Top 100 Songs of The 00s: 20-1

On December 18th, 2009 by in Lists

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100-81 | 80-61 | 60-41 | 40-21 | 20-1

20. Sufjan Stevens, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” (2002)

As much as we all want to think that our favorite music is selected by refined tastes and considered selection, there’s no getting around the obvious: it’s our life events and situations that define what we love.

That this simple hymn hit me harder than anything else in Sufjan’s catalog says much more about my childhood than anything else. I loved church hymns, and I loved Kermit the Frog’s “The Rainbow Connection” the first time I heard it when I was eight. I love people singing together and I love it when moments of quiet restraint unhinge in subtle ways that betray (but don’t spell out) a fiery passion. I love sad songs.

I can point out the beauty in the slightly raised attack of the piano or the introduction of new voices by verse, or how the wobbly delivery gives it a heartbreaking sincerity, but it comes down to this: I’m an Episcopalian raised in the suburbs and churches of the South by a mother who loved to sing and sang us “Show Me The Way To Go Home” and “You Are My Sunshine” when we were little. And that’s why I love this song.
find it on Songs For Christmas

19. Hot Chip, “Over And Over” (2006)

I got to know this song through a few dance nights at the Black Cat, and it’s a perfect dance track for Mousetrap. Strange lyrics, great dance beat that’s heavy on the snare, but the jewel of the song is the middle part, with the incredible rhythm of “tell you, tell you, tell you, tell you.” A classic example of a great song made amazing by one bit.
find it on The Warning

18. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, “Young Adult Friction” (2009)

In my days on indiepop-centered mailing lists in the late 90′s and early 00′s, I noticed that there were two popular ways to romantically describe a song that you loved so much that it pushed you into some involuntary, strange act. These being sensitive music geeks, they were both in the context of listening to music by yourself in your bedroom. The first was “this song makes me want to lay down on the floor with my arms outstretched”, which means that it was beautiful. The other was “this song makes me want to spin around the room”, which meant it was energetic.

“Young Adult Friction” is so much the latter that I think we can go ahead and retire the phrase entirely (if we haven’t already). The ridiculous twee of the band name and the fact that the song begins with a nod to the “stacks of the library” (I mean, come ON) are completely forgiven with the overwhelming energy of this track. When the guitars come back to their intro phrase after the chorus at 2:04, there’s a little extra push of energy that sends the song soaring.

So yeah, this song makes me want to spin around the room, possibly with my arms outstretched, which seems pretty dangerous, but music gets what music wants.
find it on The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

17. Mogwai, “2 Rights Make One Wrong (edit)” (2001)

If you haven’t noticed by this point in the countdown, I love songs that build to a climax, and that’s pretty much all this song is. Horns and organs swell around it and there’s a effected gauze of lyrics, but mostly it’s just the rounds of guitar and the pounding drums, leading to an overwhelming peak.

It’s an incredible song, but it has as much of a place in this list because it’s the last song that I was ever blown away by instore play in a record store. That will almost certainly never happen again.
find the long version on Rock Action

16. Of Montreal, “So Begins Our Alabee” (2005)

I was lucky enough to see Of Montreal in 2008 in their full, insane glory, and it was a sight I’ll never forget. But what was even more memorable was that they played this song second in the night and I had no idea what it was. When I figured it out, I went into my music collection and found that I already had it. Which says a whole lot about this decade’s music gluttony. Or mine, anyway.

