The Top 50 Albums of The Decade

By: SoundProof Staff

^{December 11, 2009}

Well, holy crap, that was a pretty important decade in the history of popular music.

When you climbed up out of your expensive (but thoroughly effective) Y2K bunker on that first morning of the 21st century—all young and naïve and hungover—it was a very different world you lived in. Bill Clinton was still president. Tuvalu still hadn't been admitted to the United Nations. It would be days yet before the last Pyrenean ibex was hit by a falling tree and the species went extinct. You'd probably never even heard of al-Quaeda or Hans Blix and were still wondering just how badly Al Gore would beat that dumbass from Texas in the upcoming election. There was no Wikipedia; no Facebook or MySpace or YouTube. Apple hadn't even started working on the first iPod yet.

Still, that morning of January 1st, as you fired up "Smooth" by Carlos Santana featuring Rob Thomas on your discman and started your long trip home to puke in the reassuring privacy of your own bathroom, the foundation for the revolution had already been laid. MP3s had been around for years, and the first portable MP3 players were on the market. Napster, though few had heard of it yet, had been launched six months earlier and was poised to start feeding a never-ending supply of Dave Matthews b-sides into dorm rooms the world-over. Hell, if you were lucky, you didn't even have dial-up anymore and looked down on your friends who still had to sit through the squeaks and squawks, buzzes and beeps of the late-‘90s Internet connection. It was obvious that things were changing, that the next ten years would re-define the way we listened to music. Even if we didn't know how drastic the changes would be.

New technologies, of course, would also revolutionize the way music gets made. Thanks to laptops and sound fonts and easily-pirated software, it's far easier and cheaper for anyone to record music now than it was ten years ago. Any musician can put together a record in their own bedroom and have it sound far better than anything they could have laid down on a four-track or their parents' beat-up tape deck. Then, once they're done, they can release it and promote it themselves. And so, as the major labels crumble slowly into the sea, ambitious, groundbreaking records are still getting made and still finding an audience.

Strangely, though, the music itself hasn't actually changed all that much since the end of 1999. The last ten years have seen no new, era-defining genre emerge. And as we look over our list of the Top 50 Albums of the Decade—which we'll be posting over the course of the week and was compiled from a combination of our own favourites and your submissions—nearly all of the entries sound as if they could have been recorded during the 20th century. Plenty of the artists who made the list were already well established in the ‘90s, and some of them have careers stretching as far back as the early-‘60s. If anything, the online free-for-fall has—somewhat paradoxically—sparked the mining of retro influences and the cross-pollination of existing genres.

Frankly, that's just fine by us. It's not exaggerating in the least to say that the last ten years have been some of the most exciting in the history of music. And best of all, as the decade draws to a close, we can't help but feel that same naïve thrill we had on that first January morning of the year 2000, when we knew that strange, exciting things were about happen and we had no idea what they were going to be.

Until then, we're more than happy to indulge in a little nostalgia and spend some time with our favourite 50 records released so far this century.

Heck, we might even listen to them on CD.