Music of the Weak: The 100 Greatest Songs of the Millennium (So Far) - #10-1

PREVIOUSLY: #100-91 - Introductions, yacht rock, epic narratives, Elvis tributes, and one-man Canadian supergroups.

#90-81 – Jazz revisionism, shady fact-checking, Muppetized gangsta rap, and the no pussy blues.

#80-71 – A ragtag assembly of pop stars and other hate-able entities.

#70-61 – More pop music, Australian pop, bedroom pop, Kanye West, and the decade’s greatest use of drum machines.

#60-51 – Sex, suicide, misogyny, and a brief appearance by Amy Winehouse.

#50-41 – 8 songs that deserve your attention, 2 songs that probably already have it.

#40-31 – Dylan covers, guest spots and banging camp.

#30-21 – Electronica and “Rock is Back!” hype cycle relics.

#20-11 – Ravers, perps, gangsta children—basically, everyone named in Christian Falk’s “Dream On”—round out the top 20.

10. LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends” (2007)

The classic myth about The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" goes something like this: Keith Richards woke up one morning in his hotel room and found a tape recorder next to his bed. Belligerently drunk the night before, he'd recorded himself messing around on his guitar. He played back the tape, and discovered the iconic riff that would open the band's most indelible hit.

LCD Soundsystem's “All My Friends” could easily be this decade's “Satisfaction”—a song universally acclaimed, respected and loved, albeit by a much smaller cross-section of the population—except that James Murphy appears to have worked the opposite trick. Murphy dug through his hypothetical tape recorder, and unearthed a shambling, ugly, mistake of a piano riff. Then he built an anthem around it. “All My Friends” operates like a piece of found art; Murphy might as well have sampled a bicycle wheel, the piano he uses is so graceless and mundane. At first, it bangs along like a kid playing a remedial version of “Chopsticks” on his first day of lessons. Then, the piano speeds ahead of the player, and they both stumble over one another. Finally, to save face, the player tries to reconstruct his original rhythm, as if nothing ever happened. As the song unfolds, Murphy paints himself as a hard-partying, jet-setting, age-defying scenester, desperate to simply hang out with the people he feels comfortable around. Looks like someone's got the second album blues. Yet, for all the druggy nostalgia, for all the Pink Floyd references, for as much as James Murphy embodies a generation scrambling to hold onto its youth, “All My Friends” always comes back to that piano riff as the perfect metaphor for the rest of its content—driving forward at an uncertain tempo, while constantly on the brink of collapse.

9. Animal Collective – “Grass” (2005)

As divisive as Animal Collective are, people fixate on the albums so intently that they tend to miss the band’s true genius: as a phenomenal singles band. At album length, Animal Collective frequently misunderstands its own best assets. Allowed indulgence, the band's exquisite timing turns languid; its sense of space and largeness of sound becomes a jammy drone; the worldly percussion experiments morph into wanky drum circles. “Grass,” Animal Collective's most triumphant single, clocks in at 2:59, as if it were campaigning to be a radio hit in some alternate universe. Fittingly, under the constraints of time, every aspect that ever earned the band an ounce of derision locks into place, and begins working to its advantage. The guitar playing is lean, the drumming is thunderous, and the song writing has a pop sensibility about it. "Grass" is still tricked out with plenty of avant-garde touches—most notably, the chorus is a symphonic hurricane of screams and whoops—but everything drives toward the song's cumulative effect. With the short run time keeping the band in check, no aspect is there merely for its own sake. 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion may have been an out-of-the-box commercial hit, debuting at #13 on the Billboard charts, but, in 2005, “Grass” was the point where Animal Collective began bringing their avant-garde sensibilities to the pop table.

8. Broken Social Scene – “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” (2002)

“Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” is one of Broken Social Scene’s simplest songs. Over a series of sustained violin chords from Jessica Moss, someone hesitantly plucks a banjo, as if he’s learning how to play it in front of a crowd of people. Emily Haines, her voice slightly distorted, begins a schoolyard chant—one with the ironic distance of a woman looking back on herself as a teenager. Broken Social Scene has never been one for subtlety—they’ll cram a bazillion guitars into a single song, wrap them around some sort of crazy time signature, pack it with hooks (sung by multiple singers), and tack on a horn section for good measure. Like their fellow countrymen Godspeed You Black Emperor, they know how to spin a couple of tiny elements into a beautifully sustained tension. Here, that build is topped by Haines chanting, “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me,” which sounds at once like the frenzy of adolescent lust, and like the adult perception of it. The Canadian squadron typically has its designs on a sound bigger, richer, and more iconic than your textbook indie rock. But with “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” they aim for a different kind of bigness than one simply achieved with a massive quantity of sound—something indelible and malleable and iconic; what you’d call a modern standard.

