So... I've been meaning to do a post like this for a while and have now decided to make good on it. Here is a list, in alphabetical order, of my "50 favorite songs of the '00's".
I should start by saying that I don't think a list like this could ever truly be "accurate" or perfectly representational of my definitive favorites because my feelings about a lot of these songs can change on a near day to day basis. In other words, I could easily come up with another 50-100 songs that could replace any number of songs within this list and still hold true to my supposed "50 favorite"... But, with the mind that I should just churn out this post and sing the praises of some of my favorite music of the last ten years, I've decided that despite inevitably forgetting some equally great tunes, I'm just gonna throw this thing out there for the world as is.
Additionally, I'd like to stress that this list is IN NO WAY meant to be a definitive statement of any kind with regard to the "objectively" best songs of the decade. I think lists of that variety, while often being interesting conversational fodder, are flawed by nature given the inherent subjectivity of such things. With that in mind, I've decided simply to list them in alphabetical order to do nothing other than call attention to what I think are some really great songs.
I've also opted not to double up any of the artists, even if I thought they deserved multiple mentions, in order to diversify the list. For example, though I could realistically pick any number of Burial or Basement Jaxx songs from the last decade that I loved, I instead chose what I thought was the most immediately memorable song they made. Or, for example, though I could never really pick a favorite song off of The Avalanches' 'Since I Left You' LP (which was probably my favorite album of the whole decade), I decided to simply have the title track represent that album on the list because it most blatantly represents the spirit of the recording in full. In the instance of individual producers who did wildly varied work, and who I thought made amazing music and deserved mention in some way or another (like, say, Timbaland, Trentemoller or Ewan Pearson), I picked what I thought was their single production that had the biggest impact on me.
Also, I've decided not to add any content specific to the songs themselves. The fact is, nobody really needs me to tell them why a song like "B.O.B." is so awesome... It just fucking is and if that's not obvious to you then I'm probably not going to have any luck making that clear to you. I had originally started to write little 1 or 2-paragraph entries on each song though and frankly, became a little overwhelmed by the prospect of knocking out all 50. It was simply WAY too much work. But... Since I do have a head start on the writing, I've decided to let the popularity (or lack thereof) of this post decide whether or not I ultimately add the additional, song-by-song content. So... I'm gonna put it out there that if I get a mere 10 people to say in the comment section of this post that they'd be interested in hearing my additional and elaborated thoughts on each of these songs then I will go ahead and begin editing the post anew.
Without further ado...
Aaliyah - "More Than A Woman"
Air - "Playground Love"
Akufen - "Deck The House"
Antony & The Johnsons - "Hope There's Someone"
The Arcade Fire - "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)"
Asobi Seksu - "Thursday"
[The Avalanches - "Since I Left You"]
Basement Jaxx - "Romeo"
Bent - "Magic Love"
Blonde Redhead - "In Particular"
Boards Of Canada - "Dayvan Cowboy"
Booka Shade - "Night Falls"
The Bug - "Skeng"
Burial - "Archangel"
Camera Obscura - "Hey Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken"
Caribou - "Melody Day"
Cat Power - "The Greatest"
The Chemical Brothers - "Star Guitar"
Cortney Tidwell - "Don't Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up (Ewan's Objects In Space Remix)"
Daft Punk - "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"
Death In Vegas - "Girls"
DJ Marky & XRS - "LK"
DNTEL - "(This Is) The Dream Of Evan & Chan"
Dungen - "Panda"
The Flaming Lips - "Fight Test"
Gui Boratto - "Beautiful Life"
Herbert - "It's Only"
Jaylib - "The Red"
Jay-Z - "99 Problems"
Lali Puna - "Faking The Books"
Layo & Bushwacka! - "Deep South"
Luomo - "Tessio"
M83 - "Kim & Jessie"
MJ Cole - "Sincere"
Mymy - "Fast Freeze"
Nathan Fake - "The Sky Was Pink (James Holden Remix)"
Tonight we welcome local favorite and chief Smartbar programming maestro Nate Manic for the monthly 'Disco's Revenge' edition of Get Get Down at Berlin... You know what to expect: top notch selections from one of the city's finest.
