Music of the Weak: The 100 Greatest Songs of the Millennium (So Far) - #100-91

The TFO staff is getting prepped for its inevitable look back at the best albums of the past ten years, which will appear in the fall (truth be known, my list-obsessive ass has been preparing for something like the last 5 years.) In the meantime, Music of the Weak is going to be doing a little countdown to the countdown, taking a look at my 100 favorite songs of the millennium (so far.) Fittingly, while our albums countdown will be a collaborative venture, this songs list is purely a solo project (though I am pressuring Tucker to produce a dueling list of his own 100 favorite songs, 2000-2009, and you should too). Albums continue to be the broad slabs of meaning and association that we argue about and identify with—at least, around these parts they remain so. Songs, on the other hand, contribute to our lives in minute and intricate, personal ways. As much as I love my girlfriend, for example, she could go the entire length of our relationship without ever truly understanding the depth of my love for, say, Ted Leo/Pharmacists’ “Timorous Me.” Our iPod playcounts define us in ways Kid A or Stankonia never could. They know us intimately. Ultimately, the next ten or so weeks will simply reflect one dude’s idea of what’s been good. It would be squarely against the nature of this website, however, if it wasn’t the correct opinion.

Some quick ground rules: For the sake of maximum variety, I limited this list to one song per artist—though some artists will appear multiple times in guest spots or as producers or remixers. I could have pretty easily made room for, say, “Someone Great” or “Ms. Jackson” or “Float On,” but I think it’s more interesting to let the 100 songs become as deep and rich a mosaic of the last ten years of music as possible. Obviously, a ton of personal inclinations are going to dictate the selections—you’re probably going to know more about what I actually listen to than you ever wanted—but hopefully there’s plenty of opportunity for both arguments and new discoveries (I’m hoping to convince Philostrophy to put together a playlist of these songs as they’re revealed.) Putting the list together, I surprised myself at some of the songs I chose to include and exclude; some have stuck with me for years, some are recent obsessions. But each song, to me, represents something unique and exciting about this decade, each song thrills me when I hear it—whether it’s for the twentieth time or the two-hundredth—and I can easily imagine feeling the same way decades from now.

100. M83 – “Don’t Save Us from the Flames” (2005)

Depicting a man emerging from a car crash screaming his lover’s name, if the lyrics to “Don’t Save Us from the Flames” were in any way intelligible, the song would be bleak beyond words. “Out of the flames,” M83’s Anthony Gonzalez begins, “A piece of brain in my hair.” Yet Gonzalez wisely forgoes the lyrical melodrama in favor of musical melodrama. “Don’t Save Us from the Flames” begins with an explosive, My Bloody Valentine-referencing barrage of sound, which quickly gives way to a hushed, taut verse. Like a film-maker playing with slow motion for the first time, he juxtaposes those screams with the knife-twisting moments of tension between them.

99. Empire of the Sun – “Walking on a Dream” (2008)

A couple of years ago, saying that a band were the (desperately needed) new millennium incarnation of Hall & Oates would have been damning them with faint praise, but in the last six months, the duo and their ilk have served as de facto muses for some of our best music—namely, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and Empire of the Sun’s “Walking on a Dream.” A duo comprised of the Sleepy Jackson's Luke Steele and Pnau's Nick Littlemore Empire of the Sun dabble in slippery tech pop. Their Australian hit, “Walking on a Dream,” takes off on the mesmerizing interplay between Steele’s everyman singing and Littlemore’s half-pretty, half-creepy falsetto—elevating yacht rock from a genre with niche and satirical appeal into something with the potential for some serious cultural cachet in the next decade. If we’re lucky.

98. Jadakiss – “Why? (Feat. Anthony Hamilton)” (2004)

It’s tempting to cover the greatness of Jadakiss’s “Why?” simply by pulling quotes from Jada’s lyrics, which question everything from wistful (“Why did Aaliyah have to take that flight?”) to businesslike (“Why my buzz in L.A. ain’t like it is in New Yawk?”) to political (“Why did Bush knock down the towers?”) to hilarious (“Why’d they let the Terminator win the election?” and then, in one of the song’s few declarative sentences, “Come on, pay attention!”) But most of the song’s success derives from what comes up in between Jada’s relentless questioning—the bells that punctuate Havoc’s production, as if cartoonish light bulbs were constantly going off in listeners heads; Anthony Hamilton’s world-weary repetition of the title; and, possibly, actual searching for answers.

