Essential Albums of the Decade: Introduction

As the 2000s come to a close, it's time to rehash what the best albums were. Starting tomorrow and posting daily for the next eight days will be my end-of-decade albums recap. Because the end of 2009 means my personal chart will be 20 years old, I'm doing my best of the decade in groups of 20s, preceded by three "bonus" lists covering albums I thought missed the mark, those that achieved a lot of acclaim but don't appeal to me, and 20 albums that don't make my top 100 but that I wanted to highlight nonetheless.

Leading up to this list, all year long--typically each week--I've written brief reviews of albums I viewed as essential this decade, typically because they were among my favorite but also because they were influential in shaping the ever-changing popular music scene. Not counting the multi-year recaps, I believe all but one of my Best of 2000s albums appear (the one that doesn't is Arctic Monkeys' Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, but they are represented with a different entry).

My top 100 is a good mix of pop, rock and alternative across the 10 years. In fact, every year but 2005 is represented in my top 10, and each year has at least 6 albums (2008 is the banner year, with 16).

Certainly what constitutes the album has changed this decade. Although that could be said of any recent decade (in 1980 it was a vinyl record, in 1990 a cassette, and in 2000 a CD), the transformation in the 2000s was most dramatic, as music moved off a physical format and into a stream of bits downloadable from your computer. It certainly makes for instant gratification. In 2000, if I wanted to own all the Grammy Nominees for album of the year, I would have likely had to wait until the day after the announcement to read the list of nominees in the press, and then make my way to a record store to track them down, paying probably $12 to $18 per disc. This year, I knew the nominees the moment they were announced, and seconds later acquired the two nominees not yet in my collection, paying $5 and $10 for them each (you can get Taylor Swift's album for only $2 right now at 7Digital).

Despite such changes, and the perennial calls from the pundits that the album is "over," the medium endures, and as long as major artists keep making albums, we'll keep buying them. Let's hope that in 2019 we'll be doing best albums of the '10s write ups.

Tomorrow: 20 Albums That Missed the Mark