Additionally, we've got our next month's worth of guests sorted and February's looking awfully good:
Tonight marks the first go-round in our new, monthly 'Viva La Vinyl' edition of Get Get Down at Berlin. 'Viva La Vinyl' is as you probably guessed, a night devoted entirely to the maintenance and celebration of vinyl culture. Though Zebo and I are both the kinds of DJ's and general minds to embrace what we perceive as positive industry changes (be them technological or otherwise, ie. the proliferation of Serato Scratch Live), we are also old enough to have experienced the rave and underground music cultures that now inform our respective DJ identities. We both have relatively deep crates and though I can't speak for him personally, I know that I certainly never gave up the digger mentality and hobby of collecting and pursuing records. I still buy wax on the regular and don't anticipate that changing ANY time soon.
With that in mind, I'm super excited to embark on the 'Viva La Vinyl' expedition and VERY MUCH look forward to taking Get Get Down back to the kinds of parties where the night was dictated by the depth and taste of the DJ's mind and selections... Where I'll be creatively challenged to make due with what I have in my crates alone... And of course, where no Lady Gaga request could conceivably be tendered (because the thought of someone spending actual money on a Lady Gaga 12" is the most preposterous thing I've ever heard of)...
... And what better guest to launch this thing with than Michael Serafini, now the owner of Gramaphone, the brick & mortar record shop that, above all other shops, had the single greatest influence over my identity as both a record collector and musical mind in general. This is gonna be a good one...
So, I hope to see you all there tonight!
The rest of the month's programming is as follows:
Jan 27th - Disco's Revenge' - A monthly GGD installment featuring all disco, all night long... Guest Dj Nate Manic
In April of 2009, myself and DJ Intel launched the 'Bad Meaning Good' monthly movie event at The Burlington in Chicago (which takes place on the first Monday of every month). The idea behind the night is to screen cult classics, exploit movies, unintentional comedies and every other kind of film we collectively decide is so bad that it's actually good. In the ongoing search for the perfect 'Bad Meaning Good' film I've decided to take on a weekly (or AT LEAST once-per-week) blog entry in which I'll review, summarize and rate bad movies of every variety imaginable. The goal is to reach somewhere in the range of 75-100 posts within a year, at which point I'll look for a place to publish a first volume of 'Bad Meaning Good' reviews in book form. Stay tuned...
In April of 2009, myself and DJ Intel launched the 'Bad Meaning Good' monthly movie event at The Burlington in Chicago (which takes place on the first Monday of every month). The idea behind the night is to screen cult classics, exploit movies, unintentional comedies and every other kind of film we collectively decide is so bad that it's actually good. In the ongoing search for the perfect 'Bad Meaning Good' film I've decided to take on a weekly (or AT LEAST once-per-week) blog entry in which I'll review, summarize and rate bad movies of every variety imaginable. The goal is to reach somewhere in the range of 75-100 posts within a year, at which point I'll look for a place to publish a first volume of 'Bad Meaning Good' reviews in book form. Stay tuned...
Summary:
'Bloodz Vs. Wolvez' is an utterly joyless and astonishingly bad, direct-to-DVD feature released in 2006. It deals with two separate and centuries-old, supernatural gangs: the "Bloodz", a mobilized, high-society outfit of vampires and the "Wolvez", a bottom-feeding, fringe-society-dwelling outfit of werewolves. Taking more than a few pages out of 'The Wire' handbook, the movie seems to be trying to make some kind of statement about societal decay or class warfare or something like that... It's all incredibly unclear because there really is not one redeemable characteristic in this mess and at the end of the day, between the actors, production folks, and viewers alike (or really, ANYONE who even THINKS about 'Bloodz Vs. Wolvez' in any capacity at all), everybody is worse off for the experience.
The "action" is sparse and the pacing beyond labored. Most scenes were filmed in what appear to be empty, or at least minimally decorated apartments and retail spaces which paint a color spectrum of dull flesh tones, bland off-whites and light grays as a backdrop for the film's feverishly boring dialog and vaguely expository sequences. The film has all the visual flair of a Holiday Inn conference room.
