The Top 20 Records of the 00's - An Intro/Excuse

Decades are strange things. They are, of course, completely arbitrary ways of defining the passage of time, with no real bearing on the events and culture they represent. And yet, the wisdom of hindsight seems to lend each one a distinct personality of its own. It's easy now to look back at the '70s as the decade when punk battled disco, and the nation's interior decor was drenched in a flood of brown and burnt sienna, or the '80s as the age when synthesizers and Prince roamed the earth.

But the present tense - that's trickier. I say present tense because in a sense, we're all still living in the last decade. The calendar may say 2011, but pop culturally, we haven't moved far from 2008 yet. This is how it usually goes - the first two years of the '90s were racked by the day-glo aftershocks of the '80s until Nirvana chased hair metal and synthesizers away. The early '00s were the '90s Part II (Congrats on best selling record of 2000, NSync!), but all that changed when BUSH DID 911. Until whatever cultural or societal change washes away the Autotune and Saw sequels, it's hard to predict just what form the last ten years will take.

That's why I roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone being described as the "voice of our generation." Generations rarely get to choose their own voices - the people who come after do that for them. Our kids may reject our Radiohead and Wilco records and decide that, say, Hoobastank were the great musical innovators of our time. And we can shake our canes and write angry letters to the editor, but in the end, we're pretty much powerless to define our own legacies. Which is all a roundabout way of explaining why my "Best albums of the 2000s" list is about a year and three months late. Expect the first review later this week.