Why Lists Summarising The Decade Aren’t Meaningless And When You Can Expect Ours
words: Jamie Milton
Don’t pretend you haven’t spent the last five days re-visiting pitchfork.com for the next chapter in their top 200 albums of the decade list . You might have left the page thinking “Hmm, that was totally predictable…” and yes, it was. Without splashing out any spoilers for you poor deprived readers, the list, bar some dubious ordering, had a consensual winner and the site certainly didn’t go out to name a nobody just for some PR kudos.
Other publications, including ours, will find it difficult to differ from the list. If you go over to Pop Tarts Suck Toasted today and have a gander at their list, you’ll probably notice that nearly every choice could also be found in the Pitchfork list too. PTST is indeed a blog that represents the P4K-taste, but Pat himself would have found it difficult to include any surprise choices. This is merely because we’ve had a good ten years to assess the albums making the lists, time to re-consider evaluations. That’s probably why these lists will be so scarce of 2009 releases, although granted, 2009 has been decidedly below-par. There is a consensus already that Arcade Fire, Radiohead, The Knife, Sufjan Stevens and Interpol, amongst others, have all made some of the greatest albums of the decade. There’s no breaking away from that. And so you’ll probably be able to draw parallels between nearly every other list you see and believe me, you’ll be growing tired of them very soon.
But these matter an awful lot. Why? Because yearly lists can be scrutinised and mocked when a retrospective shadow is cast but these decade lists…they have an almighty importance in guiding new music listeners in decades to come to scrawl back through time and discover the music their Mum and Dads used to love. If a particular album is picked in its masses as the best record released between 2000 and 2009, it’s going to be difficult to resist. And so it’s satisfying that Pitchfork, the most influential taste-making music publication in the world, have resisted temptation to tip an outsider. It’d be unfair to give glory to the underdog.
Music Fan’s Mic’s own summarisation of the decade will be published from October 19th, where you can find out our top 10 songs of the decade and our 20 top albums, alongside some other miscellaneous lists.
MFM @ HYPEM
