Last September I wrote a post about the year 2000 in music and what it meant for me personally. It was pretty extensive, and at this rate I’m not going to be able to cover the entire ‘00s decade (whatever we’re supposed to call it) until it’s time to start looking back on the ‘10s. But that said, 2001 was a major year for me and it’s probably worth digging into a little bit, even if I never get around to writing about the other eight years. So I’ll give it a shot and we’ll just see how it goes.

It’s difficult to know where to start with 2001. Once, that year had strictly futuristic, sci-fi connotations. Even more than “the year 2000,” a phrase which had been well overused by the time the actual (rather ho-hum) year came around, 2001 sounded like something bold and new. It was a strong and foreign looking number, no less novel than 2000 but somehow more serious, and more unknowable.

Starting the year off with George W. Bush’s inauguration brought 2001 back down to Earth, and fast. Now he is remembered mostly for the absurd amount of damage he caused to the world and to his country during his interminable reign, but prior to September 11th he was just kind of a joke. The image of awkward, bumbling incompetence is one he was never able to shake, but in early 2001 that was his only image. Remember That’s My Bush? He was a sit-com character, a charmingly inept doofus who had the presidency handed to him. John Ashcroft as Attorney General? It was laughable. Not that many didn’t recognize how dangerous the situation was, but it just didn’t seem possible that this administration would have a chance to do too much irreversible damage.

Of course, it did, and the only association with 2001 that matters now in this country could not be further from A Space Odyssey. But this post is supposed to be about the music, and about me. So where was I? Still in high school, getting my driver’s license, spending time with my girlfriend. I was on the upswing from the worst of my experiences with depression. I was engaging with people more, relaxing more, and just generally doing more. Musically, I was more confident than ever — my Bob’s Discount Furniture gig (and I’m not knocking it — that was a great high school job) allowed me to spend more on CDs than I’m sure I should have, and as a result I was starting to explore some of the depths of rock music that I’d never gotten to before. It must have been 2001 when I discovered XTC and bought their entire catalogue, a couple pieces at a time. And I must have bought music by Neil Young, and Television, and The Stone Roses, and Love, and Big Star — still all physical copies, though my pre-iPod MP3 library was beginning to get serious.

My personal memories of 2001 are really very positive. I’m sure I had meltdowns, and panic attacks about my future, and made stupid mistakes. But looking back, the pieces were coming together a little bit, and I think you can see that in the music I was listening to. It wasn’t all just broody and introspective anymore — I was opening up. If you had asked me at the time I wouldn’t have told you I felt dramatically better or different from a year prior, and I really would have meant it. But I didn’t have perspective.

So how to reconcile the 2001 I experienced personally with the 2001 we all wish we could forget ever happened? Let’s take a look at the contemporary music I was listening to at the time, and see if it helps to make any sense of it.

The Shins

This band would very quietly do more than any other to break indie pop into the mainstream (with the aid of Zach Braff, for some bizarre reason). But in 2001 we weren’t there yet, and The Shins’ debut album was just the kind of exciting, under-the-rader release that would have infatuated me: catchy and melodic, lo-fi and obscure. It was like being able to pretend The Beatles had only influenced this small cult of music lovers, and I was in the club. I was still probably really insufferable with this shit. But I wanted sounds that felt personal and were just for me, without necessarily being mopey or cerebral. As I’ve said, as a little kid in the ‘80s I grew up on Squeeze, not on Joy Division. So if 2001 was the year I transitioned into wanting both worlds — the depth and the superficiality, the introspection and the sense of fun — then it makes sense it would also be the year I started obsessing over XTC, and considered The Shins’ Oh, Inverted World to be a standout release. Fortunately, there was a whole lot more of this kind of thing to come out over the course of the decade, so I really couldn’t have timed it better.

And yes, well before Garden State, “New Slang” felt like a classic.

