They keep telling me that to find anything of musical worth in the 2000s, you have to dig, so I dug.
This is a listing of my favourite 100 albums of the year 2000.
I’ve been digging into the records and music of the year 2000. I’ve been reading reviews, digging out old music magazines, scouring websites made of lists and mostly listening to tons of records. I didn’t do so because I’m convinced 2000 is the greatest year for music since recording began. 2000 is definitely an average year for music at best, below average probably.
But that’s the point. Well, part of it is that I like a good, stupid project which involves lots of time wasting and making up lists. But the other point… I wanted to find out if I could find the infinite variety of music inside one year. It turned out, once you start looking there is an endless stream of music, in a wide range of genres and styles, ever present, even in below average years. I had to consciously limit myself or else I’d be there forever.*
If the idea of a list of 100 records from a below average year like 2000 strikes you as unattractive, don’t worry. That’s a long way off. I’m starting all the way at the bottom with number 360. I’ll try to keep it short for the bottom rungs of the ladder (there’s only so many ways to say a record is really boring). But below average year or not, all of the top 100 come wholeheartedly recommended by me. I ended up with about 150 albums that I’d loved to put in there. No false excuses there, they’re not perfect albums (there were few of those), but I love ’em.
So, if you feel like it, cast your mind back to a time when Beyonce was still at the wheel of Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears was wholesome, Eminem was riding high, Coldplay were just debutants, none of us had heard of the Strokes, the White Stripes, Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem, Arctic Monkeys, Amy Winehouse, Fleet Foxes, Interpol or any of that stuff… It’s beginning to sound like heaven, isn’t it?
Now back to reality…
Btw, it's going to take a long time to get to number 1, there's no rush.
*One thing though, as endless as it turned out, it wasn’t all of the moment. The concept of the musical moment isn’t all that in 2000 – a surprising number of records I read about in reviews or music journalism of the year turned out to be released in 1999 or even 1998, own-label releases which slowly got picked up by bigger players and re-released, sometimes several times. So I expanded my search to reading about 2001, and I found a lot of records of 2000 in there. I can’t imagine the same thing happening in earlier times. Eventually I settled into my own intuitive system of determining the year of a record. I’m sure there are a number of mistakes in there with regards to chronology (some deliberate), but really, who cares?
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Is this an objective list? Of course it is.
I am all knowing and impartial when it comes to music.
Well, anyway, I tried to break out of my comfort zone, both in a more popular direction and in a more obscure. Without this project, I might have never heard a Coldplay or a Britney Spears album, then again I might never have heard one by Kaija Saariaho, Cascabulho or Toru Takemitsu.
But I have my blind spots: reading this list you might wonder if no one was doing anything new in 2000. Sure they were, but unfortunately it was nu-metal. I didn’t feel like listening to Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and the Deftones, so they’re not here. My loss.
What can I say? There had to be a tiny chance that I might like it.
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One reason why I dug in there, one reason you’re obliged to dig in the 2000s, is that we’ve been short changed when it comes to music criticism these last ten years or so. The profession has seriously deteriorated – you just can’t find much decent to read about current music the way you could just 8 or 9 years ago. I’m all for equal opportunities, but when being deaf became a job criterion in 2003, something was definitely lost.
Then again, when you have to listen to the music that journalism has deemed to foist upon us in the 2000s, I suppose the deaf have an advantage over most of us. Maybe music has gotten worse, that’s still a question to me. That they put increasingly worse bands before me to taste, of that I have no doubt. I really think that we need to build up an alternative to the current canon. Of course we’ll never agree on what to put in there. Some of that is in here.
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This is going to be a positive read…in time. I’ve got pages full of lines like ‘manna from heaven’ and ‘like making love to a beautiful woman, marinated in wild honey and exotic spices’ and stuff like that ready, I promise. We’ll get there one day. But this is the nature of the numbered list. We start all the way at the bottom.
22 records you won’t even find in the list, cause I couldn’t bring myself to listen to them:
1. Linkin park: Hybrid theory
2. Limp Bizkit: Chocolate starfish and the hot dog flavoured water
3. Bloodhound gang: Hooray for boobies
4. Everlast: Eat at Whitey’s
5. Rollins band: Get some go again
6. Billy Joel: 2000 years – The millennium concert (just the thought of 2000 years of Billy Joel…)
7. Him: Razor blade romance
8. Kid rock: The history of rock
9. Bone thugs n Harmony: Resurrection
10. Roger Waters: In the flesh
11. Papa roach: Infest
12. Levellers: Hello pig
13. Gabrielle: Rise
14. Julio Iglesias: Noche de quarto lunas
15. Enigma: Screen behind the mirror
16. Barbra Streisand: Timeless: live in concert (another millennial concert)
17. Melanie B: Hot
18. Wheatus: Wheatus
19. Good Charlotte: Good Charlotte
20. Bon Jovi: Crush
21. Nickelback: The state
22. Deftones: White pony
You’re welcome to try and change my mind, but you better bring a good argument.
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