very different)

Life Without Buildings - The Leanover (not rap - but was the first track - found thanks to NickB on ilx)
Souls of Mischief - 93 'til Infinity
Saul Williams - Black Stacy
Blackalicious - Alphabet Aerobics -into-> Chemical Calisthenics
The Fugees - Nappy Heads
Pigeon John - Cheerleaders
Pigoeon John & Freedom of Soul - Not this Record
Pigeon John & Kiz Charizmatic - Wow! (out there)
Flynn Adam - Such a Time
Flynn Adam - Just Don't Get It
Blackstar - Definition
Talib Kweli - The Blast
Jurassic 5 - Concrete Streets
Kyteman - Une Seule Fois (feat. Reazun)
Kyteman - She Blew Like Trumpets (the only song I regret putting on the mix)
The Black Eyed Peas - Rap Song
N.O.R.E ft. Tego Calderon & Nina Sky - Oye Mi Canto
Pharcyde - Passing Me By (edited because it's so long)
Madvillain - Great Day (found thanks to ilx)

I'm thinking I'll replace the Kyteman song with K'naan - Wavin' Flag next time I make this mix
That's the only replacement I can think of now...
but If I had time to listen to some more k'naan and some lifesavs and damian marley I might change up this mix a good bit

Thread brings back memories.

massive lols at Whiney's Will Smith YouTube autoplay

what should I switch up on the mix?

i mean what else would fit

a kashi granola bar with a hacky-sack stapled to it

well obviously it's mostly happy rap, I can't stand ghetto/booty shit

dat nigga delmar to thread