The '00s were one crazy decade, weren't they? It boggles the mind when you think about it. When Y2K hit (with none of the techno-chaos we feared it would, I might add), MP3's and blogs were just beginning to spread through the web ... "American Idol", the iPod and iTunes didn't even exist yet (How did we ever get along without iPods?) ... and Ray Charles and Michael Jackson were still alive and singing and entertaining us all (for better or worse). I have to wonder if anyone in the world could have seen how drastically our music listening and consumption habits were about to change. The Decade That Was undoubtedly held the most dramatic amount of change in the most all-encompassing way, that I can't conceive of the incoming decade or any in the future even coming close to topping it in that respect. But anyway, I digress.
I may be shooting myself in the foot here, not only in terms of avoiding exhausting the future subject matter for this blog, but also in terms of avoiding exhausting myself with what's sure to be an intensive flurry of posting. You see, I had originally intended this list to be 75 items long, but, well ... there were enough albums in my collection to warrant expansion of the list to a much rounder number. So, throughout the month of January, I'll be proudly presenting the countdown of my 100 favorite CDs of the 2000's! And, if you can believe it, even taking it to the century mark still left me with a handful of albums that I really wanted to put on the list, but just didn't have room for. But, if I can keep up with preparing the posts in advance like I did with my '90s list, I should be just fine.
As with last month's countdown, it's not meant to be a fully representative cross-section of the popular or noteworthy music of the last decade; rather, it's just what its title says: my favorite CDs of that decade ... meaning it's limited to ones I actually bought, still enjoy listening to, and still feel proud to have as a part of my collection. For that reason, you won't be seeing Kanye West, Franz Ferdinand, Radiohead or Alicia Keys here ... it's not that I necessarily dislike any of those artists, I just haven't bought any of their albums (yet). You'd have to understand what a jaded listener I feel I've become ... it's almost to the point that, unless an artist really grabs me in some way, I'll dismiss them fairly quickly, even if they're critically acclaimed or popular with the public. (And, unfair as it seems, the more I hear about them in the news and on the web and whatnot, the more likely I am to end up ignoring them.) But, I digress again.
So anyway, here comes my list of favorite albums of the just-closed decade. And by the way, if any of you have problems with what I put on this countdown or where I put it (and they might not completely mesh with their relative rankings in my recent annual countdowns ... haven't figured that one out yet), before you leave any snarky comments, I politely refer you to my blog's header graphic -- specifically the phrase nestled underneath the title. So ... prepare to be amazed and/or amused and/or astonished ... the countdown starts tomorrow!
Oh, what the heck ... let's make it 101!
101. JOHNNY MATHIS - "A Night To Remember"(Columbia, 2008)
I don't know what it is about his voice -- its resonance, its clarity -- but it pulls at my ears like a magnet whenever and wherever I hear it. There's a reason why this guy is one of my favorite "old" singers, and why he's been making records for half a century.
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