Dre’s magisterial sophomore effort 2001 was released in the last weeks of 1999. So although it was an enlightening and ubiquitous presence in the first year of the decade, we’ll have to look elsewhere for Andre Romelle Young’s de jure highlight of the ‘00s (and I don’t think we should be overly optimistic about longtime work-in-progress Detox, judging from the leaked material).
‘The Real Slim Shady’ (momentous at the time, and still exhilarating to listen to) comes pretty close, as does Eve’s ‘Let Me Blow Ya Mind’. If you wanted to play loose with the ‘Dre’ tag (we all know he doesn’t actually do the producing, right?) you could put forward early-2003 Aftermath hit ‘Addictive’ by Truth Hurts, one of the most creative exemplars of the Iraq-war-coinciding trend for orientalism in American r’n’b.
The line-up of our Tunes of the Decade list thus far has underlined two things: 1) that commercial pop music is relevant to the zeitgeist in a perhaps unprecedented way, and 2) that the implications of this fact are frustratingly difficult to make sense of.
Amerie, Girls Aloud, JoJo, R Kelly, Tatu, Nelly Furtado; all are utterly worthy of their places in a list of the most brilliant music produced over the last ten years. But how are we supposed to react to this development, this fact that music created by a bizarre conglomerate of songwriting teams, super producers, faux-lesbians, 13-year-olds, talent show contestants and (alleged) paedophiles, is at the forefront of the most innovative, exciting, artistically worthwhile stuff around? How can a new generation of bands, songwriters and creative individuals possibly hope to come up with a pragmatic response to this sort of confusing, hyperreal (non-)blueprint for making music?
One radical suggestion was provided in 2007, in the shape of Burial’s ‘Archangel’, the lead-track from his glacial sophomore masterpiece Untrue. The basis (if you can call it that) of the tune, is a sample of American R’n’B-pop maestro Ray J (more specifically, his 2006 ballad ‘One Wish’, a song I have been profoundly in love with since hearing it on Trevor Nelson’s Saturday evening Radio 1 show not long after my parents died). Read the rest of this entry »