Evidently, the battle between the two New York gangs has been waged over centuries of bloodshed and in an attempt to catalyze the growing, organizational strength of the Bloodz' various business enterprises, Bloodz leader Asiman opts to launch a ceasefire in a sort of bargain bin variation on the way Stringer Bell played diplomatic chess in 'The Wire'. What follows is a whole lot of back-stabbing from both sides of the ball game and a soap opera season's worth of trite melodrama, none of which offers anything warranting comment or revision. The script is full of a seemingly endless barrage of generic street-isms (I think the expression "Time is money." is uttered, without a hint of irony, no fewer than 6 or 7 times in the film) and the whole experience is so completely uninspired and lame that its admittedly slim 84 minute run-time more often than not felt torturous and downright sadistic.
Perhaps the film's worst offense though (in a very long list of them) is that no one involved seemed to be having any Goddamn fun. I mean, for fuck's sake people, you're making an extremely low-budget, straight-to-DVD movie about vampire and werewolf street gangs... Could we all just lighten up a little bit and not take this thing so seriously? Additionally, and as far as I'm concerned, it should be no mystery to anyone that if you as a director are unable to make even the most low-rent, girl-on-girl vampire action in ANY WAY hot or even remotely fun to watch, then that should be a sign that your film is a consummate, infernal failure from cinematic hell.
How 'Bad Meaning Good' was it?:
Ugh. Not at all. Skip it people, I beg you. This one is not worth your time.
Oddly enough, there is one brief moment in the film that treads delicately close to the tipping point of becoming a fantastic comedic premise. It was a moment that required just the slightest amount of cool-headed, directorial and script-writing whimsy in order to blossom into something legitimately funny... And then with all the gentle and poised restraint required to incinerate an ant farm with a nuclear warhead, the idea was promptly dispatched, falling eons short of its potential evolution.
Said idea involved Loup Garou, the head of the Wolvez, employing an etiquette coach to help him overcome his brash, unrefined werewolf ways in order to create the facade of relative sophistication required to step up to bat against the vampires on a business level. What happens though is that the etiquette coach commits the werewolf-insensitive social faux pas of showing up to the werewolf lair with REAL silverware with which he intends to teach Loup Garou the basics of dining civility (an admittedly funny idea in its own right). Well, needless to say, the werewolves in the building do not take kindly to such a mistake and it proves to be a nearly instantaneously fatal one, suffocating the possibility of a potentially hilarious montage sequence of werewolf dining and courtesy coaching and leaving the film's much needed comic relief dead in the water.
Now... Forgive me if I'm allowing my undoubtedly coarse and juvenile sense of humor get the better of me here but I honestly thought this idea had comedic legs to stand on and I still do. For comparison's sake, and just to demonstrate my point, imagine it for a second in the hands of the 'Mr. Show' folks (which is of course an incredibly lopsided comedic comparison) and then think about what they could have done with such an idea. Even if you were to take your imagined 'Mr. Show' version of that bit and imagine it further as a half-as-funny version of itself, you'd still probably have something both relatively amusing and infinitely funnier than what actually happens in 'Bloodz Vs. Wolvez'... And that's what kind of film we're dealing with here folks; a film that gets it all wrong so comprehensively that the best compliment I can pay it is to offer one example of potential humor that failed catastrophically.
I'd like to give it a 0.0/10 because ultimately there was nothing I liked about it (and by the way, next time you see me you should thank me for not providing details about the part where a werewolf takes a shit on a newspaper) but I have this vague, internal feeling that somewhere out there exists some greater, more life-sucking time-waster than 'Bloodz Vs. Wolvez' and for that reason alone I'll give it an extremely generous 0.4.
'Bad Meaning Good'-O-Meter:
0.4/10
The best I could do (or perhaps worst) in youtube footage of the film:
Monday February 1st marks the latest in our 'Bad Meaning Good' film event saga and this time around we'll be screening the much-beloved 1978 trash musical and triumphant, cinematic tour-de-force 'The Apple'.
The cult appeal of 'The Apple' has endured for obvious reasons... The movie is an outrageous spectacle of excessive and terribly half-assed ideas... And it is totally, fucking hilariously awesome. I've always thought of it as a see-through attempt at trying to recreate the underdog success of 'The Rocky Horror Show' while cutting as many production corners as possible. The film has such a preposterous mess of a premise and is so inherently flawed at its core that its potential for success starts somewhere fathoms deep in the red. It is by far the most inept musical I've ever encountered and I find it a thoroughly hilarious and laughable production from top to bottom. It's great and if you haven't, you need to see it.