Radiohead Again

But let’s not get carried away with the indie pop stuff. Radiohead was still the center of my universe, I probably listened to Kid A more than any other album in 2001, and there were no signs that this would be changing at any time. I obsessively counted the days leading to the release of Amnesiac in the summer of 2001, especially since it was to feature some live standouts that had been excluded from Kid A’s tracklist a year prior (”Pyramid Song,” “Knives Out”).

And it was a disappointment. Maybe it was the relatively quick release after putting out a classic record, or maybe I had just ruined the listening experience by downloading one badly-encrypted mp3 after another as they leaked over the spring. Certainly this was a brand new way to experience a record for the first time, and the negatives probably outweighed the positives.

Amnesiac wasn’t all that well-received in general, either. It sounds all over the place, as you might expect from a record assembled from the same sessions that had already produced one immaculately sculpted CD (some referred to it as Kid B-side). Interestingly though, its reputation has increased a lot in the years since. It’s gained a lot of respect as Radiohead’s most fragmented, schizophrenic, and experimental album. Many critics took the opportunity to up their initial scores of Amnesiac when EMI rereleased the Radiohead catalogue at the end of the decade. History has given the record less a sense of “these guys have lost it” and more of a “that’s that cool weird one from ’01.”

I love many of the songs on Amnesiac individually. That year I participated in an afterschool music criticism class, led by The Hartford Courant’s classical critic Steve Metcalf. For one assignment I played “Pyramid Song” for my peers (one of the leaked, pre-release mp3s) and extolled the band’s genius for a good ten minutes. I still think Amnesiac is their least successful album as a single listening experience. I just have no emotional attachment to it. But it did nothing to hinder my adoration for the band, and when I saw them at Suffolk Downs that August it was absolutely thrilling.

Another thought — maybe Amnesiac is more respected now because its insanity seems well suited to how we collectively remember the year 2001. Things hadn’t totally gone to hell yet, but maybe it took a pessimist like Thom Yorke to show us where we were headed.

Sparklehorse

I didn’t know much about Sparklehorse when I bought It’s a Wonderful Life. I’d heard about the band mainly through connected artists like PJ Harvey and Tom Waits, both of whom appeared on this album. It was also produced in part by Dave Fridmann, the master of bombast who defined the sound of The Flaming Lips’ classic The Soft Bulletin. These would have been more than enough reasons for me to buy the CD blind.

Mark Linkous was the mastermind behind Sparklehorse. He reminded me a bit of E from the Eels — his music was almost painfully private, his voice always sounding like it was coming from inside your own head. There was somehow more pain in Linkous’s music, though — where E embraced soul-baring honesty, Linkous found ways to obscure himself, and it could be scary.

Linkous committed suicide this past March. I loved this album as soon as I heard it, but it was a hard one to listen to very often. It’s certainly no easier now.

The Strokes and The White Stripes

I should talk about the big players in 2001, and that would be these guys. The Strokes, you may recall, were going to “save rock and roll!” Or something. I think The Hives were supposed to do that too, and The Vines. But those bands weren’t very good, and The Strokes, it turned out, were.

Did rock really need saving in 2001? I don’t know. I guess few were making high quality, straight up guitar rock at the turn of the millennium. But take the whole idea of saving rock out of the equation and you’re left with a really great album in The Strokes’ debut, Is This It. I liked it a lot at the time, but I am kind of amazed how good it still sounds. There’s nothing original about it, but there is something in that straightforward post-punk sound that makes it ageless.

The album didn’t come out in the US until October, and it became one of the more infamous post-September 11th releases — one of its best songs, “New York City Cops,” was replaced with a weaker song at the last minute to avoid controversy.

And then we have The White Stripes, who became instant icons in 2001 with their third album, White Blood Cells. Jack White probably did more to save guitar rock than The Strokes did, frankly. You just could not get away from this album after it hit, and for good reason. You aren’t going to see many best-of-the-decade lists exclude this one. Does it hold the same position for me personally? I guess not — I don’t listen to it with any kind of regularity anymore.

