The Decade in Music

The Basic Premise

In order to celebrate the album in a time when the medium itself seems to be at a crossroads, I've decided to go on a spree of sorts, and listen to Metacritic's 200 best reviewed albums of the decade.

The Reason

Now, initially, I wanted to listen to all of Rolling Stone Magazine's top 500 albums of all time, and do a short write-up on each of them. I decided against doing that for two reasons:

1.  It's been done already.
2.  Looking at the list, Rolling Stone is far from unbiased. The magazine has a clear penchant for classic rock, and as much as I want to write a piece about how I like Rubber Soul better than Sgt. Pepper, all that material has been listened to, reviewed, analyzed, and commentaried to death.

The whole impetus for this blog came from my reflections on how digital music has changed the way we search for, discover, and listen to new music, particularly how the album format has been challenged by the digital mp3.

In light of that, I decided that focusing on music from this decade only would do a couple things.

1. Keep the project as fresh as possible by focusing for the most part on artists that are still producing new work, as opposed to bands that called it quits decades ago.  
2. Give me the chance to focus on the best albums that have been released during a decade where appreciation for the album is probably as low as its ever been.  Let's face it, today's youth loves the single.
3. I haven't always been as interested in music as I am today.  My musical tastes have come a long way since the advent of web and software based tools like Last.Fm, Pandora, and Amazon.  This project will give me a chance to retread the last decade and listen to the best of what I was missing back when local radio and billboard seemed like my best option for discovering new music.

Something I want to touch on is reason I chose to use Metacritic's list, as opposed to one of the other "best of the decade" lists out there (Uncut, Pitchfork, and NME all come to mind).  I considered all of those, but ultimately chose Metacritic mainly because it is the most genre-blind of them all.

The whole point of Metacritic is to assess the input from the entire critical community, and return a weighted score for each album.  Individual publications like Pitchfork and NME have definite genre-biases, and must cater to their readership, whereas theoretically Metacritic does not.

I ultimately decided that because of this, Metacritic's top 200 would be the most unbiased list out there, and would offer the greatest range of artists and genres.

Regarding Lists

Some people love 'em, some people really, really hate 'em.  Personally, I love em, though I do understand the other side of the argument.  This sort of thing is highly subjective, and obviously no list is ever perfect.

But that's OK as long as you don't take what you're reading too seriously.

• The wrong attitude: "These are the best albums of the decade in order from 1 - 200."
• The right attitude: "Here are two hundred albums that a lot of people really liked over the last ten or so years.  Bet you'll find something you dig."  

In light of that, instead of proceeding down the list from beginning to end, I'll us a fancy random number generator and pick a random album after each of my write-ups.

Thanks!

If you made it this far, thanks for stickin with me! I know there are those of you out there that have probably already heard just about every album on this list.  That's cool, but for every one of you there are probably three or four like me who haven't come close.  The underlying spirit here is supposed to be open-mindedness, discovery, and celebration of what this generation's musicians have done over the last ten years.

If that sounds good to you, definitely stay tuned for more, and please don't hesitate to leave your thoughts in a comment or shoot me an email.  If not, no worries, I'll be here anyway.