I've yet to do a proper Bad Meaning Good case study on the film (though I might be forced to in light of its upcoming screening) but here is a review from Bad Movie Planet.
Also, here is an even better one from the House Of Self Indulgence. (This person's write-up is particularly fantastic.)
... Can't wait for this one to go down. More info to come!
Tonight we welcome guest Heaven Malone best known in Chicago for being a part of Angels & Kings' 'Disappear Here' party... Shit's gonna get unruly, no doubt.
The rest of the month is as follows:
Jan 20th - 'Viva la Vinyl' - A monthly GGD installment to celebrate wax only. No Serato, No Cds... Guest Dj Michael Serafini (Gramaphone)
Jan 27th - Disco's Revenge' - A monthly GGD installment featuring all disco, all night long... Guest Dj Nate Manic (SmartBar)
It's a new year and with the new year (at least around these parts) comes the freezing rush of winter. With that in mind, I've drawn up a new DJ mix made specifically for the occasion; the latest contribution to my ongoing 'Kaleidosope' series for Samurai.fm.
It's a head-y and contemplative mix full of some very moody and dramatic moments. I wanted it to represent not only where I am going musically (as evidenced by the inclusion of my original "Nightswim" track that I blogged about recently), but also to just be a totally unpretentious sequence of songs; a sequence of songs that allows the music to shine and simplifies the transitions so as not to detract from the power of the music itself. About half of the tracks are properly mixed in time and the other half are mixed using a more free-form sort of style, blending synth patches and washes of sound rather than locked grooves. To put it short, this listening experience is not in any way meant to show off my abilities as a DJ; it's meant to be a seamless and thoughtful listen from start to finish... Almost as if the DJ's presence isn't even recognizable.
There are vocals at the beginning, around the halfway mark and at the end and although it's mostly instrumental, I think there's a very strong and cohesive, melodic and emotional thread throughout... The spirit of the thing remains consistent. Additionally, every track was painstakingly selected in order to work for its respective moment within the context of the entire thing and hopefully that translates to you, beloved listener that you are.
So... Here's a tracklisting for ya:
Popstatic 'Nightswim' - Unreleased
Damian Lazarus 'Moment' - Get Physical Music
Murcof 'Memoria' - Leaf
Burial + Four Tet 'Moth' - Text Records
F.U.S.E 'Nightdrive' - Plus 8 Records Ltd.
Pantha Du Prince 'Saturn Strobe' - Dial Records
Lulu Rouge 'Bless You' - Music For Dreams
Joris Delacroix 'Calin Cale' (Rodriguez Jr. Remix) - WOH Lab
Mymy 'Fast Freeze' - Cocoon Recordings
Petter 'Some Polyphony' - Border Community
Extrawelt 'Mit Liese Auf Der Wiese' (Max Cooper's Melt Remix) - Traum
Charlie May 'Midnight' - emFire
Sylvain Chauveau 'Fly Like A Horse' - Kompakt
Sigur Ros 'Samskeyti' - MCA Records
... As is always the case, you can stream or download the mix in it's entirety from my podcast page, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or you can always catch all my 'Kaleidoscope' shows directly from my Samurai.fm showpage. Feel free to leave any comments or feedback that you please, be it complimentary, critical or otherwise.
Tonight we welcome our close, personal homeboy and DJ collaborator Pr3-Frosh (The Booty Up) as our guest for GGD at Berlin and as always, we're expecting a fantastic party from start to finish. Much thanks again to Tim Zawada for participating in last week's foolishness, your contributions were of course much appreciated. Additionally, the remainder of the month's GGD programming is as follows:
Jan 13th - Heaven Malone (ChicagoSuicideClub)
Jan 20th - 'Viva la Vinyl' - A monthly GGD installment to celebrate wax only. No Serato, No Cds... Guest Dj Michael Serafini (Gramaphone)
Jan 27th - Disco's Revenge' - A monthly GGD installment featuring all disco, all night long... Guest Dj Nate Manic (SmartBar)