But I can’t argue that White Blood Cells and Is This It both rock, and rock convincingly, which we maybe had forgotten how to do for a few years.

Gorillaz

Damon Albarn is a musical hero of mine — an incredible douchebag, but a true genius, nonetheless. By 2001 I’d been well into Blur for at least a good four or five years. But the idea that Damon was going to do a hip hop album fronted by cartoon characters did not hold a ton of appeal for me. First of all, I really was not open to appreciating hip hop yet. Secondly, I took my love of Blur very seriously, and instead of working on another album Damon was going to take some time off to focus on a cartoon band? What the fuck?

So I avoided buying this for a while, but after I finally caved, I felt like an idiot. It’s a really good record. Forget about the cartoon bit — what you have here is Albarn just being himself and messing with different genres outside of the Blur mold, throwing things together to see what happens. Not all of it works, but an impressive amount of it does, mainly just due to the guy’s raw talent. Even when he’s just screwing around with a half-assed melody and a drum machine (and there is more than a little bit of that kind of thing here), it’s pretty great.

Blur, it turned out, was nearly over by this time anyway. Gorillaz wasn’t some trivial side project, but a new way for Albarn to explore legitimate musical ideas. It would in fact be his primary outlet for the rest of the decade.

Low

Low had already been around for some time, but I didn’t discover them until 2001’s standout Things We Lost in the Fire. It is one of the most beautiful albums of the decade. I’m finding it’s a tough one to write about, but it needs to be singled out. Listen to it yourself.

Additional Notes

I bought Super Furry Animals’ Rings Around the World while vacationing in Ireland with my family in August 2001. “Juxtaposed With U” was actually getting a ton of airplay there, which I loved. It’s not SFA’s best album, but it is very good, and it contains the wonderful “Run! Christian, Run!”

I spent a lot of time listening to Spiritualized’s Let It Come Down in 2001. It’s one of those records I found myself in love with at that point in my life, which doesn’t do much for me anymore.

R.E.M., which I still considered to be my favorite band of all time in ’01, released their first terrible record that year. Reveal was very, very hard to come to terms with, and I spent many weeks trying to convince myself it wasn’t so bad. Three years later, they would come back with Around the Sun, which was even worse. The inevitable decline can be a hard thing to watch.

Björk’s Vespertine was another 2001 standout, and the first CD of hers I bought new after becoming a fan. I’m not always in the mood for it, but it is one of her better efforts.

Elbow’s Asleep in the Back is one I’m not ashamed to love. I played this many, many times, and though they were thought to be a kind of Coldplay whose songs weren’t catchy enough to make it, I think they need to be considered on their own merits. You listen to “Powder Blue” and tell me you don’t feel something.

Destroyer and Spoon both put out excellent CDs in 2001 that I wouldn’t catch until a few years later. Destroyer’s Streethawk: A Seduction in particular I think is one of the decade’s best, and represents Dan Bejar at his most compellingly weird.

Best song of the year: Super Furry Animals — “Run! Christian, Run!”

Best album of the year: Low — Things We Lost in the Fire

Best concert of the year: Has to be Radiohead. It was my first chance to see them as a fanatic (I had seen them open for R.E.M. when I was 11, but that barely counts). Finally being old enough to start driving to shows with friends was a huge deal. Also, I got to see the band play “Pearly*,” and that’s just awesome.

Most overrated album of the year: Daft Punk — Discovery. Look, I know, “Digital Love” is great and everything. You are never going to convince me that “One More Time” is not annoying as fuck.

Worst song of the year: “It’s Been Awhile” came in 2001. “How You Remind Me” as well. Crazy Town, enough said there. There’s no lack of choice here. But I am going to go with the song that drove me craziest that year — the horrible, horrible Moulin Rouge version of “Lady Marmalade” by Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil’ Kim, Mya, and Satan. You could not escape it, and I wished every day that I could.