That wasn’t the first time I’d dismissed Of Montreal. In the 90′s, I’d been totally turned off by their unbearably twee old sound, and had ignored all the hype surrounding them until 2007. Shame, because I would have heard this perfect slice of art pop (name another non-OM song that has lines anything like “you’re my mousy aesthete”), a simple song whose only real character is its glorious chorus, with it’s simple, clear hinge: “it’s true”.
find it on The Sunlandic Twins

15. Fiona Apple, “Extraordinary Machine (Jon Brion Version)” (2005)

Confidence in music often comes with swagger, but this song is confident in a more simple way of knowing what the problems are and what to do about it. Yes, it’s far from sexy to call a song “efficient”, but there you have it. There’s not a single wasted moment here: every line is packed tight with astounding wit and brilliant rhymes and the melody swoops around with absolute purpose. One of the most intelligent (and fun) songs you could ever hope to hear.
find the final version on Extraordinary Machine

14. Fleet Foxes, “He Doesn’t Know Why” (2008)

There’s no shortage of beautiful, swooping melodies in the world, but there are times when a melody climbs and dips in all the right ways that there are no better words than “perfect”, no matter how I overuse it. This song is a perfect melody, delivered by Robin Pecknold, easily one of the greatest voices of the decade, and one of the few people that sang from the soul, though the moment when he belts out “There’s nothing I can say” is something far beyond the soul.
find it on Fleet Foxes

13. Stars, “Heart” (2003)

As my friend Peter put it, the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” was “a moment” in 1999 when a lot of us who had spent a decade or more trying to distance ourselves from the top 40 learned to love pop again. It was around/exactly that moment when it felt okay to love any music no matter how many other people loved it.

But still, there was something that we’d loved about the indie approach as well: that sound that it’s made by people we could know in our daily lives, like people who had lived the same lives we’d lived rather than untouchable pop stars.

“Heart” is the song where those two loves come together perfectly. It’s a slow jam, but with expressing love and longing as a genuine, deep feeling rather than a generic song subject. It’s a duet whose chorus and climax we wish had scaled the pop charts, but we’re fine keeping it to ourselves as well.
find it on Heart

12. Arcade Fire, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” (2004)

This was a first-timer, a song that I was totally in love with even before it was even halfway over. Christian had pointed me to the Merge site when Funeral was still a month away from release, telling me to listen to this song because it sounded like “Pulp recorded like The Walkmen”. Which is about as enticing a description for me as they come.
You can hear everything that we love about Arcade Fire in this song. It’s a powerful build with a beautiful ambient-meets-crunch intro, an unhinged vocal moment (“then we think of our parents, whatever happened to them?”) and even a disco beat there at the end. There’s still a lot of time, but I hear this song and I can’t imagine Arcade Fire not being one of the enduring bands twenty or thirty years from now.
find it on Funeral

11. Johnny Boy, “You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve” (2004)

This is as hot as indiepop gets. The hard push overwhelms any timid indie twee, creating something that embodies the pure sound of indiepop in a grabbing, wrestling, propulsive thrust of sound that seems as natural as it does surprising. I don’t really know what the words are about, but with the “YEAH YEAH!” yells, the constant push forward of the backing, and the vocals dropping into a sensual whisper before exploding again into screams, it’s all about the sexual liberation of “Be My Baby.”
find it on Johnny Boy

10. Billy Bragg & Wilco, “Remember The Mountain Bed” (2000)

The duo of albums put out by Billy Bragg & Wilco are studies in how to marry lyrics and music. The incredible words of Woodie Gutherie are matched more often that not with music that they seemed destined for.

There’s nothing in the collection more gorgeous than this one, though. It’s an absolutely perfect melody with varied instruments that come in and bow out, keeping it constantly fresh and create a stunning backdrop for words that ponder procreation and existence with such truth that these six minutes and twenty-seven seconds have everything you need to know about the meaning of life. And sex.
find it on Mermaid Avenue Vol. II

9. Animal Collective, “Fireworks” (2007)

As I got more into Animal Collective, “Fireworks” slowly became the ultimate example of their genius. It was a display of what people raised on rock music could create beyond the limitations of rock culture. It has a beautiful, complex melody with a chattering rhythm that suggests samba, jazz, and funk without being any of those exactly, or even remotely. It’s one of those extremely rare songs that has the comforts of the past while also showing the exciting places that music can go from here.

