for what its worth...

I'm doubtful, that of the maybe 5 people i've talked to about music in the last year, any of them would be surprised by my favorite two records of the past decade. What Wilco and Radiohead achieved in the early part of the 2000's seems insignificant now, but at the time the internet was still nascent. By the time the music industry had time to catch up, it was nearly half a decade later.


I recently told someone that the Bush years had been the grimmest presidency since i was born (granted that is not a long time). The events of 9/11 brought the grim revelations of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to life. That raw emotion wound up ingraining itself in my memory instead of the increasingly insipid back story to the record. Pitchfork's (I hate to do it), Joshua Klein puts it best:

"The real story was the resonance of elliptical songs like "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart", "Ashes of American Flags", and "Jesus, Etc.", which often reduced crowds to hushed silence once 9/11 attached a real world frame to Tweedy's cryptic lyrics."

Radiohead changed the game by being the first band to fully utilize the internet and connect with fans in a way never seen before. Like Yankee Hotel Foxtrox, Kid A sought to navigate a technological age that for the better or worse is now how we now live. In this way, Kid A was a much more hopeful record than OK Computer, and still maintains all the emotionally affective qualities of its predecessor. Pitchfork's (i know twice now) Mark Richardson is again spot on:

"Thoughts about millennial techno-dread; fragmentation, broken transmissions, garbled communication; the feeling of helplessness that comes from having access to so much information about the world while not having the power to change any of it; the subtle and dramatic ways that electronics are altering our landscape and our consciousness. And there's still something there, though in some ways it's all now more intense. Part of our brains moved online in the last 10 years, and this will continue; it's not a good or bad thing; it's just the way it is. Refracting these developments through the prism of Kid A, it still resonates, even if so much has changed since. Radiohead were not only among the first bands to figure out how to use the Internet, but to make their music sound like it, and they kicked off this ridiculously retro decade with the rare album that didn't seem retro. Kid A-- with its gorgeously crafted electronics, sparkling production, and uneasy stance toward the technology it embraces completely-- feels like the Big Album of the online age."