7. Wu-Tang Clan – “I Can’t Go to Sleep (Feat. Isaac Hayes)” (2000)

If Ghostface and the RZA were actors, “I Can’t Go to Sleep” would be pure Oscar bait. The two work themselves up into back-to-back fits of emotion, and then leave Isaac Hayes to do the Morgan Freeman-style narration. Ghostface describes the ghetto like it’s Darfur (“Someone raped our women/ Murdered our babies”), then gets weepy over “babies with flies on their cheeks,” before pulling the old You’re On Candid Camera bait-and-switch. RZA, whose verse may even top Ghost’s (depending on what mood you’re in) offers no such easy out. He recounts civil rights leaders’ assassinations by empathizing with their witnesses—Jesse Jackson’s presence at MLK’s death; Malcolm X’s kids witnessing his shooting; Jackie Kennedy horrifically picking JFK’s brains out of her hair and trying to put them back in his head. As RZA’s verse winds up, he becomes such a loose cannon that he might just rush out of the studio and beat somebody: “Drunk as a fuck, looking around like, ‘These Devils,’ ready to break this world down.” While Ghostface can’t sleep because the atrocities in his neighborhood have him bleary-eyed, RZA can’t sleep because history has driven him to near-madness. Finally, Hayes, whose version of “Walk On By” from Hot Buttered Soul provides the song’s framework, is sent in to mediate. In a surprise twist, his empathy veers in the opposite direction as Ghost’s and RZA’s, and he ends the song by admonishing them, “Stop all that cryin’, and be a man.” “I Can’t Go to Sleep”: You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fear for your life.

  6. Spoon – “Paper Tiger” (2002)

Spoon has always been minimalist, but with 2002’s Kill the Moonlight the band took its skeletal sound to its greatest extreme. “Paper Tiger” is the leanest track on a lean album, a wonder of precision. Jim Eno clacks his drumsticks against one another to provide the rhythm. A piano plays brief chords, hitting some isolated notes every once in a while, and making only the slightest changes. Against such a spare, confident framework, Britt Daniels’ voice takes on previously unheard resonance—each shift in pitch becomes seismic. In the direct center of “Paper Tiger,” there’s an instrumental break that lasts over a minute—almost one-third the length of the song. Barely anything happens, musically, but it remains utterly captivating. Spoon allows so much space to creep into the rhythm that the song is practically minimal techno. Daniels’ has always had an indie everyman voice, the kind that could become commercial at any moment. The lyrics of “Paper Tiger” would seem comforting, if not for the music’s iciness. Instead they imply an “Every Breath You Take” type of menace. But the “paper tiger” (also used to title a Beck song released on Sea Change, a month after Kill the Moonlight) is lifted from a Chinese phrase describing an animal that looks dangerous, but is truly harmless. So when Daniels sings, “I will be there with you when you turn out the light,” like he’s whispering in your ear, he’s more a boogey man than a predator.

5. Jürgen Paape – “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” (2002)

Translated from German, the lyrics to “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” come off pretty silly—something about flying through space with moonlight in your hair. Sounds pretty implausible. Truthfully, the only translation of Israeli actress Daliah Levi’s sampled lyrics that would even be remotely satisfying would be if we discovered that she was singing the actual phonebook—and not the German one; the American one, translated into German; the one from 2011. That’s how otherworldly “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” is: Assisted by little more than a loping groove, Levi’s vocal is a lost transmission from the future. By now, twisting AM radio gold into chill-out tent fodder is old hat, but Jürgen Paape released this masterstroke a couple of years after helping found the Kompakt record label (long before, say, Bent’s “So Long Without You,” which also appears on this list, was released.) His work on “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” is delicate and subtle—finding the exact buoyancy the song could stand, affixing just the right amount of echo, adding the haunting coda—and, through it, he sets the high water mark for not only Kompakt, but for a decade’s-worth of minimal techno, as well.

4. Cannibal Ox – “The F-Word” (2001)

Of course Vast Aire’s not going to get the girl. On Cannibal Ox’s finest moment, “The F-Word,” dude has preternaturally surgical focus on the object of affection, but he raps with the goofy gallantry of a Sophomore passing folded up wide-ruled notes to a Senior. He upends every cliché he can get his hands on, scrapes barrel bottom for pop culture references, leaves no pun unturned (relationships become “relation-ships;” friends get “fried in the end”). Chalk it up to love drunkenness if you must—or, as wingman Vordul Mega puts it, “Chemical elixirs, caught her like a sickness”—but what results is a song without a single wasted moment. There’s a punch line or two in every stanza, a love of language that parallels hip-hop’s golden age, and a good number of mind-blowing lines. (My personal favorite: “You ask a girl out and the universe extends.”) Producer El-P, who has been chasing down new wormholes within the sound he created on Cannibal Ox’s debut ever since 2001, mines the planetary funk of Dexter Wansel’s “All Night Long” for scrap metal, excising all of its looseness in favor of a jagged, military robot march. The heavy-metal production gives “The F-Word” all the gravitas it needs to launch Vast Aire’s wordplay to the level of pure poetry. He probably still didn’t end up with the girl, but we’re all better off for it.