I’ll admit that this song is an intellectual love. It still gives me chills and begs to be repeated, but not in the same heart-melting way that a lot of the songs on this list do. But I love it for being a towering example of the incredible art that can be created when smarts meet heart.

Aside: the wordless, manic melody that opens and punctuates the song became my favorite whistling tune. FYI.
find it on Strawberry Jam

8. Belle & Sebastian, “Your Cover’s Blown” (2004)

In the days of imports my college friends and I used to joke about scoring the rarest song find, getting it to as absurd levels as possible: “Their best song is on a Dutch limited-edition colored-vinyl fan club 7-inch b-side.” We laughed about the snobbery, but it was a half joke, because we all knew the excitement of finding that a rare song actually was one of the band’s best.
Finding rarities is rarer now (and why remixes and mashups have found a new resurgence), but there are still those times when a band has an off-album song that is one of their best.
Even if it had been on a proper album instead of a single/EP, “Your Cover’s Blown” would easily be Belle & Sebastian’s best song of the decade, and one of the best of their career. A indie-disco epic, it’s also a story of the shy indie boy growing up. It’s the successor of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now”: a night out where the conflict is not self-pitying certainty that he’ll go home alone, but in serious relationships and/or the fun-but-unfulfilling life of making “a rough plan to sleep around.”
And as the song goes on, the music brings out more of the hook in the chorus, so that you wonder how a good song became perfect without being able to find any one exact moment where that happened.
find it on limited-edition Japanese import multicolored see-thru flexi-mp3s

7. Dizzee Rascal, “Hype Talk” (2004)

An unfair high bar for verbal fireworks. The speed of Dizzee’s vocals is only matched for thrills by his travels around the beat, transforming the grime rhythm with almost every line into something new. It’s as exciting as a song can get, and I didn’t listen to this song once and not feel that jumping-out-of-my-skin thrill at the impossible pace of the vocals, but the lightning-fast moments were only heightened by Dizzee taking his foot off the accelerator just to floor it again. A stunner.
find it on Showtime

6. The Lucksmiths, “The Music Next Door” (2005)

The fun and challenge of making lists like this one is trying to find in yourself the reasoning of a high ranking. Is it because you can intellectually back up the significance of a song or album or movie, or is it because it played a big part of your life?

As corny as it sounds, there’s no more right way to put it: The Lucksmiths were my musical soulmate. They combined everything good of pop music–good musicianship, thoughtful songwriting, wit, melody–with the things that spoke to me as who am I and where I’ve ended up. I don’t know if anything that I write about them will talk anyone else into fandom, but everything in my life is there in their music.

“The Music Next Door” is everything I love about The Lucksmiths in one song. It’s the simple, bittersweet story of friendship, with a gorgeous melody and a killer ending, where the pop ba-ba-ba fades into the melody echoed with a trumpet.
find it on Warmer Corners

5. Neko Case, “Deep Red Bells” (2002)

“Deep Red Bells” catches Neko Case at a perfect moment on her trip from straight country and honky-tonk to sometimes-maddening experiments in arrangement. The belting out of the song’s title is the single greatest show of the sheer power of her incredible voice and that alone is enough to make it one of my favorite songs, but it’s the middle section that pushes it into genius. In just a few lines, she paints a perfect portrait of rudderless, violent lives before yielding back to the power of the title lines:

Where does this mean world cast its cold eye? Who’s left to suffer long about you? Does your soul cast about like an old paper bag, past empty lots and early graves? Those like you who lost their way, murdered on the interstate, while the red bells rang like thunder…

4. M.I.A., “Galang” (2005)

The mixing and matching of music cultures has been going on for centuries, and accelerated with recorded media in the last 70-80 years, but it was “Galang” that was that “oh!” moment for me of how global music can be, not just in a way that says that one ingredient is added to another stew, but in a true sense of being a kind of music of the whole world.