97. The Schema – “Those Rules You Made” (2007)

The Schema was Rhodri Marsden of Scritti Politti’s experiment to “record, distribute, and promote a single from my bedroom in a 30-day timeframe.” “Those Rules You Made,” the resulting “yacht rock spectacular,” is an immaculately made, anachronistic tune (or as Marsden puts it on The Schema’s website, “a barely contemporary sound made by a fat bloke in his mid-30’s”) about chasing after a woman with ridiculously high standards. The record’s subject matter might have set the tone for its reception—the song appeared and disappeared in less time than it took to create. During its brief run, it got a bit of support from the bloggeratti and word of mouth, and the indelible video yielded more than 250,000 views on YouTube, which—somewhat hilariously—translated to roughly 58 sales on iTunes. I was one of them, though, and the song has remained in rotation ever since. That’s got to count for something.

96. Jamie Lidell – “Music Will Not Last” (2005)

Between his tenure with Supercollider in the 90’s, and his relationship with Warp Records, Jamie Lidell had quite an experimental electronic music pedigree before deciding that what he really wanted to be was a soul singer. Multiply, his breakthrough album, finds him getting pulled in both directions. “Music Will Not Last,” the album’s finest track, could have been easily a Motown impersonation if Lidell hadn’t brought in Matthew Herbert, a man who can make and has made songs out of human hair, as producer. In Herbert’s hands, the song’s opens with an echo-y, mumbled scat before erupting into Lidell’s pitch-perfect, gravity defying vocals. Herbert knows that he doesn’t have to do a lot to make Lidell’s voice shine, so instead he concentrates on providing as skeletal a musical backing as possible—half as many drum beats as you’d expect, finger snaps that float in and out, and a couple of ethereal voices that only stick around for one note at a time.

95. The Streets – “Empty Cans” (2004)

“Empty Cans” is the climax and resolution of Mike Skinner’s A Grand Don’t Come for Free. Over the course of the song’s eight minutes, every one of the album narrative’s loose ends is tied up—in the midst of a minor meltdown, Skinner deals with a break-up, mends his relationship with a friend, and finds the thousand pounds he’s been looking for all album long. Though the context of the album adds to the song’s emotional weight, it also, miraculously, works as a stand-alone track. Few songs could pull off a story arc that sees its protagonist fully transform from misanthrope to optimist; “Empty Cans” ends, figuratively and literally, with Skinner running off into the sunset.

94. Snoop Dogg – “Drop It Like It’s Hot (Feat. Pharrell)” (2004)

In retrospect, Snoop Dogg is the perfect foil for the Neptunes. He possesses an effortless lyricism that adds much-needed melody to the producers’ drastic, spare beats. (Why do you think Pharrell ends up singing on so many Neptunes tracks? You have to put the actual, you know, music somewhere.) The beat for “Drop It Like It’s Hot” is cobbled together from snaps, tongue clicks, a bicycle bell, and a couple of errant, pesky synthesizer splashes. It would be completely and totally laughable if Snoop didn’t go extra bananas on top of it, topping it with a call of “Snooooooooooooop” somewhere between a whistle and the sound of a 3 year old imitating a police siren. No one has ever deserved a commemorative Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor as much as Snoop does strictly for his performance here. Is it too early to start bringing “izzle” jokes back?

93. Imogen Heap – “Hide and Seek” (2005)

Vocal modulators are so omnipresent these days that even dyed-in-the-wool lock-myself-in-a-cabin-with-a-guitar singer/songwriters like Bon Iver are fucking with AutoTune. “Hide and Seek,” a 2005 sleeper single by Imogen Heap (formerly of the duo Frou Frou), became maddeningly ubiquitous the year after its release, at the hands of industrious television producers who viewed its a capella arrangement as an excuse to use it to soundtrack anything. With Heap at the boards, producing “Hide and Seek” herself, the vocoder becomes the sole thing that pushes the song from a delicately lovely downer to something completely otherworldly. The emotional ache of her voice is constantly pushing up against the harmonizer’s metallic edge, so Heap escapes the simple payoff of a break-up song—which “Hide and Seek” could have easily turned out to have been—and ends up with an examination of a woman being simultaneously locked in and locked out of her own sadness.

