Category: Music

Most Popular Songs of the Decade

The most popular songs of the decade (2000-09) across all genres, ranked by radio airplay audience impressions…sales data…and streaming activity…

  1. We Belong Together, Mariah Carey
  2. Yeah, Usher Featuring Lil Jon & Ludacris
  3. Low, Flo Rida Featuring T-Pain
  4. How You Remind Me, Nickelback
  5. I Gotta Feeling, The Black Eyed Peas
  6. No One, Alicia Keys
  7. Boom Boom Pow, The Black Eyed Peas
  8. Let Me Love You, Mario
  9. Gold Digger, Kanye West Featuring Jamie Foxx
  10. Apologize, Timbaland Featuring OneRepublic

The top album was No Strings Attached, ‘N Sync.

Billboard has the Top 100s.

Best line of the day

“And yet, it’s better to be a one-hit wonder than say, a lifelong failure. Most creative people I know would cut off a finger to have the word ‘hit’ associated with their names — even a single time.”

Mary Elizabeth Williams writing about The one-hit wonder of the decade.

Billboard selected Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day.” Click to learn about the runners-up and more.

Imagine

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no posessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

John Lennon

Lennon was killed 29 years ago tonight.

Best line of the day, so far

“[Mick] Jagger was preposterous and admirable, as always: these days, he always seems like he’s filming a workout tape.”

Ben Freeman reviewing the HBO broadcast of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert.

“Fergie, who had started at the back of the stage, on a riser, in a sinuous Kali-like pose, ended up in a cock-and-hen mating dance with Jagger, which wouldn’t have been a problem except for the fact that it flew in the face of context, decency, and history.”

Apparently, according to Freeman, they messed up “Gimme Shelter,” surely a capital offense. Go read his commentary; rock music criticism at its very finest.

The Grand Ole Opry

… began broadcasting on this date in 1925.

Soon after going on the air, National Life hired one of the nation’s most popular announcers, George D. Hay, as WSM’s first program director. Hay, a former Memphis newspaper reporter who’d most recently started a barn dance show on Chicago radio powerhouse WLS, joined the station’s staff a month after it went on the air. At 8 p.m. on November 28, 1925, Hay pronounced himself “The Solemn Old Judge” (though he was actually only 30 years old) and launched, along with championship fiddler, Uncle Jimmy Thompson, what would become the WSM Barn Dance.

Hay’s weekly broadcasts continued and proved enormously popular, and he renamed the show the Grand Ole Opry in 1927. Crowds soon clogged hallways as they gathered to observe the performers, prompting the National Life company to build an acoustically designed auditorium capable of holding 500 fans. When WSM radio increased broadcasting power to 50,000 watts in 1932, most of the United States and parts of Canada could tune into the Opry on Saturday nights, broadening the show’s outreach.

Grand Ole Opry: Introduction

Pops

Michiko Kakutani reviews the new biography of Louis Armstrong — Pops. It’s a positive review of what appears to be a significant addition to the Armstrong literature from Terry Teachout. Kakutani leads with:

Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture.

Reading the review reminded me of a quotation from Gary Giddins in his Visions of Jazz.

On November 12, 1925, in Chicago, Armstrong embarked on the most influential recording project in jazz, perhaps in American music. Over the next three years, he produced the sixty-five sides … generally known as the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens. If Armstrong had put music aside after the December 12, 1928, session, he would not have exerted the full measure of his charisma as a singer; would not have recorded the dozens of nonpareil big band performances; would not have enjoyed the pop hits and movies; would not have matured and mellowed over time into an even more expressive instrumentalist and singer; would not have achieved international renown; would not even have earned the nickname Satchmo. But he would still be the most imminent figure in jazz history.

“When I blow I think of times and things from outa the past that gives me an image of the tune. Like moving pictures passing in front of my eyes. A town, a chick somewhere back down the line, an old man with no name you seen once in a place you don’t remember.” Louis Armstrong

The Decade's 50 Most Important Recordings

It seemed like an impossible task, but that didn’t stop us from trying. With the first decade of the new millennium coming to a close, we decided to compile a list of the 50 most important recordings of the past 10 years — a list that covers a wide range of styles and genres, with indelible songs and albums that challenge, inspire and captivate. These are the game-changers: records that signaled some sort of shift in the way music is made or sounds, or ones that were especially influential or historically significant.