Actually, I will say more about Crazy Town. According to Wikipedia, “‘Butterfly’ is one of only two No. 1 songs in the Hot 100 era naming an insect in its title (the other being ‘Fireflies’ by Owl City).” So now you know.

Next: College! War! And Yankee Hotel Fuckin’ Foxtrot! It’s everyone’s favorite palindrome, 2002!

The Shins – “New Slang”

Radiohead – “Pyramid Song” live in Paris, 2001

Sparklehorse – “It’s a Wonderful Life”

The Strokes – “New York City Cops” live

The White Stripes – “Fell in Love with a Girl” (obviously)

Low – “Sunflower”

Super Furry Animals – “Run! Christian, Run!”

Elbow – “Powder Blue”

2000 was a long time ago, and it feels like it. I was 15, couldn’t drive, no girlfriend, depressed out of my mind. Bill Clinton was president, which is bizarre to think about. And it’s been really difficult trying to remember everything I was listening to at the time. Medum-wise, it was pretty strictly CDs, I can say for sure. Yeah, I was well into the MP3 thing already by then — we’re talking the heyday of Napster, after all — but I just didn’t have the hard disk space to hold a full digital music library on the family computer, and the iPod age hadn’t started yet.

Was I still listening to the radio? I guess I must have been, but certainly not to the degree that I did in the ‘90s. The alternative rock era was pretty much over by 2000, and my once-beloved Radio 104 had devolved into a Creed-and-Staind-dominated bore. Napster really did come at the right time — all of a sudden, I had access to as much obscure indie fare as I could think to look for, things I’d never have heard on commercial radio in Hartford. All I had to do was wait half an hour or so for each song to download via dial-up, adding perhaps another hour or two spent ruining several CD-Rs in a sometimes futile attempt to burn my loot to disc… ah, joys my children will never know. I was definitely reading more than ever before about music, poring through books on indie rock history and keeping up with the daily Pitchfork reviews. Yeah, that’s right, I was reading Pitchfork before it was cool to hate it.

Is that the douchiest hipster sentence ever written? You’re welcome.

Anyway.

It’s fun to reminisce about, I guess because it really is a long time ago now and so much changed about music technology, distribution, and habits over the course of the decade. But it really wasn’t a fun year as I remember it personally, filtered through a Prozac haze and drenched in constant, intense feelings of self-hate and loneliness. By the end of 2000 though, I was through the ugliest phase of my adolescence and things got to be pretty great for a while. Except for, y’know, that whole George W. Bush thing. I’ll try not to dwell on that too much in these entries since the only notable music to come out of the Bush administration was “Let the Eagle Soar,” but it’s tough since Bush did otherwise own the entire fucking decade.

So, 2000. What to talk about? I guess I know where to start.

Kid A

It didn’t come out till October, but my primary association with the year 2000 has to be Radiohead’s Kid A. I really can’t explain how exciting this album was to anyone who wasn’t there or just didn’t get it. Since I only became a Radiohead fanatic after OK Computer’s release in 1997, Kid A was the most anticipated LP of my life. I was familiar with live versions of nearly every song that had been floating around Napster for some time, as well as many that would appear on 2001’s Amnesiac. But I could only hear the studio versions in short “blip” advertisements the band released, no more than a few seconds each, in lieu of any advance singles. Their marketing definitely worked on me. Everything about it — the evil little cartoon bears, the mysterious fiery mountain imagery, the brief morsels of sound like OK Computer put through a paper shredder and tossed into the Grand Canyon — it resonated with me strongly. You would think, looking back, that no album could have lived up to the hype for an obsessive like me.

I am not the first to note this, but the most amazing thing about Kid A is how incredibly fresh it still sounds. I think a lot of people forget the criticism it received at the time of its release. Thom Yorke’s vocals were chopped up and processed into obscurity, they said. Really? Listening now, they sound so vivid and clear and honest, perhaps a result of years of autotune abuse in popular music.

