Best of the Noughties - Sounds noughty

The noughties have been a tempestuous and adventurous decade for music. In the last ten years we’ve seen pop get creative, alt. go mainstream and the entire traditional music industry get roundhoused by the digital realm. Paul Sullivan reports…

If the eighties were all acid-washed jeans, exuberant hairdos and chintzy synth pop, and the nineties were all hands-in-the-air house, sing-a-long Brit pop and retro chic, the noughties have been all about innovative pop, the ascendancy of the independent and the domination of the digital.

It’s been a tumultuous decade all round, what with the constant terror alerts, the spurious warmongering, the ever-impending Gaia-geddon and our ongoing global recession. Thinking about it, we can be pretty lucky we got through it alive, unless of course the powers-that-be and the mass media were exaggerating slightly (they wouldn’t, would they?).

There have certainly been some major upheavals within the music industry. The noughties were also the 2.0s – an era of, to quote Wikipedia, “web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies.”

The inexorable advance of the digital revolution, which seemed so quaintly haphazard at the start of the noughties, went on to rock the system to its very core. Ten years and a few false starts after nascent P2P services like Napster and Kazaa allowed us to share our music collections at the click of a mouse – how novel it all seemed! – CDs really have given way to MP3s and the print media has finally begun to bow to the power of the blogosphere. Subsequent (legal) music services like Last.FM, Pandora, Spotify and iTunes, and social media sites like MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have changed the way we listen to, consume and share music (and more) forever. Not bad for a decade’s work when you think about it.

Music itself underwent seismic transformations. The fag-end of the nineties was an odd time, especially in the UK where the pop charts looked like they’d been in an M25 multi-car pile up. The Spice Girls first lost a limb (Geri), then disintegrated completely. Brit pop’s moribund corpse was given a final death blow by The Gallagher Brothers’ tumescent Be Here now (1997); and dance music, with its irksome ‘let’s-’ave-it-large’ mantra felt like some middle-aged, drug-addled uncle trying to look trendy at a party he hadn’t been invited to. By 2000 the tide had turned in favour of young, shiny American pop stars. Jlo, Slim Shady, Britney, Beyoncé, Timberlake, Christina and the not-so-young-actually-no-not-even-back-then Jay Z all stepped on the scene like a breath of fresh pop air – or at least a breath of freshly airbrushed pop.

Their bright, glossy “Pro-Tools” sound – characterised by increasing amounts of audio compression to make the sound literally ‘pop’ – gradually set a new sonic standard and simultaneously ushered in another new era: that of the super-producer. Sonic innovators like Timbaland, Dr. Dre, Scott Storch, The Neptunes and Kanye West (the latter two introduced to the world on Jay Z’s 2000 release The Dynasty: roc la Familia) stepped from behind the boards to reveal themselves as production paragons, broadening steadily out from rap to inject r&b and pop with new and interesting sounds. Noughties pop was thus born.

Britain’s response, at least at the beginning, was ashamedly underwhelming. With such dynamite movers and shakers as The Bedingfields, James Blunt, Emma Bunton, Corinne Bailey Rae and – *shudder* – Charlotte Church representing UK “pure” pop, it was obvious that the apogee of Cool Britannia had passed (for many it had never existed). A nation knows it’s in trouble when it starts feeling grateful for Robbie Williams.

Thankfully, by mid-decade the digital revolution had taken root and was changing the scene at a rapid pace. The Internet gradually rendered the music industry more transparent. Fans could now get closer to their favourite bands and artists via personal blogs and social media nodes like MySpace (they would soon be able to monitor their every move thanks to popular ‘stalking’ tool Twitter), and artists were able to use the same kinds of tools to intensify communication and build up broader, and at the same time more niche, fan bases.

The first examples of the MySpace phenomenon were the Arctic Monkeys (who denied it) and Lily Allen (who accepted it), both of whom bothered the charts severely after building up large fan bases through social media activity and live shows. These bands opened the gates for a slew of independent acts to follow suit. Finally, indie bands could get a look-in.

The burgeoning digital realm was certainly paramount in fostering the noughties alt./indie rock explosion, heralded in the UK by Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997) and Kid A (2000), and massively catalysed by ‘garage-rock’ bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes, who dropped their hugely influential albums Is This It? and White Blood Cells respectively, in 2001.

This paved the way for a seemingly never-ending trail of guitar wielding man-bands that favoured long hair, punk-era skinny jeans and names beginning with “The” (see The Libertines, The Killers, The Horrors, The Vines and Krillions of others).

Non-“The” bands like Jet, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, PJ Harvey, Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse, Bloc Party, Kings of Leon and Interpol also had success channelling influences from pop and post-punk to rockabilly and rave, while Sigur Ros, Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, You Will Know Us By Our Trail Of Dead and Sunn O))) – among many others – chased rock off into more esoteric directions.

Despite mainstream dance looking as lively as a leftover cheese sandwich at a wake at the start of the decade, acts like Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx kept things buoyant with life-affirming albums such as Discovery and Rooty (both in 2001), while The Street’s superb 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material, showed there was plenty of life and imagination left in the underground 2step / garage scene.

