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)

Spotify Playlist

The 2000s in review [Kottke.org]

The 100 best films of the decade [according to The Times]

Top 100 albums of the ’00s [Resident Advisor]

Sleevey Wonder [one of the worst puns of the decade? thanks The Sun]

50 of the best jokes of the noughties [joke's on The Telegraph really]

Delia’s favourite noughties ‘recipe’ for antipasti [The Daily Mail caters for well-behaved housewives]

Leading swiftly to a round-up of the decade’s sex tapes [courtesy of The Huffington Post]

Top agricultural biodiversity reads of the decade [Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, obviously]

For people who don’t care that much about the music of the last decade [look away now]

… although the noughties are by definition OVER, this list can continue ad infinitum, just add comments below…

2000 – New year arrives in Bristol city centre, re-concreted for the millennium, to find shuffling teenage cattle equipped with two toke spliffs and plastic bottles of vodka mix; I don’t get to kiss the girl I did last year, but this isn’t the 90s anymore. Miss out on camping with the cooler kids at Glastonbury. By end of year get 10 GCSEs, a mobile phone and a girlfriend.

2001 – Lose virginity and fall in love (probably in that order). Go skittish round April when new girlfriend disappears on French exchange – listen to indie pop break-up songs, and ponder what an emotionally wrought break-up might be like (and how to write emotionally wrought indie pop break-up songs). Have acute encounter with own mortality sat on a toilet, drunk, in a cubicle at Bryanston school on last night of a wind-band course. By the end of the year I have Grade 8 clarinet and more earnest adolescent issues then I can knock out square with one punch.

2002 – Get A-Levels and having studiously avoided UCAS realise I need apply for University. Get job in Japanese noodlebar, eat lots of noodles, choose music as my raison d’etre and get place at Oxford.

2003 – Accept place at Oxford, finish working in noodle bar and take off for Cuba on March 16^th with girlfriend holding a sweaty shaking hand. Discover that world is beautiful, broad and widely impoverished, through medium of Latin America. Hottest summer of the decade spent back home throwing a Frisbee further every day. September arrives – girlfriend goes to University and one month later I arrive at Oxford, shake my Dad’s hand (no sweat) to start a new life. Two months later have more stories, more friends, and a bigger vocabulary.

2004 – Split-up with girlfriend but by summer am a neophyte drug user in white-tie and tails. Seductive summer holidays with new friends full of superlatives before tick-box trip to Eastern Europe (trains, beers, a well-thumbed guidebook) brings a handful of anecdotal sexual experiences. Improvise on this theme until December when I discover that pretty girls make you anxious when they don’t reply to your texts.

2005 – Discover that getting up at 3pm doesn’t always make you happy. Amidst much chicanery avoid doing any real work. Clubs and bars become quasi-domestic spaces. Join Facebook and get another girlfriend (not related). Quiet nights the exception that prove the rule.

2006 – Pariah status as I take a gap-year from University on spurious academic grounds. Break up with girlfriend as things get more sobering. Later that summer a sense that things-that-could-have-been-are-not leads to deposits in the memory bank in Paris and Spain; in Morocco attempt to help build classroom with spade, some money and lots of goodwill, but not enough cement (classroom left unfinished).

2007 – Climactic period of keepsake June segues to summer in Serbia, but somehow heart if not broken gets bruised. Move to London where a whole new game begins, and largely unemployed, fill days with little, and odd evenings with holding trays of champagne, cursing the day. By December life seems a difficult thing to be good at.

2008 – Become provider of second tier private schooling as tutor for  a clutch of London’s better off, less able youths in various smart-casual postcodes. Claim dole to buy coffees for free internet in free time – get two-day per week internship which pays in compliments and lunch. Have affair with women in her thirties, move to Cambridge for first proper job and join the leisure class on a tight budget.

2009 – Leave Cambridge and start to tell the hour with Big Ben, leaden circles advancing the days. By autumn my youth is given a once-over for crimes as am checked for suitability to serve the crown…batting for Britain…thinking of the pavilion. Parties are the exception that make the rule and having long-resisted the term ‘Noughties’ on various aesthetic and ideological grounds, start using it more and more.

I don’t know what to call this decade yet.

ER, THANKS FOR NOTHING

Dorothy Feaver

I like the fact that, literally, “The noughties” is a decade with a void at its centre.

On Good Friday 2008 I tried to tell people at a dinner in Chelsea an instructive moral fable involving a Japanese man and a cup that was too full of tea.

I don’t know if they got it. Or if I did.

Maybe nothing is a gift?

Matt McLean

One from the pre-digital middle of the Noughties – can’t remember where exactly, of course. I liked disposable cameras and I still like the duds: grainy, black and not much to see, they free up the memory.

Dorothy Feaver

Shooter’s Hill, 2003, above the A2 and towards Kent, I guess. I harbour a belief that exhaust fumes intensify the light.

Memories become templates. Some things are mine to forget.

Matt McLean

Round about Bologna, Aug. 2003… Strangers asleep on trains are mine to remember…

Dorothy Feaver

The problem when looking back is that there are at least as many things not done, as done.

No regrets?

Matt McLean