And the guitars — where was Jonny’s signature, “Paranoid Android”-style soloing? Well, I didn’t miss it. When called for, Jonny Greenwood can use his guitar shredding abilities to incredible effect; Kid A simply doesn’t call for it. The band was derided for taking a self-conscious left turn into electronic noodling, but Kid A is no half-assed, experimental detour. The sound on this record is rich, inspired, varied, challenging. And how can you argue with the songs themselves? This record has as great a first half as any I have ever heard. “How to Disappear Completely” in particular is a triumph in songwriting, an incomparably beautiful expression of coping with overwhelming anxiety. Of course this resonated with me around the time I turned 16 — it was like it was written just for me.

Kid A was my headphones album of choice for a very long time. It has aged well, and seems to be more revered now than it was then. I fully expect that when Pitchfork unveils their best albums of the decade list soon, Kid A will be right up there at the top. How can it not be? No album has matched its power in the last nine years, and most aren’t trying to in the new golden age of the single and the iPod Shuffle.

Eels

I was already familiar with “Novocaine for the Soul” from alternative radio, but I didn’t start getting into E’s music until 2000’s Daisies of the Galaxy. It’s not a classic record or anything — “Flyswatter” is fun and received a memorably insane performance on Letterman, and “It’s a Motherfucker” is a great example of how E can balance honest melancholy and comedy as beautifully as anyone. But Eels’ music would mean a lot to me over the course of the 2000’s, particularly during the first few years.

Mainly, this is due to 1998’s Electro-Shock Blues. If nothing else, Daisies of the Galaxy was effective enough to convince me to buy this, the band’s second album, and it would quickly become one of the most meaningful records I’d ever heard. In the early 2000s I would lose three grandparents, and Electro-Shock Blues just seemed like such a gorgeous, accurate, epic meditation on death and loss and grief as I went through those experiences. It’s not something I listen to terribly often, but for a while there I really needed to. I still can’t listen to “Dead of Winter” without tearing up, and I can’t say that about many songs. There is nothing indirect about this music, it is straight up soul-bearing, and it’s not for everybody. But it’s done a lot for me.

Elliott Smith

I didn’t discover Elliott Smith until 2000, either, though it feels like it must have been a lot earlier considering he was dead just three years later. In fact, 2000’s Figure 8 was the last album he would release during his lifetime. In any case, once I found him, his music buried itself deep enough into my brain that it felt like I’d always been a fan.

The initial appeal of his music came from his impressive pop instincts. Elliott was masterful at weaving together strange chord progressions and ending up with something surprisingly straightforward and catchy. But as much as the term “Beatlesque” was thrown around when his music was discussed, Elliott came from a very dark and sensitive place. Figure 8 was a glossy, well-produced effort compared to the rest of his catalogue, but no Smith record was short on stripped-down, lo-fi, acoustic expressions of quiet angst. As depressed as I ever felt back then, I could always listen to Elliott and walk away thinking, “Jesus, I’m glad I’m not him.”

He was a unique and gifted songwriter, and I have always wished I’d seen him live.

Post-Rock and IDM

A return to pop basics would run as a constant theme through much of the decade’s indie rock, but in 2000 things were almost bizarrely dark and abstract. It’s funny, since the state of the country was actually pretty great at the time, but a lot of the new music I heard was grim — particularly the abundance of stuff that fell into two wretchedly-named genres, post-rock and intelligent dance music.

My interest in both was briefly pretty high. The absolute peak in post-rock for me was 2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven by Godspeed You Black Emperor! (later Godspeed You! Black Emperor — I know, bunch of pricks). As a genre, post-rock was musically overindulgent, but with enough subtlety and restraint that it never quite veered into prog-rock territory. Lift Your Skinny Fists certainly shares what are probably the genre’s fundamental faults, but it’s actually still quite beautiful listening now. The double-disc’s four expansive instrumental tracks really succeeded at capturing something harsh and evocative, and unlike many other similar bands (and other Godspeed records), it never gets dull here.

