This Helps Explain The Rise of Fleet Foxes, At Least

Simon Reynolds in the Guardian:

“See, I have this hunch. I reckon that if you were to draw up a top 2,000 albums of every pop decade and compare them, the noughties would win: it would beat the 1990s decisively, the 1980s handsomely, and it would thrash the 1970s and 1960s. But I also reckon that if you were to compare the top 200 albums, it’d be the other way around: the 60s would narrowly beat the 70s, the 70s would slightly less narrowly beat the 80s, the 80s would decisively beat the 90s, and the 90s would leave the noughties trailing in the dust. Yeah, it’s just a hunch – but it has the ring of truth. Because I think that the higher reaches of a chart of this kind demand something more than mere musical excellence: there has to be an X factor, the hard-to-define quality that you could call “importance” or ‘greatness’.”

He uses Pitchfork’s early-Noughties (I feel weird and British using that word) slant to its Best of the ’00s list (Person Pitch being the only post-2005 inclusion) as the first bit of evidence.  Believe me, Pitchfork editors and staffers had an inkling that something like this would happen.

The most interesting part of this article is its conclusion–which, thankfully (and perhaps obviously, given its author) avoids the “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” argument.  Reynolds’ contention is that, as the numbers of (often good) releases goes up, the critics themselves are spread thinner, and consensus inevitably declines, especially in comparison to earlier decades.  I actually had a bit somewhat similar to this in my own 00’s accompanying essay–a similar conclusion, but having more to do with the role of technologies and the incursion of non-critic-critics into this situation–but cut it, for various reasons.

Filed under: criticism  Pitchfork  Simon Reynolds