The Decade’s 50 Most Important Recordings : NPR

Here’s the full alphabetical list, but click the link above for a discussion of each of the 50.

John Adams: On The Transmigration Of Souls
Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
Arcade Fire: Funeral
The Bad Plus: These Are The Vistas
Beyonce: Dangerously In Love
Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago
Bright Eyes: I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
Burial: Untrue
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: S/T
Kelly Clarkson: Breakaway
Coldplay: A Rush Of Blood To The Head
Danger Mouse: The Grey Album
Death Cab For Cutie: Transatlanticism
The Decemberists: The Crane Wife
Eminem: The Marshall Mathers LP
The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
Osvaldo Golijov: La Pasion Segun San Marcos (Saint Mark’s Passion)
Green Day: American Idiot
Iron And Wine: Our Endless Numbered Days
Jay-Z: The Blueprint
Norah Jones: Come Away With Me
Juanes: Fijate Bien
LCD Soundsystem: Sound Of Silver
Lil’ Wayne: Tha Carter III
Little Brother: The Listening
Yo-Yo Ma: Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet
Mastodon: Leviathan
M.I.A.: Kala
Jason Moran: Black Stars
OutKast: Stankonia
Brad Paisley: 5th Gear
Panda Bear: Person Pitch
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss: Raising Sand
The Postal Service: Give Up
Radiohead: In Rainbows
Radiohead: Kid A
Shakira: Fijacion Oral, Vol. 1
Sigur Ros: ( )
Britney Spears: In The Zone
Sufjan Stevens: Illinois
The Strokes: Is This It
The Swell Season: Once Soundtrack
Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate: In The Heart of the Moon
TV On The Radio: Return To Cookie Mountain
Various: Garden State Soundtrack
Various: O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack
Kanye West: The College Dropout
The White Stripes: White Blood Cells
Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Amy Winehouse: Back To Black

Idle thought

Can’t get motivated to write about the birthdays or much else today. I’m just exhausted from all the quilting.

I was driving home through the nearby rural-like nature of Sandia Pueblo last night, feeling for a few minutes like I was on another great American road trip. And just then Booker T. and The M.G.’s came up randomly on the iPod with “Green Onions,” the greatest of all road trip music.

And I thought, I need a road trip mix for the Z4. “Green Onions” obviously, Del Shannon’s “Runaway” of course, but what else?

And, come to think of it, why do The M.G.’s have an apostrophe in their name?

True genius

Die Zauberflöte — The Magic Flute — premiered in Vienna on September 30, 1791; libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. That night Mozart conducted the orchestra, Schikaneder played Papageno.

Mozart died less than 10 weeks later at age 35.

Redux post of the day

Eva Cassidy was a singer from Bowie, Maryland, near Washington, who died of melanoma in 1996. She was 33. Click here and here and here to read about Eva.

I first heard Eva’s CD Imagine one evening last October at Tower Records in DC. I bought it then and three more CDs since. Her eighth album, American Tune is due out August 12th. [I have it, too.]

According to reports, Boston DJ Robin Young was able to get Sting to listen to Eva’s rendition of “Fields of Gold”. “She has him on camera saying that he was quite territorial about that song, arrogant even, only to be brought to tears by her totally different vocal interpretation.”

Eva Cassidy owns “Over the Rainbow” and “Fever”.

Well, actually Eva shares ownership of “Over the Rainbow” with Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.

Above first posted here in August 2003.

Best redux line of the day

“The simple fact is that every time Krauss opens her mouth to sing, angels stop what they’re doing and take notes.”

— Rick Anderson in a review of Alison Krauss at All Music. He adds:

“There may be no musical pleasure quite as pure and sweet as listening to Krauss sing ‘Baby, Now That I’ve Found You’ or ‘When You Say Nothing at All.’ And when she starts in on the impossibly beautiful gospel tune ‘Down to the River to Pray,’ the effect is almost disturbingly moving.”

First posted in 2006.