I recall having to order this album online (you weren’t going to be able to just walk into Borders and pick up the new Godspeed, even then). When it arrived, I was fascinated by the eerie ink-on-cardboard packaging and track list pretentiously displayed as a visual timeline. My mom thought the band name and album title were so befuddling and hilarious she had me read them to my grandfather.

IDM was all about sucking the fun out of techno, essentially. Artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre manipulated drum machines and synthesizers to craft avant-garde electronic music that was impossible to dance to. Like post-rock, it was often more pompous than it was worth. Still, some of it has had some lasting value for me: Boards of Canada’s first two albums are excellent, and Squarepusher, who I believe I discovered in 2000, was able to mash up jazz and drum and bass influences into something fascinating.

Much is made about IDM’s influence on Radiohead during the Kid A sessions. Thom Yorke is obviously a fan, but I’m never going to get as much out of Tri Repetae as I have out of Kid A.

The New Pornographers

There will be much more on A.C. Newman and friends later, but I have to note that the Canadian power-pop group’s amazing first record, Mass Romantic, came out in late 2000. Insanely, I was not very open to it at the time; when you’re listening to a lot of Godspeed and Mogwai and Portishead and you hear the unabashed pop glory of “Letter from an Occupant” for the first time, your brain doesn’t know how to handle it. But as I said in my previous post, I was brought up on Squeeze, and I would come back around to adoring this stuff soon enough. I knew it was great, but I wasn’t yet at a place in my life where I could comfortably embrace it.

Additional Notes

Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump came out in May of 2000, and for much of that year it was one of my favorite albums. It’s a little dated now, but it was kind of the nerdy American response to OK Computer. “The Crystal Lake” is still pretty great.

PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea actually sounds better than I remembered. Thom Yorke sings on it, which is probably why I bought it then, but it really is a standout in her excellent discography.

Sigur Rós is often grouped together with the other post-rock bands of the time, but they were always kind of doing their own thing. An opening spot for Radiohead during a pre-Kid A Radiohead tour led to a great deal of attention for their 1999 LP Ágætis byrjun in 2000, and it was well-deserved. Their music was always a touch too — sleepy, maybe? — to be counted among my favorites, though.

I should probably be taking some time here to talk about OutKast here — Pitchfork recently called “B.O.B.” the best song of the decade, and it is undoubtedly excellent — but honestly, I don’t listen to much hip hop now, and I listened to none at all back then.

I also want to make sure I mention Clinic’s debut CD, Internal Wrangler. I first heard about them because, surprise surprise, they opened some shows for Radiohead. I remember finding this CD on a family trip to New York City, and I made everyone listen to it during the car ride home. I am pretty sure my parents hated it. But listening to it now — spectacular! What a great, fun album. And “Distortions” — one of the best songs of the decade for sure.

Finally, 2000 was a productive year for Fidel and the Castronauts, my half-baked musical venture with John Glover. I spent a lot of time hacking away on this stuff with free sound editing software that was completely ill-suited for music making. It is mostly unlistenable, but we had a lot of fun making it.

Best song of the year: The New Pornographers – “Letter from an Occupant,” whether I knew it or not.

Best album of the year: Radiohead – Kid A (duh).

Best concert of the year: Hard to remember what I saw in 2000 (living in Canton and not driving means probably not too much), but I’ll go with Fiona Apple at the Oakdale. When the Pawn is a classic record from the tail end of the ‘90s, and she put on a memorable show. I also attended with a memorable companion.

Most overrated album of the year: Modest Mouse – The Moon and Antarctica — I like Modest Mouse, and this isn’t a terrible album by any means, but I was a little “meh” about it when it came out and I still don’t really understand the accolades it received.