92. Bent – “So Long Without You” (2003)

Bounce, in dance music, tends to come from sheer volume or the magnitude of the bass, or some combination thereof. “So Long Without You” goes for a kind of slow horseback-riding “bum-ba-di-dum” and manages to pull it off without sounding remotely hokey or out of place. That’s mostly because of 70’s country singer Billie Jo Spears, who delivers a bracingly cool vocal performance. Bent can’t escape being compared to Air, but, based on “So Long Without You” and the rest of The Everlasting Blink, they’ve got much more massive balls. A country/electronic trend has ever blossomed—thankfully, if for no other reason than for the god-awful genre name that someone would have inevitably come up with (Twangchno? Honky Tonktronica? Cowse?)—but “So Long Without You” is so good that it makes you believe that something like that could actually work.

91. A.C. Newman – “Miracle Drug” (2004)

Between Broken Social Scene and The New Pornographers, this decade saw the rise of the Canadian super-group as the posse you most wanted to be associated with (and, man, is the Wu-Tang Clan pissed.) Both bands had decade-long runs for the record books, both as wholes and in their component parts (Stars, Neko Case, Feist, Destroyer, etc.) Broken Social Scene will show up a little later on down the list, but the New Pornographers’ best song of the decade was secretly tucked away on band-leader A.C. Newman’s first solo album, The Slow Wonder. Built around little more than a wacky time-signature, a deathless drum pattern, and a ladies harmonizing, “Miracle Drug” makes that whole less is more argument, and does it with 100% more three-chord guitar solo. Power pop as punk rock.

-Martin Brown, 2009

Comments

[Sean Witzke]

OH HELL YES.

Streets - I'd have picked "Blinded By the Lights", just because it's so insanely close to "Warning" for pure storytelling.

AC Newman - dead on, it's the his best song.

Snoop - what gets me is that Pharell clearly heard Medulla and saw it as a toolbox.

I can't wait for that albums list.

[Chris Jones]

Man, I could MAYBE do a top 20 songs of the new millennium. This is way ambitious and I can't wait to see what the #1 pick is!

[Rhodri Marsden]

Ah, thank you Martin. How kind!

[Kenny Cather]

Here's a question, and I'm not trying to be sarcastic, just curious - how will you handle people who are in multiple groups? (Like Damon Alburn or someone like that.)

How perfect to start off with M83, a group you guys introduced me to! Kim & Jessie is still my jam!

"The Schema was Rhodri Marsden of Scritti Politti’s experiment..."

For real??? I need to hear this! I *really* like Scritti Politti, but I've never followed up on the solo projects...which is something I'm 100% ashamed of.

[Mr]

I could not in good conscience put "Miracle Drug" above "Use It," but I am grateful for your list anyway. I would also have "Hide and Seek" higher if I were a listin' sort of man. Can't wait for the next round!

[Zeb]

Cowse? I see what you did there.

You know that Bent song.. she's covering an Elvis song - I only know that because it's one of the ones that Elvis impersonator in my Uncle's show does. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oj8d9rp9to

This is a great list and I will follow the shit out of it! I enjoyed alla these!

[Zebtron A. Rama]

neat-o list. I am such an album oriented person, it's always interesting to see these.

[Marty]

Sean - Yeah, that entire Streets album is ripe with good choices, and I might have repped "Blinded" or "Fit But You Know It" or "Could Be Well In" in the couple of years after it came out, but lately, I've felt like "Empty Cans" captures something that few other songs ever do - epiphany.

Chris - I'm excited you're excited, man. Hopefully you'll find some good new stuff along the way.

Rhodri - Well, thanks for making one of my favorite songs! If I'd known you'd stop by, I would have been more lavish in my praise.

Kenny - Basically, I decide on a case by case basis. Generally, if the artist in question is the most defining aspect of both songs, I'll choose the best one--like, if it were between Madvillain and an MF Doom solo joint, I would only go with one. On the other hand, if each song has more going for it than just the artist--like, say, Gorillaz "Feel Good Inc." and Blur's "Out of Time"--both would be elligible.

Rendon - You, my friend, have got a serious weak spot for Twin Cinema. And I dig that about you.

Zeb 1 - I may or may not have known that at one point, but it's amazing that that fact doesn't come up more on, like, Allmusic or Wikipedia. Also, I think I had more fun coming up with fake country/electronica genre names than anything else.

Zeb 2 - Awesome, man. Perhaps you'll find some stuff you wouldn't have come across otherwise!