Looking at some of the choices in both the NME and Gaurdian Music Blog’s retrospective top album lists of the noughties, it struck me that ‘defining’ a decade’s worth of music in one list is no mean feat, especially in an era where new subgenres seem to be created during a single online search.
Admittedly, I tutted, eye-rolled and uttered ‘really, that?’ at some of the choices but then I started to wonder just how simple it was to compile such a list. It’s easy to have a pop at the aforementioned publications for predictability and bandwagon-hopping, but there are a few fairly on-the-nose comments within the accompanying features. Whether you’re a fan or not of The White Stripes or The Strokes (I am), there was something undeniably formidable about both in the first half of the decade - as discussed by both list compilations. When I watched The Strokes headline Reading after just one album and a whole lot of hype to an ecstatic crowd, I realised this was a landmark event. I felt like I was watching the Beatles or Stones of my generation; big bands had come around in my living memory but even Britpop’s most successful bands had a longer road to mass adulation and certainly not with the same global impact so early on-it was exciting.
Both bands have since ridden the zeitgeist and become embroiled in the inevitable sideprojects and solo careers, but when NME said of The White Stripes “Between 2001 and 2003 there was no one to touch them”, they weren’t wrong.
For me, as a British teenager of the 90s, the decade was book-ended by two dominant guitar-based musical subcultures. The early half looked to America, and more specifically the anti stadium-posturing, punk-rock endorsing Grunge of the Seattle bands, with Nirvana crowned reluctant kings. After Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Grunge was in its death throes and us UK followers had a dearth of smug boy bands and horrific Europop littering the hit parade. British indie was on the periphery of mainstream culture, never quite breaking through until Britpop. Suddenly a load of Fred Perry-wearing Brits were flying the flag for UK alternative music and Camden was the hipster reference-point du jour.
Whatever you were into, by the time the clock struck twelve ringing in the year 2000, it was easy marking out the sounds of the 90s.
Back to 2009: is it really possible to mark out a particular sound or style as noughties music? I’m not so sure it is, perhaps that’s a good thing. At school in the 90s, to be labelled indie or a ‘grunger’ was a slur, an insult, to be on the outside. I don’t know what the pop-culture based playground snobbery is now, but it in the iPod era it seems far more acceptable to listen to Wiley alongside your White Stripes.
Of course people are still polarised by music, but to see Josh T Pearson and Lethal Bizzle sharing a bill, and the younger sister of one of the world’s biggest pop stars covering a Pitchfork-endorsed Domino act (Solange Knowles covered ‘Stillness is the Move’ by Dirty Projectors recently) shows some interesting cultural shifts in musical attitudes. With the exception of Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue, the 90s never really had such eclectic bedfellows.
If the noughties must have a through line, it is arguably a revisionist one. Almost every year, the word New (or ‘Nu’) has been a default tag to denote a style or scene. This ranged from the brattish, schlock-rock of Nu Metal (Limp Bizkit, Slip-Knot et al) to Nu Rave (the neon mash up involving 90s samples, glo sticks and angular hair, in the likes of Klaxons, CSS and Hadouken) to Nu Folk (although rarely embraced by its tagees, these include Johnny Flynn, Laura Marling, and to a certain extent Noah and the Whale) and even Nu-Gaze (Deerhunter, Serena Maneesh, The Big Pink). Making lists is fun, but writing a catch-all list to summarise ‘the best’ of the decade is getting harder.
Tags: NME, The Strokes, top album lists
by Becky
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