The Noughties: The Decade Which Broke Pop

And so, The Noughties is about to give way to a decade which has yet to be named. It started with a failed Millennium Bug and ended in a celebrity cadaver pile. But what happened between?

If The Nineties were the branded years, with bands getting logos and lampooning the supermarket shelves and embracing and glorifying the plastic aesthetic, then the 2000s looked inward and ended up becoming more extrovert.

After the terrible events at the World Trade Centre, music seemed to revert back to the singer-songwriter movement of the mid-Seventies, with acts like Norah Jones selling a ton of records. From the dustcloud of the failed NAM (New Acoustic Movement) of the late '90s, out came Coldplay to peddle their brand of grown-up rock music, tagged along with Snow Patrol and a Springsteen revival.

Rock music, in fact, finally delivered what it had been threatening to do for many years, and that was to start acting it's age. Nickelback sold far too many records and the hip-young gunslingers shot smack anthems from British bedsits and took itself very seriously indeed.

The only shot in the arm rock music got in the Noughties was via the much maligned Emo movement. Offering itself as an antidote to the jock posturing idiot sounds of NuMetal. Bands like Linkin Park, Blink 182 and Limp Bizkit bared chests while Emo bared some soul and an outpouring of darkly sentimental emotion. Of course, being of a certain age, I totally didn't get it... however, to mock it is to mock our young and, as tempting and easy as that is, it was a good sign that The Kids Are Alright, still seeking weird kicks that The Olds just didn't understand and forming an identity out of the weirdness of a world still hungover from terrorism and the endless video spools of those planes crashing into those towering monuments to consumerism.

Meanwhile, pop sneaked up on the blindside.

As the world braced itself for one of the ugliest, dodgiest wars in human history, something was clearly needed to help put smiles back on the faces of the people. Enter a second coming of Girl Pop. Through Lady GaGa, Little Boots, Britney Spears, Beyonce, Girls Aloud, Kylie's resurgence, Rihanna, Lily Allen, Katy Perry and Sugababes, the good times rolled once again.

Whilst the Guardian-set dug Folk music, with the likes of The Green Man Festival promoting pastoral music, it was quite the reverse that made the world tick. Slick, polished synthpop with Girls With 'Tude fronting, completely dominated. Even someone as irritating as La Roux managed to make a couple of decent singles, leaving People Like Us (aka, those of us who read far too much into things) unable to work out whether we hated or loved 'In For The Kill'. Exactly what pop music is supposed to do.

And all the while, politicians mopped the blood with their ties and the bankers shuffled around in darkened rooms, bringing the Western World to it's knees. The Noughties has been a very, very serious decade... one filled with fear and loathing... which is the perfect ground for unashamed pop music to flourish. It took a second Vietnam to see the pop chorus to re-emerge.

The crown for the Queen Of The Noughties (there's been little competition for the King spot) has been hotly contested. Right now, it's difficult to think of reasons why Rihanna (whose 'Umbrella' is the modern equivalent of Zep's 'Kashmir' - apocalyptic pop par excellence) or Lady GaGa (who is the most interesting musician we've had since forever) shouldn't land the crown... but there's one reason why they'll have to wait 'til 2010 onward:

Beyonce Knowles.

Beyonce is, without question, the supreme ruler of popular culture in The Noughties. In 'Crazy In Love', we have the best record of the decade and, in 'Single Ladies', have the song of the year. Tracks like 'Deja Vu', 'Sweet Dreams' and a whole buncha great stuff she did with the last Destiny's Child LP ('Lose My Breath' is an incredible tune), we've got a clutch of tracks that match anything done by those that went before her as inspiration (I'm looking at you Diana Ross and The Supremes).

It speaks volumes that, in The Noughties, there were more column inches devoted to The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent franchises than musings on bands like The Editors, Kings of Leon, Florence and the Machine and The Ting Tings.

The weird rise of Susan Boyle is a perfectly strange snapshot of a decade confused. Cowell's frumpy protege provided one of the weirdest televisual spectacles, with a clear sneer from the throng, which gave way to pantomime clutching to the collective bosom. Boyle was left in shreds and looking like a confused lady stood in the middle of a whirlwind, obediently singing the words when prompted.