But what the hell: it’s a fucking banger, and that’s as universal as it gets. The hook of the beat can take you anywhere in the world, and the chant at the end could take you anywhere in the galaxy. If you really want to, the song could be dissected into its various South Asian, North and South American and British parts, but as a whole it’s just a primal song in a language that everyone (or at least, anyone fun) speaks.
find it on Arular

3. Joanna Newsom, “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie” (2004)

There’s not much I can do to convince anyone of this song’s greatness. The very first time I heard it, I was overwhelmed, and it immediately became a favorite. But to understate it, I’ve found that this is not a common first reaction. More likely is that you’ll be like a friend of mine who listened to it quietly for the first time, and when it was over, said, “If I hear that woman’s voice again I’ll kill myself.”

This is a song that I would wish I could convince the doubters and haters of the fragile power it wields. The beautiful words and the tender attack of the harp backdrops a shattered voice. It has the feel of a traditional Appalachian ballad, but the shifting lines make it totally modern. It’s constantly abandoning melodic ideas for better emotional expressions, giving the song constant build and movement, but it still lives as a perfect whole. It’s great poetry (“Your skin is something that I stir into my tea”, “waltzing with the open sea”) seems to tell a lifetime worth of stories of defeat whose only sum is the plaintive, exhausted wail that ends the song.
find it on The Milk-Eyed Mender

2. Arcade Fire, “Wake Up” (2004)

In February of 2007, I was walking through my neighborhood one Sunday morning to get breakfast. I started feeling dizzy, and the next thing I knew, I was on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, unable to remember even my name.

I can’t really call it a near-death experience, because there was nothing wrong with me, something I know from dozens of tests. But I feel like I know what it’s like to die suddenly, to have my entire life–every accomplishment and defeat, love and heartbreak, frustration, argument, joy–come to a close in one quick, unexpected, easy moment, with the swirling sidewalk of R Street being the very last thing that my perspective took in.

I know that it was only coincidence that I started listening to “Wake Up” a lot after that incident (it mostly had to do with this video), but this song never sounds like anything less than all of life and death. It’s when the concepts of the enormity and smallness of life collide; when total confidence and utter futility are the same thing; when the defeat of “we’re just a million little gods causing rainstorms turning every good thing to rust” is delivered with passion, and the conviction of “I can see where I am going” is delivered with fear and uncertainty.

I’m sure you hear something different, and I hear an amazing song as much as you do. I can can’t listen to it without it driving home the singularity of life that can end all too easily, putting a quick stop to every single thing you’ve ever done. And truly knowing this has strengthened my beliefs, but it can just as easily make me feel like everything is pointless. This song shakes me.

I guess we’ll just have to adjust.

1. LCD Soundsystem, “Yeah (Crass Version)” (2005)

I could write an entire book about this song. Every moment has movement: a bassline is changing or the hi-hat rhythm switches up or a synth voice is tweaked. Vocals come in and and raise and lower in intensity. The major moments never cease to devastate me, and the minor moments are constant rushes.

It’s a song of nasty grit and quietly considered intelligence. It starts without wasting a second and ends in a wasted mess, a spent shell of its tight beginning. It’s meant for dancefloors and best with headphones. It has the monotone urgency of sheer volume yet still creates a feel of acrobatic melody. It’s as ripe for heady academic analysis as it is for thoughtless wildness, and I’ve done both with this song many times.

It’s a life’s worth of excitement in ten minutes: exhilarating, exhausting and still somehow sad. It’s a simple story with a million possible interpretations, and a climax (7:31-8:00) that blots out everything else in the world in a blinding, overwhelming shot.

It’s a perfect song–one of the few of any time I can think of that’s as soulful as is it considered–and if you love me, you’ll let me take you through it moment by moment sometime.
find it on LCD Soundsystem

100-81 | 80-61 | 60-41 | 40-21 | 20-1

Photo: my nephew, Thanksgiving 2003.
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