3. Modest Mouse – “The View” (2004)

Isaac Brock is indie rock’s unofficial poet laureate of disenchantment, king of the deadbeat aphorism, master of the life-affirming double-negative. On Modest Mouse’s “The View,” he’s in rare form. “If it takes shit to make bliss,” he sings on the song’s chorus, “Well, I feel pretty blissfully.” It’s exactly the world view you’d expect from such a sad, sappy sucker—except that the buoyant arrangement that carries Brock’s downtrodden (if wry) lyrics won’t let him get self-involved for even a second. Released in 2004, when it seemed like every single indie band had begun to dabble in dance music, “The View” pushes the funk as hard as it can without tipping over into Red Hot Chilli Peppers territory. Then, they deck it out with a gallery of sounds that would have a hard time playing it cool at any level—whistling, Brock’s gonzo laugh-barking, a freakin’ mellotron. The lyrics may point toward someone resigned to defeat, but, at mercy the supple four-on-the-floor bass line, Modest Mouse twist those aphorisms into affirmations. Brock may look mopey on paper. In practice, he has the unbridled freedom of someone with nothing left to lose.

2. OutKast – “B.O.B.” (2000)

By now OutKast’s “B.O.B.” is an unimpeachable masterpiece, and, when music reaches that status, it usually starts to get taken for granted. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Respect,” “Helter Skelter,” and, yeah, Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” have become part of our lingua franca. When we hear those songs, they tend to wash over us. They have a deeply ingrained greatness, but one that doesn’t ask for close inspection. We tend to focus on, say, Danger Mouse’s production, about as much as we focus on the etymology of words as we say them. “B.O.B.,” on the other hand, will knock you on your ass every time, forcing you to rethink everything you thought you knew about music. It’s a song that’s impossible to mold, or replicate—a staggering example of two geniuses working at the top of their game.

Cranking up the tempo is, of course, a great way to get your attention. Lesser artists would let the BPMs do the work for them. But the joy of “B.O.B” comes from how virtuosic Andre 3000 and Big Boi remain at such breakneck speed. Both MCs rap at hypersonic levels, without ever letting the quickness become the show—you’re still paying attention to the words, not just hearing syllables as they fly by. The choruses turn into an operatic show-stopper, corralling an Eddie Hazel-referencing electric guitar and the Morris Brown College Gospel Choir into a series of calls-and-responses, as if they that anticipated “B.O.B.” would be a major club hit. As ironic as it is that the central image of “B.O.B.”—bombs exploding over Baghdad, as a metaphor for rapping—forecasted the political fixation on the Middle East that dominated the ten years that succeeded it, from OutKast’s point of view, you can easily imagine crowds screaming, “Bob your head, rag top,” as if there’s nothing remotely offensive about it.

1. Dntel – “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan (Feat. Ben Gibbard)” (2001)

Most of us have the well-trained sense to run in the other direction the second someone begins to tell us about a dream they had, but we can't resist telling other people our dreams. We even know all the pitfalls: details that seemed mystical and foreign in the middle of the night become mundane; the symbols that supposedly reveal your subconscious instead reveal that your subconscious is a cliché; things that felt significant at the time get lost in the ether. In the arts, dreams have become a signifier for lazy storytelling—an excuse to be a little hazy on connecting the dots, easy filler, or a way to introduce the deus ex machina. Worse, we've all made an unconscious pact to let this—the ugliest of all artistic transgressions—slide. The Sopranos resolved its second season with a sketchy dream sequence involving a talking plastic fish from WalMart, and people say it's the greatest TV show of all time.

Ben Gibbard’s performance on Dntel’s “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan,” on the other hand, is a small miracle of craftsmanship. The story is a simple one—he and his girl watch a concert—and he never attempts to make it sound anything less than mundane. Instead, he gets wrapped up in the details of dreaming itself—the incomprehensible speech, the vague familiarity of everything that happens, the tickle of eyelashes on this back of his neck. Though the song (and dream) was reportedly about Evan Dando and Chan Marshall, and he was probably talking about Come On Feel the Lemonheads, when Gibbard sings, “He then played every song from 1993,” I always imagine that he’s talking about hearing *every* song from 1993, from “Whoomp (There It Is)” to “Mr. Jones.” With five verses’ worth of commonplace imagery, Gibbard crafts a world with a dreamlike elasticity of time. When a telephone finally disrupts his reverie, he repeatedly sings the word “ringing,” as if his voice were either the ring itself, or another part of the dream, swirling into a new place in his psyche.

