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Albums '00s
I have made a decision for the remainder of 2009 to listen to no more Albums I Haven't Heard Yet. So, a trifle early, here is my decade's end albums list:
Top Ten Albums Of The '00s
1. Ashlee Simpson Autobiography
2. Montgomery Gentry Carrying On
3. Big & Rich Horse Of A Different Color
4. Britney Spears Blackout
5. t.A.T.u. Dangerous & Moving
6. Various Artists Global Hits 2002
7. Eminem The Marshall Mathers LP
8. Ying Yang Twins Me & My Brother
9. Fannypack See You Next Tuesday
10. Paris Hilton Paris
I wouldn't say that these albums are representative of the decade, or my decade, or my listening, even, and I've also not until this moment given any thought to what they might have in common. So let's try: not counting Global Hits 2002, an anthology of Eurodance that spans the late '90s and early '00s, all but two of these are debut albums or second albums, the Ying Yang's being their third and Britney's being her fifth. And all but the Britney strike me as fundamentally exuberant, though that needs elaboration. Global Hits and Paris are bread-and-butter dance albums, so their exuberance is mundane, eye-level, everyday and every night exuberance, Paris being a nice tour through the loneliness and promise of the dance club. And of course all the others are just as danceable, different dances in different locations. Ashlee's exuberance is shot through with an underlying sadness, Montgomery Gentry's with defensiveness and low self-esteem, Eminem's with anger and weakness - the album could be subtitled "In Which Our Hero Explores His Anger And Weakness" - t.A.T.u.'s with poignance (blatantly cheesy poignance is their shtick, the shtickiness making it more eerily beautiful, not less), Ying Yang Twins' with alcohol, and Fannypack's with even more exuberance. Big & Rich's nonstop two-voice harmonies sound simultaneously full of regret and full of gall. Leaving Britney, who in her hedonistic self-involved dance sounds like she's scratching fiercely and insinuatingly at the world - somehow the angriest thing on the list, closer to punk than even Eminem and Montgomery Gentry are, and they kind of are punks in the pre-musical sense.
The feelings that run contrary to the exuberance kick the exuberance forward. When Ashlee introduces herself (first line of the second verse on the first song of her first album) with "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep," she's speaking of long dreadful loneliness, but the line is total chutzpah, telling us in effect, "NOW I'll show you."
Ying Yangs and Big & Rich clown all over the place ("I got a spaceship, fully equipped; I'm a cowboy Stevie Wonder," which makes me think of when the National Lampoon put Stevie Wonder on the cover of their special 3-D issue, wearing 3-D glasses), but Ashlee's got the most full-scale hilarious song ("Love Me For Me," and while being deliberately funny it's dead serious, a raucous comedy of manners on the subject of Ashlee's intense refusal to be taken for granted or on anything other than her own terms), and Fannypack ("Get off, like a wedding gown!") and Eminem have the funniest lines ("Oh, now he's raping his own mother" and "Dear Mr. I'm Too Good Call Or Write My Fans" still crack me up whenever I hear them, but my favorite is "When I go out, I'mma go out shootin'! [Pause.] I don't mean when I die, I mean when I go out to the club, stupid").
A final thought, though: whatever record I might have picked as my favorite for every other decade (in '69 I'd probably have chosen Beggars Banquet, in '79 it'd have been either Raw Power or Never Mind The Bollocks, in '89 it was Appetite For Destruction*, in '99 Midi, Maxi & Efti, which was Swedish reggae-pop but it was fronted by three immigrants who made a point that they were from an area of civil war), there'd have been the presence of politics - or at least a sense of a social push-and-pull - in the songs. I wouldn't say that the records on this decade's list should have more such push-and-pull than they do (and the country duos, Big & Rich and right-wingers Montgomery Gentry, do reference war and racial politics, and there's the exploitation of identity politics by t.A.T.u., and Eminem is punching every social button in sight), but the fact of wars (the U.S. is fighting two of them) and likely environmental catastrophe, and a decade of fairly blatant class division, isn't the presence it would have been when they occurred in other decades, except from the country guys.** This doesn't mean such songs aren't out there, but - except for the country guys - the people making them weren't the ones who put together the really good albums, at least not the ones that reached me.
I assume Ashlee's politics run pretty close to mine - she supports gay marriage and she's a Green Day fan, is probably liberal left - but this doesn't feed her art.
*Stacey Q's Hard Machine was a near miss as my number one, almost upsetting my generalization. And there's always implied identity politics in everything, but that's a different matter.
