I love “Hey Ya” and “Crazy”'s good, too, but those are also the two I think everyone must know. The only other one I recognize is “Paper Planes” (featured prominently in Slumdog Millionaire), and while a few others may ring a bell if I heard them, it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t. So I’m 3/20, slightly less old than you. 
I’ll try and do that too, but probably won’t have time until the weekend…
See, I do keep up with new music - constantly and ably. And I feel that this list is ridiculously out of wack for the most part, and (as all things like this are) bizarrely weighted toward recent flashes-in-the-pan and negligent of ridiculously great stuff from earlier in the decade.
The one thing that I do need to point out, though -
is that “Ignition (Remix)” is easily top 10 of the decade. Here’s 100 legit reasons why. I agree with most of them. 
OK, come to think of it I have heard “Crazy,” I just fucking hated it so much that my mind blocked it out. A repetitive, unbelievably annoying song and I can’t stand the cadence of the singer’s voice in it. The only time I’ve heard any other Gnarls Barkley songs is when I was at someone’s house (who I hate) and he put on their CD. They did a horrible cover of “Gone, Daddy, Gone” by the Violent Femmes which completely disgraced the original and added absolutely nothing.
This list to me smacks of some editor at Pitchfork saying, “the economy’s suffering, journalism is suffering, so we need more mainstream appeal. We need to include a bunch of token shitty mainstream pop and rap songs that would never have been discussed in Pitchfork 7 years ago.”
Naw, this has been going on for about the past seven years, actually, not just on Pitchfork (though they certainly spearheaded the movement), but in all critical circles. It’s basically the logical progression and evolution of snobbery - it got to the point where the next logical step in the hipness arms-race was not to go deeper underground (they had already hit the bottom) but toinstead do an about-face and indiscriminately embrace and intellectualize the most base mainstream pop music.
Get Ur Freak On - Missy Elliott is #7 for the entire decade? Bitch please
I realize that “hipness” is an essential component of the music scene, but I’m in the weird position of having outgrown the hipster phase but still liking music generally considered to be “hipster” music. So I’m still fiercely loyal to The New Pornographers, The Flaming Lips, plus a lot of more obscure bands like Grandaddy and Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective and Kings of Convenience, but I don’t like the direction that the hipster scene is going in right now (especially the embracing of shit like Sufjan Stevens and The Arcade Fire.) I don’t give a shit about “hip” anymore but I do care whether it’s good music and more importantly, unique music.
Man, 2004 is on the phone…
What bothers me is where it’s actually going right now, which seems to be the embrace of this absolutely ridiculous, compressed hype and disposal cycle. Bands are being hyped waaaaaaay up before they’ve even had the chance to pay their dues or even evolve and mature naturally - literally getting signed off of myspace demos - and then there’s an immediate backlash when they go on to make bad records (what do you expect of a band put in the studio with Bernard Butler to make a mega-hyped debut full-length mere months after forming?) and have on-stage meltdowns because they’ve never even done a shitty cross-country basement/bedroom show tour and suddenly they’re in another country playing in front of 500,000 people and don’t know how to handle it. That is, when they’re not throwing tantrums and refusing to play in the first place.
What a mess.
I honestly do not understand how you could have been in the vicinity of a radio, television, or computer and not hear “Hey Ya!”, which is, incidentally, eleven slots too low on that list.
Oh, yeah I guess I’ve heard that one, although I don’t really like it. I guess I was so apathetic about it that I kind of just blanked out on it.
I agree. No matter how played out the song seems now or how annoying you may have found it when it was a hit, it was the only song this decade I can think of that “crossed over” the way Thriller or Prince did in the 80s. When you can get classic rock and country fans to listen to a hip-hop group, that shit’s impressive.
Missed the edit: As for the rest of the list, it’s exactly what I’d expect from Pitchfork. Buncha overhyped crap, buncha legitimately great stuff, buncha Top 40 pap to prove they’re not snobs.
Only impressive in that it’s able to cater to the lowest common denominator. Stuff that “everyone can agree on” is rarely of any genuine quality.
“Purple Rain”, The Beatles, a lot of Motown stuff - all quality, all basically agreed on by the same number of people who made “Hey Ya!” a hit. Just because something’s popular doesn’t automatically make it shit.
I’m not saying it’s shit, just mediocre. But this really is a matter of personal taste.
Impressive collection of hipster garabe. “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem is truly a great song.
Pitchfork is pretty retarded. As an experiment, I read through the list and make a playlist of the songs (all 30) of the 500 which are in my itunes and am listening through. In most cases (with the exception of Sufjan Stevens who appears 3 times) these aren’t even my fav songs from these artists, and some I REALLY wonder what are doing on here.
Say My Name by Destiny’s Child is unarguablely the WORST song of this decade.
Well yeah. It wasn’t really a feasible explanation. Just a description of the feelings it gives me lol. Just like with modern art, sometimes your cat really could paint something similar…
Believe it or not, I actually like that song. It has an interesting melody and rhythm. It’s probably the least objectionable of Pitchfork’s slumming in that list.
I still haven’t take time to really go through the list, but it seems to be what I’ve came to expect from Pitchfork lists: some greats, some not-so greats, some pleasant surprises, some unpleasant surprises.
One such pleasant surprise for me was #97: Belle & Sebastian - I’m A Cuckoo (Avalanches remix). I like the original song, but the remix is exquisite. It makes me very happy and is worthy to be on the list.
The Avalanches also made a *fantastic *remix of Manic Street Preachers’ So Why So Sad. I don’t even particularily like MSP.