Attempting a summation of the musical decade would be i) tardy ii) pointless iii) not really in keeping with Murdofleur’s remit, so the below aren’t our top tracks of ‘the noughties’ (though Black Dice’s Creature Comforts, as maybe my most napped-to LP of the the past five-odd years, would ride pretty high in any list I was forced on to compile). What we have got for you is a bunch of songs spanning 1999-2010 that are preoccupied with loops, zeroes, naught – songs, in other words, about nothing.
Some, of course, would argue that ‘nothing’ is what the 2000s bequeathed musical history. And, although they’d be lying through their ignorant teeth, the title of Beach House’s ‘Master of None’ (itself a competent slice of inoffensively derivative lo-fi pop) is admittedly pretty applicable to the slew of (albeit sometimes great) recent music that’s merely pastiched or cross-bred old styles.
Ironically it’s the selection from the nineties – the Godspeed track – that gets closest to adequately conveying noughties-style paranoia and fanaticism. It’s pretty depressing, in retrospect, that it would only take Bush three years to make the suspicions of the gun-loving anti-authoritarian zealot who’s sampled on it sound eminently reasonable…
(Oh, and – in keeping with the ‘nothing’ theme – no podcast this time)