**And I'd say the same tends to be true of what made the charts.
Top Ten Albums Of The '00s
1. Ashlee Simpson Autobiography
2. Montgomery Gentry Carrying On
3. Big & Rich Horse Of A Different Color
4. Britney Spears Blackout
5. t.A.T.u. Dangerous & Moving
6. Various Artists Global Hits 2002
7. Eminem The Marshall Mathers LP
8. Ying Yang Twins Me & My Brother
9. Fannypack See You Next Tuesday
10. Paris Hilton Paris
I wouldn't say that these albums are representative of the decade, or my decade, or my listening, even, and I've also not until this moment given any thought to what they might have in common. So let's try: not counting Global Hits 2002, an anthology of Eurodance that spans the late '90s and early '00s, all but two of these are debut albums or second albums, the Ying Yang's being their third and Britney's being her fifth. And all but the Britney strike me as fundamentally exuberant, though that needs elaboration. Global Hits and Paris are bread-and-butter dance albums, so their exuberance is mundane, eye-level, everyday and every night exuberance, Paris being a nice tour through the loneliness and promise of the dance club. And of course all the others are just as danceable, different dances in different locations. Ashlee's exuberance is shot through with an underlying sadness, Montgomery Gentry's with defensiveness and low self-esteem, Eminem's with anger and weakness - the album could be subtitled "In Which Our Hero Explores His Anger And Weakness" - t.A.T.u.'s with poignance (blatantly cheesy poignance is their shtick, the shtickiness making it more eerily beautiful, not less), Ying Yang Twins' with alcohol, and Fannypack's with even more exuberance. Big & Rich's nonstop two-voice harmonies sound simultaneously full of regret and full of gall. Leaving Britney, who in her hedonistic self-involved dance sounds like she's scratching fiercely and insinuatingly at the world - somehow the angriest thing on the list, closer to punk than even Eminem and Montgomery Gentry are, and they kind of are punks in the pre-musical sense.
The feelings that run contrary to the exuberance kick the exuberance forward. When Ashlee introduces herself (first line of the second verse on the first song of her first album) with "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep," she's speaking of long dreadful loneliness, but the line is total chutzpah, telling us in effect, "NOW I'll show you."
Ying Yangs and Big & Rich clown all over the place ("I got a spaceship, fully equipped; I'm a cowboy Stevie Wonder," which makes me think of when the National Lampoon put Stevie Wonder on the cover of their special 3-D issue, wearing 3-D glasses), but Ashlee's got the most full-scale hilarious song ("Love Me For Me," and while being deliberately funny it's dead serious, a raucous comedy of manners on the subject of Ashlee's intense refusal to be taken for granted or on anything other than her own terms), and Fannypack ("Get off, like a wedding gown!") and Eminem have the funniest lines ("Oh, now he's raping his own mother" and "Dear Mr. I'm Too Good Call Or Write My Fans" still crack me up whenever I hear them, but my favorite is "When I go out, I'mma go out shootin'! [Pause.] I don't mean when I die, I mean when I go out to the club, stupid").
A final thought, though: whatever record I might have picked as my favorite for every other decade (in '69 I'd probably have chosen Beggars Banquet, in '79 it'd have been either Raw Power or Never Mind The Bollocks, in '89 it was Appetite For Destruction*, in '99 Midi, Maxi & Efti, which was Swedish reggae-pop but it was fronted by three immigrants who made a point that they were from an area of civil war), there'd have been the presence of politics - or at least a sense of a social push-and-pull - in the songs. I wouldn't say that the records on this decade's list should have more such push-and-pull than they do (and the country duos, Big & Rich and right-wingers Montgomery Gentry, do reference war and racial politics, and there's the exploitation of identity politics by t.A.T.u., and Eminem is punching every social button in sight), but the fact of wars (the U.S. is fighting two of them) and likely environmental catastrophe, and a decade of fairly blatant class division, isn't the presence it would have been when they occurred in other decades, except from the country guys.** This doesn't mean such songs aren't out there, but - except for the country guys - the people making them weren't the ones who put together the really good albums, at least not the ones that reached me.
I assume Ashlee's politics run pretty close to mine - she supports gay marriage and she's a Green Day fan, is probably liberal left - but this doesn't feed her art.
*Stacey Q's Hard Machine was a near miss as my number one, almost upsetting my generalization. And there's always implied identity politics in everything, but that's a different matter.
**And I'd say the same tends to be true of what made the charts.