As heroically compact as Gibbard's performance is, it's Jimmy Tamborello's production work that makes “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” an unmatched triumph. After “Evan and Chan,” Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello and Gibbard famously formed The Postal Service, but their work on Give Up shows few traces of the groundwork laid here. Their subsequent music relies on synthesizer and drum machine compositions that sound like lost keyboard presets. Here, Tamborello molds swaths of unruly static into palpable bursts of rhythm. He augments the white noise with some drumwork that sounds like The Dismemberment Plan's Joe Easley playing the back half of Squarepusher's "My Red Hot Car." Even without Gibbard's performance, the song would have been stunning. Attaching Gibbard's serene vocals to such an aesthetic beast, Tamborello pulls of something as seemingly impossible as wind wrangling.

The 2001 people imagined decades ago must have sounded like this--the electronic squall, the nearly overwhelming surge of drums, the drifting grasp on reality. In that sense, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” is a nifty bit of wish fulfillment—a dream that Tamborello plucked from the collective unconscious, mistaking it for his own. 8 years on, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” sounds like a future that we still haven't caught up with. Add Gibbard's performance to that, and you've got a memory that never happened laid on top of a prediction that never will; you have an artifact, stuck out of time; a dream; a thing that is exactly what it pretends to be.

-Martin Brown, 2009

Comments

[Chris Jones]

I'm gonna post my own list later in this comments thread and it will be SO different.

I agree with your sentiments about Isaac Brock but not necessarily the song choice. Not their greatest, but still one holy hell of a song-one of the first I ever really fell in love with as a kid.

I approve!

[Chris Jones]

Also it'll only be 50 songs.

Later tonight or tomorrow.

[Marty]

Bring it, Jones.

[Chris Jones]

Man, I'm probably gonna look at this in the morning and be like "What sorta dope was this produced from?" but as of right now, here it is, my personal favorite 50 songs of the millennium:

1. Gravity Rides Everything-Modest Mouse
2. Hurt-Johnny Cash
3. Drunken Lullabies-Flogging Molly
4. Fight Test-The Flaming Lips
5. We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed-Los Campesinos!
6. The Grudge-Tool
7. No One Knows-Queens of the Stone Age
8. How I Could Just Kill A Man-Rage Against The Machine
9. Time To Pretend-MGMT
10. Adam’s Murmur-Cynic
11. The Last Baron-Mastodon
12. Do You Want To-Franz Ferdinand
13. Sorrow-Bad Religion
14. Bonafied Lovin’-Chromeo
15. On March The Saints-Down
16. Fake Empire-The National
17. I Woke Up Today-Port O’Brien
18. Little Time Bomb-Kind of Like Spitting
19. Maiden, Mother and Crone-The Sword
20. Atlas-Battles
21. Game Shows Touch Our Lives-The Mountain Goats
22. Little Secrets-Passion Pit
23. Black Betty-Spiderbait
24. Heavy Artillery-Mr. Lif
25. The Wedding Dress-2 Cents
26. Kid On My Shoulders-White Rabbits
27. I’ll Believe In Anything-Wolf Parade
28. For My Next Trick I’ll Need A Volunteer-Warren Zevon
29. Ideoteque-Radiohead
30. Empty Walls-Serj Tankian
31. Ibitsu-Boris
32. D Is For Dangerous-Arctic Monkeys
33. Suite 1: Storm-Godspeed You! Black Emperor
34. Jihad-Slayer
35. Banks of the Deep End-Gov’t Mule
36. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!-Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
37. Arcarsenal-At The Drive-In
38. Brown Metal-Hella
39. Machine Gun-Portishead
40. Crowd Chant-Joe Satriani
41. Stand and Deliver-Young Knives
42. Real Good Looking Boy-The Who
43. You Make Me Like Charity-The Knife
44. Twilight of the Thunder God-Amon Amarth
45. Tokyoto-The Velvet Teen
46. M79-Vampire Weekend
47. Dateless Losers-Reel Big Fish
48. Stream of Consciousness-Dream Theater
49. Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse-Of Montreal
50. Silver-Ozzy Osbourne

In lieu of any actual analysis, I'd be happy to defend my picks on this list 'til Kingdom Come. One of the reasons I didn't comment a ton on your list, even though I enjoyed reading it, is because we occupy pretty different spheres of influence-yours seems to be indie, electronica and R&B while mine is indie, metal and a little rap. Still, you asked for a list at some point I remember and...well, there it is. Like I said, I'll probably see it tomorrow and be like "What the tits?" but until then, this is it.

[Tim O'neil]

Martin, for #1, you misspelled "Big Pimpin'."