'00s to be chewed over

[koganbot]

Supposing I were to write a Decade's End essay, what would you like it to be about?

The correct answer is "Taylor Swift," of course, but you should make other suggestions as well.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I think the '00s produced quite a lot of good writing about music - better than the '90s by a whole lot, I'd say.

It's good to hear this. The second part of my subject was somewhat facetious, important point being that if there's a problem, it's not a "decade" problem -- but honestly I'd just like your general take on the decade in awesomeness, which I think will look very different from other top lists.

[koganbot]

Well, a lot of the best didn't go for awesomeness or towering achievements but for the individual idiosyncratic taste or smell of this or that fairly ordinary growth experience, or a little doohicky or whirrr that could become the backbone of a song. Off the top of my head here would be my lists, though I'll do official ones at some point (at least they'll be their own separate post): 1. Panjabi MC f. Jay-Z "Beware Of The Boys," 2. Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz f. Ying Yang Twins "Get Low," 3. 50 Cent "In Da Club," 4. Hilary Duff "Come Clean," 5. Missy Elliott "Get Ur Freak On," 6. Jay-Z f. UGK "Big Pimpin'," 7. Eminem "The Real Slim Shady," 8. Kelly Clarkson "Since U Been Gone," 9. ATC "Around The World," 10. Kelly Clarkson "Because Of You," and ack! that leaves off the Veronicas' "4ever" and Paulina Rubio's "Don't Say Goodbye." Five nonsingles could be 1. t.A.T.u. "Kosmos," 2. Margaret Berger "Robot Song," 3. María Daniela Y Su Sonido Lasser "Duri Duri," 4. Fannypack "Smack It Up," 5. Lindsay Lohan "Nobody 'Til You," except maybe Cassie's "Turn The Lights Off" should be there instead. 1. Ashlee Simpson Autobiography, 2. Montgomery Gentry Carrying On, 3. Big & Rich Horse Of A Different Color, 4. Britney Spears Blackout, 5. Eminem The Marshall Mathers LP, 6. t.A.T.u. Dangerous And Moving, 7. Ying Yang Twins Me & My Brother, 8. Fannypack See You Next Tuesday, 9. Paris Hilton Paris, 10. Various Artists Global Hits 2000, and ack! that leaves off the Bring It On soundtrack and Scooter's Jumping All Over The World. I also want to honor Cansei De Ser Sexy for being generally adorable and to honor Alizee's "Moi...Lolita" and Lil Kim's "Aunt Dot" f. Lil Shanice for being the best songs I've discovered so far through the poptimists Best Songs Of The '00s polls, and also Aaliyah's "More Than A Woman" for being a song whose greatness only now hit me via the polls.

What I'd say about the '00s angst girls versus the '60s angst boys I grew up on is that the '00s girls are about reconciliation, because alienation for them is much more a disaster than an opportunity, though the disaster-versus-opportunity dialectic holds for them just as it held for Dylan and Lou and Iggy but those boys were about the universe is irrevocably fucked which frees us hurray to go into total despair and let's party! Whereas the Ashlees and the Kellys are more about working the disaster into and working it through and out of the regular old furrows and plows and brows of your spilled-coffee-and-shared-toothpaste regular life.

But whom I'd most likely want to write about because they're in my mind and in my Right Now are Taylor Swift and Rihanna, Taylor with the specificity of her almost-diary lyrics but also a vast and varied palette of a girl's sighs and quavers and resolve and pissiness, all this in a womanly romantic quest for self by way of her difficult relationships with males - and Rihanna suddenly a wild card with her soul searching about who she is and why she'd behaved the way she had, and what her role as a public figure calls up for her. Not sure how this will play out on her new album; she's already done darkness as a trope, I think she's starting to get co-writer credits, so does she unexpectedly become a singer-songwriter angst girl too, but with Ne-Yo and The-Dream and Tricky Stewart providing the urban soundscapes? The risk is that "darkness" and "expressing oneself" can fall into cliché very easily: oh we're dark, and darkness is seriousness! But if the most important figure in the last three years of the decade in country music can be a teen girl doing girly-girl singer-songwriter diary-excerpt self-expression, maybe the same thing can happen in r&b, the most important figure being a young woman barely into her twenties who's got powerful reasons to be estranged from the romance cycle that dominates pop songwriting. Taylor does the sort of princess pop that drives her to say "I'm not a princess"; Rihanna is in the sex 'n' love urban landscape, and she's just said "Eff love!" and so what's next? What's there to sing?