Yet, away from rock's failings (they weren't all failings of course... there were some wonderful releases that crept under the radar) and pop's glories, the thing that 2009 will invariably be remembered for is the death of Michael Jackson.

The death of Michael Jackson prodded many to reappraise the finer points of his back catalogue as well as scrutinise his strange and troubling life. The death of Michael Jackson, like the passing of Elvis or JFK wasn't merely a celebrity death, but rather, more like a planet imploding. Jackson's life had been a cartoon of epic proportions and his utterly unexpected death caught the whole world on the hop, setting the kindling alight with rumours, bad jokes, monumentally odd funeral services, sickly tributes and a moment in time unlikely to be forgotten by those gawping.

Jackson's death nearly eclipsed those that also died. We lost Lux Interior, Farrah Fawcett, Brittany Murphy, Ron Asheton and many more. The Noughties was filled with untimely and sad passings: Arthur Lee, Syd Barrett, Alec Guinness... and so on... all left us when we really weren't done with them.

We also got the troubling spectacle of the fall of Phil Spector, leaving an entire backcat of glorious pop music hidden under a peculiar shock of afro and a handgun.

Yet, the biggest deal in pop culture wasn't a release, rather, a format decision. With the rise of the download, we saw the music industry's biggest prank backfire spectacularly. In a move to give the people even less for their money (charging for something you can't even roll a joint on is baulking to say the least), the nerds got their own back by cracking open the skull of pop culture and offered the brains for everyone with an internet connection to pick at.

I've written extensively on the subject elsewhere on these pages, and as such, won't bore you with the theories all over again. Suffice to say, filesharing posed a new problem for music and film, to which no-one has been able to come forward with a suitable solution. One glimmer of hope in the melee was the advent of Spotify, which could help to point toward the way out of the mess we currently find ourselves in.

And all the while, the political filesharers who wailed at the prosecution of The Pirate Bay, suddenly released late in the game, that buying music can be fun and have an impact. The battle for the Christmas No.1 of 2009 is a sweet footnote in the history of the Yuletide chart topper. When people finally paid some cash for a track, The X Factor was the first to suffer.

Rage Against The Machine's surprise number one, 'Killing In The Name', saw a chart run-in so ludicrously fun and interesting (when you take away all the pointless rhetoric) that it could potentially pave a way for people to start wanting to buy music again, as opposed to simply 'owning' it.

And so, a suitably weird decade draws to a close... a decade filled with a Large Hadron Collider, the threat of terrorism, textspeak, carbon footprints, Harry potter, iPods and iPhones, the swearing in of the first black president of the United States of America, MPs expenses hammering nails into the coffin of British trust in politicians and a whole bunch of equally worthless and brilliant pop culture artefacts.

We can only hope that the next ten years are as much fun and give us all something to fight over and thrill about.

[Mof Gimmers]

Comments

[Marcus]

A great piece Mof! I’m in utter agreeance with your choice of Beyonce as ‘Queen of Pop’ for the Noughties. As a performer, she’s right there alongside Bodyguard-era Whitney and pre-R’n’B Mariah. Of course, an early parallel with Diana Ross is inevitable having broken from one of the greatest girl groups, but she’s bolted where Ross bloated. Her performance of “If I Were A Boy” at the MTV EMA’s in 08 ( here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur5KYs7BaYw ), is one of the finest performances I’ve ever seen (and without her even moving from the spot)!

However, equally as great as her talent is her PR. Don’t underestimate the impact her “relationship” with Jay Z has had on her standing. Imagine if Diana Ross had married Michael Jackson back in the day!

It was the year that everything went pop! Rock is currently in the doldrums thanks to the likes of The Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stoneage chasing the pop-friendly penny, becoming pop-rock mammoths. Foo Fighters playing to 100,000 people at Hyde Park in 06 and the success of QOTSA’s ‘Nobody Knows’ changed the face of rock in the Noughties, beating a path for bands like My Chemical Romance and Kings of Leon to follow in to prole-consciousness.

Grime emerged as a very dangerous and exciting animal, even if its longevity was doomed from the start. Those who survived the quick burn were those who found their inner pop; Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Lethal Bizzle.

Pop, The Ark of the Noughties.