Now that I drive into work, I find myself listening to a lot of NPR, a station which used to be reserved for special road trips upstate. When I was able to leave work a little early last week, I managed to catch Soundcheck, while they were having a week where they reviewed the best music of the decade. I caught Critic's Week: The Decade in Rock, which was really interesting, and made me think much harder about a decade when I felt like music really wasn't at it's peak. I guess there was so much Britney Spears and Good Charlotte that it sort of blocked out The Arcade Fire and The Strokes and Regina Spektor and Muse and all the other great artists from the 2000s in my mind. Ryan Schreiber, the featured critic, also noted the way that music became more and more individualized in the 2000s, citing the fact that you could look on anyone's iPod and find music that almost no one but them would know. I didn't finish the program, but I hope he expounded on the fact that having an iPod at all helps to create a sort of cult of music as personality. The collectivity of music (starting out at the basics, as most of music being created by a band, and moving toward collective music experiences like massive concerts which are then aired on television to an even more massive group of people) is starting to disintegrate just a little in the face of such individualizing technology.
Anyway, the small review is this: it was a very interesting program, and you should go listen to it. I'm planning to listen to the whole thing, and then hopefully check out the rest of the week's episodes.
