Stuff that everyone CAN’T agree on is also rarely of any genuine quality. Sturgeon’s Law always applies whether music has crossover appeal or not. So that point is really quite irrelevant. Sure, a lot of widely popular stuff is shit, like Nickleback. But are you gonna tell me the Beatles sucked? Elvis? Stevie Wonder? All are noted for bringing different styles of music into wide acclaim. If you’re telling me Stevie Wonder wasn’t of genuine quality, friend, we’re gonna have to throw some hands.
Obviously YMMV, but in my opinion OutKast is the most talented and original musical act of the last ten years and “Hey Ya!” is the best track.
As someone who works in the industry, this has it closest to why Pitchfork just isn’t worth paying attention to anymore. I mean, the last three days the “Best New Music” were three Radiohead re-releases, all with perfect scores. That’s fucking bullshit.
Indie somehow became really stratified over the past few years through CMJ, Pitchfork, and all the various hype machines like Sunday AAM and Terrorbird. Animal Collective, on their last album, were asking for a guarantee of $25k, where the album before they were only asking for $5k. A band we booked last October for $500, who has released no new albums and only toured moderately since that time, now wants over $2k.
Trust me, great indie is out there - Helado Negro and Desolation Wilderness for example - but they get only all right reviews on Pitchfork because there’s no pressure to do otherwise.
And that Top Whatever has solidified my opinion of those assholes. None of the top 20 are really what I’d consider indie-indie anymore, which is ridiculous. Microphones, Sunset Rubdown, the first Dodo release, etc are all fucking better than “Get Your Freak On”.
I understand most of your criticism of Pitchfork, but why does it matter that most of the top 20 are not “indie-indie?” The list is the Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s, not the top indie tracks. There’s a bunch of songs on the whole list from mainstream artists.
Anyway, it seems like an interesting list. Lots of stuff I like, lots of stuff I need to check out, and some stuff that I’m mystified why it’s on there. If anyone wants to see how cool they are, there’s a checklist here with all the songs listed. I’m familiar with 155 of the songs, making me 31.00% cool.
I guess it comes down to what “Top Tracks” means. If we understand it to be “most played” or “most played over the widest audience” then I could sort of see justification for their list. But this has truly been the decade of indie music, in almost every sense the independent music scene has destroyed the mainstream in innovation, hooks, diversity, whatever - all things I think should be factored into a judgment of “Top Tracks”
For instance, JZ’s 99 Problems. The song itself is great, but DJ Danger Mouse’s remix makes it a work of art - why not include that version and recognize both artists for what they did?
Or take My Girls by Animal Collective. That album was the point of departure, where Animal Collective no longer gave a shit about the indie-indie world that supported them all along. And My Girls is a banal, insipid song with no repeat value. Compare it to For Reverend Green or Panda Bear’s Bros and it’s no contest. So why go with the pop song when the indie-indie songs are so much better?
I mean, I can understand their list to a large degree: it’s all bands they have featured and fawned over for the past 10 years. But truly amazing songs/bands are all the way up in the 200’s and 300’s, while the mainstream pop crowds out the top 20, which makes no sense to me. I will reluctantly agree that Outkast and Gnarles Barkely should be there for crossover appeal, but no fucking way “Get Your Freak On” should ever take out Microphones, Panda Bear, The Roots, Talib Kweli, Modest Mouse, etc.
(Not to mention the almost complete lack of backpackers on the list: No J Dilla, Prefuse 73, Illogic, DJ Zeph, whatever, which is bullshit plain and simple.)
I think that maybe that the people who put together the list have different tastes than you. They feel that the bands they loved over the past decade have produced the best songs of the past decade. Imagine that.
My favorite tracks are all indie-indie-indie. One is even indie-indie-indie-indie.
I’m 14.4% cool. Though I don’t think familiarity alone should be enough to calculate “cool”. A “cool” rating would need to be weighted so that it gave more “cool” points relative to the obscurity of the band and song. There are probably more songs that I know of, or have heard, even some that I probably recognized, but if I couldn’t think of the tune off the top of my head, I didn’t count.
There were more mainstream songs than I expected to see, and when they appeared, they were ranked higher than I expected.