Worst song of the year: Creed is tempting, but I’m going to go with “Kryptonite” by 3 Doors Down. This is a great representative of the unapologetically dumb shit that entirely ruined commercial rock for the whole decade. Witless, soulless, and still somehow hugely popular.

Next: George Bush is President! The whole world goes to hell! Plus, The Shins! Party like it’s 2001, everybody!

Kid A Blips

Eels – “Flyswatter” on Letterman

Elliott Smith – “Son of Sam” live

A selection from the first track on Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven with some guy freaking out in front of a lamp

The New Pornographers – “Letter from an Occupant”

Clinic – “Distortions”

Fidel and the Castronauts – “The Nose Bleed Song” – Flash video by Taco the Wonder Dog

John Ashcroft – “Let the Eagle Soar” (a sign of things to come)

Music was the top art form of choice for me. Before I was old enough to have opinions, I knew more clearly than I knew anything else how I felt about one song over another. Those feelings were pure, emotional, and fervent. Songs were flavors and colors; a favorite was a favorite just because – because it resonated a certain way in my brain, and in my spine. Yes, my father has to get credit because that’s where the initial exposure to music needed to begin (not to sell short my mother, a singer-songwriter and serious music fan in her own right). But no one told me Squeeze was my favorite band when I was six. There was no reason they should rank above any other artist whose LPs were scattered around the house – Springsteen or Dylan or U2 or The Beatles or The Stones or Talking Heads. But, based largely on their 1982 singles compilation, it was Squeeze, just because. Their pop songs tasted the richest, looked the greenest, felt the warmest. I didn’t comprehend the clever, British slang-ridden narrative lyrics, but they always sounded right. And the melodies, and the chord changes (without knowing what chord changes were) – transcendental. A little later, it was R.E.M. that would click in the same way. Later, Radiohead. In every case, the religious center of my brain would seize, and complete discographies were collected and absorbed completely, without knowledge of what the critics said. All I knew of musical tastes outside mine and my parents’ were those of my grade school peers. I knew they were completely different from mine. More than that, I knew mine were informed by greater musical exposure and interest. Superior.

Like I said, I can be pretty insufferable with my musical opinions, and that goes way back. Just imagine the feeling of hitting adolescence in the late ’90s, an awkward and introverted early bloomer, and hearing Radiohead’s “Karma Police” on the radio for the very first time. What the fuck was that? Mind-blowing. Ecstasy. And then, as my musical awareness expanded outside what my father knew about and what the local modern rock radio station would play, I began to explore within the doors of music criticism. And hey, it turns out I’ve been right all along! It’s not just me feeling like Murmur and OK Computer are timeless masterpieces – they are. It’s all over the place, in print, written by people who get paid to listen to this stuff. Does that mean I can get paid to listen to this stuff? Does my superhuman pop intuition grant me a spot on the high council of tastemakers? I pondered this often as I indulged in a much wider spectrum of music than ever before, entering my cold, Prozac teenage years. The music that resonated most became bleaker.

The ’00s, it was clear, were to be my musical decade. I would own them. Beginning as a depressed and obsessive 15-year-old and ending as a 25-year-old “adult,” this would be the (arbitrarily) prime ten-year slice of my life. I was to buy lots of CDs, pirate lots of MP3s, and attend lots of concerts. I would also attempt to write lots of songs of my own, though the expectation for success on this front was considerably and justifiably lower.

Over the next few weeks (or months, knowing me), I’m going to be writing about my musical decade that was. Yes, 2009 is only half over, but I’ll be moving chronologically starting from 2000 so it’ll be a while before I get to the present. I’ll be talking about the music that seemed important to me at the time, the music that has stuck with me, opinions that have changed with perspective, and why I’m hopefully somewhat less insufferable than I was ten years ago. I’ll try to find some relevant videos and things to link to for illustrative purposes. Should be fun, yes? No? Yes.