In fact a generation of street-savvy switch-doctors – Dizzee Rascal (2003’s Boy In Da Corner), Wiley (Treddin On Thin Ice, 2004) – were also busy reconfiguring 2step, dancehall and hip hop, emerging with grime, a gnarly take on UK hip hop that was all council estate menace, rudeboy posturing and harsh, angular production.

Grime in turn spawned dubstep – yet another UK urban genre with a bass-heavy growl and a reputation for scaring the bejesus out of the ladies – though it has ultimately thrived where grime faltered. The lack of aggressive MCs in the scene allowed the music to bloom in many different directions and even make a mainstream fuss in the latter part of the noughties via acts like Skream, Benga, Burial and Hyperdub’s Kode9.

In Berlin, the techno purists went the other way, building on the nineties work of producer/DJs like Basic Channel, Richie Hawtin and Robert Hood to create a ‘second wave’ of minimalism – virulently anti-mainstream of course – that chugged, throbbed and beeped its way through most of the decade. People eventually got tired of it and the inevitable backlash began, as labels like Berlin’s Get Physical added electro and house to create a pan-electronic sound (see Booka Shade’s seminal 2006 album Movements).

Things got maximal in the UK too with funky – a mash up of house, broken beat, 2step, dancehall, soca and other colourful influences, as well as the so-called electroclash scene, which emerged in NYC’s Williamsburg at the start of the decade (it was named after an ElectroClash Festival in 2001), and incorporated disparate dance-rock acts like Fischerspooner, Peaches, Chicks on Speed and Miss Kittin and The Hacker.

Fellow Brooklynites Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy joined the ‘electroclash’ party with their highly influential DFA records, spawning bands like The Rapture and Murphy's own LCD Soundsystem, whose Sound Of Silver (2007) has gone down as one of the records of the decade.

The French, naturally, were not going to be left out and two labels in particular - Ed Banger and Kitsuné – entered the fray with a mass of killer bands like Justice, Simian Mobile Disco, DJ Medhi, Crystal Castles, Klaxons, Hadouken! and Bloc Party, along the way helping create the ironic, short-lived, colourful and generally meaningless nu-rave movement, which was in essence simply a continuation of electroclash.

By the second half of the decade, the UK charts were starting to shift emphasis again, as the public and musicians alike started to grow bored with the constant onslaught of sweaty, all-male rock bands and their Ramones tees. What began with the rise of Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen in 2006/2007, continued with Duffy, rockferry, MIA and Adele and finally effloresced into a style-conscious mass of female individuality as ladies of all stripes – from Little Boots and Lady Gaga to Fever Ray and Florence Welch (of Florence & The Machine fame) – exploded across the market.

The sheer amount of Queen Power kicking around was enough to floor the King of Pop himself, who departed – somewhat abruptly it must be said – for the great Neverland in the sky.

MJ’s life, legacy and funeral was just one of many surreal musical moments in 2009. Others included Eminem munching on Bruno’s butt at the 2009 MTV awards (fortunately after he’d recorded ‘ass like That’); Paul Oakenfold making a bell-end of himself in Madonna’s ‘Celebration’ video; Dizzee rascal taking Grime commercial with Tongue n Cheek; Madonna in general; Kanye’s slaying of Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs; and Bob Dylan releasing a festive album featuring ‘Christmas In The Heart’.

And so we wave bye-bye to the noughties, the unofficial Decade of awe. Why awe? Because in just ten years we music lovers in the industrialised West have come to inhabit a wired-up world where we read reviews online, seek recommendations through Last FM or Spotify, download singles and albums through iTunes or Amazon (or share them through P2P networks). Awe because the noughties have been such a bold and inventive decade for music of all stripes. Awe because – well, because it almost rhymes with nought.

Of course, some of us miss vinyl and album artwork and hanging out in record shops. But that’s progress for you, innit? You either keep up or get left behind. See y’all on FaceSpace, yeah?

20 AWESOME NOUGHTIES AlBUMS

Radiohead – Kid A - 2000 (Buy here.)
The Strokes – Is This It? - 2001 (Buy here.)
White Stripes – White Blood Cells - 2001 (Buy here.)
Ágætis Byrjun – Sigur Rós - 2001 (Buy here.)
The Avalanches – Since I left You - 2001 (Buy here.)
The Streets – Original Pirate Material - 2002 (Buy here.)
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - 2002 (Buy here.)
OutKast – Speakerboxxx/The love Below - 2003 (Buy here.)
Dizzee Rascal – Boy In Da Corner - 2004 (Buy here.)
Arcade Fire – Funeral - 2004
Sufjan Stevens – Illinois - 2005 (Buy here.)
Antony and The Johnsons – I am a Bird now - 2005 (Buy here.)
J Dilla aka Jay Dee – Donuts - 2006
Burial – Untrue - 2007 (Buy here.)
M.I.a. – Kala - 2007 (Buy here.)
LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver – 2007 (Buy here.)
Bon Iver For Emma, – Forever ago – 2008 (Buy here.)
Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules and Love Affair - 2008 (Buy here.)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz - 2009 (Buy here.)
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion - 2009 (Buy here.)