Index of all best albums of the decade posts.
The 2000s were the era when rock, the most important genre of the previous 50 years, ceased to be the main popular or creative force in music. In its place, electronica, hip hop, and post disco dance music took center stage. This list reflects the change (and my disinterest in Radiohead)—though there’s still some guitar goddery around the margins if that is your poison.
25.
Slum Dunk Presents: Funk Carioca Mixed by Tetine (2004)
Various Artists
Birthed from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, funk carioca is a mash-up of hip hop, reggae, cheezy 80s synth pop, and the untiring butt-shaking dance culture of Rio itself. The bass-heavy beats pound and flex, turntables scratch, and the performers half-chant, half-rap, half-bellow jokes, exhortations, and declarations. Os K-Rascos and Vanessinha DO Picatchu’s flirtatious call and response on “Bochecha Ardendo” is turned into a robot mating ritual with utterly injudicious use of autotune; Raffa’s “Microondas” roars and struts while the melody tinkles somewhere down below like Aphex Twin stuffed in a sack. Funk carioca arguably influenced a few artists like M.I.A., but it never exactly took off outside of Brazil. At home though it remains a live tradition, goofy, original, and joyful.
24.
Red Arc/Blue Veil (2007)
John Luther Adams
Composer John Luther Adams’ music is inspired by the dramatic landscape of Alaska. His work has some parallels with the meditative drones of Pauline Oliveros, but he’s more attracted to percussive sounds, giving his work a feeling of vast monumentality, like ocean’s rising and cliff-faces falling. His piano compositions here, “Dark Waves” (performed by Stephen Drury and Yukiko Takagi) and “Among Red Mountains” (Drury alone) treat the instrument like a vast echoing drum, the performers pounding out Cyclopean gobs of sound whelmed and extended by profligate sustain pedal. “Qilyuan” uses similar techniques but with two percussionists (Scott Deal & Stuart Gerber); 15 minutes of pulsing drumroll, like thunder gods racing across a rugged plateau. The title track for piano and xylophone-esque percussion (Drury and Deal) is a more crystalline exercise in awe. Red Arc/Blue Veil is Xenakis-big but unabashedly Romantic—melodramatic music for glacier trek or contemplating the stars.
23.
Music and Lyrics—Music From the Motion Picture (2007)
Various Artists
Music and Lyrics isn’t television songwriter Adam Schlesinger’s best-known project, but it may be his masterpiece. The mostly forgotten Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore romcom about an aging 80s British singer who forms a new writing partnership with his cleaning woman is a perfect venue for Schelsinger’s genius for genre mimicry, parody, tribute and general silliness. “Pop! Goes My Heart” (sung by Grant) is the definitive never-was helplessly corny New Wave hit; “Buddha’s Delight” (sung by Haley Bennett) is the sexy Buddha 2000s club thumper you didn’t know you needed to get into Nirvana; the “Meaningless Kiss” sax solo is so smooth jazz leven Kenny G would find himself mellowed out. The album’s triumph though is “Way Back Into Love,” an impossibly catchy sunny slice of schmaltz, in which the lyrics function as a love song between the protagonists or as a love song between Schlesinger and the history of pop music, which he guides out onto the dance floor for a transcendent clumsy/graceful waltz/boogie, so empty-headed it’s brilliant, or vice versa.
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