i don't listen to the Arcade Fire. I thought they were a carbon copy of Radiohead...?

Important is a shiftty concept, and is just as subjective as "albums I like most."

My personal opinion is that very few albums are truly important. "A Change is Going to Come" is important. Can't say I really feel anything is important from the 00s. I think there is a tendency for every generation to try and claim something for themselves as a monumental shift of greatness. Not sure that happened in the last ten years. Doesn't mean they can't have some great unimportant albums though.

These were the 2 discs that I agreed with most being in the list, along with Radiohead.

there's some real stupid arguments in this thread.

This might be the most lawyerly thing you've ever posted.

You understand that generations label certain moments great while also saying that "those kids don't know what great is".

First, it's impossible to define a decade by a relative small list of albums but, second, you're also speaking from your view of the world. Like billy said, these things only become more clear with time but that doesn't mean that some of these albums won't be seen as "important" 20 years from now.

I agree that there are very few important albums a decade but to discredit this list is to just say that you fucking don't know. This isn't really directed at you Fish just the thread in general. Hell, I didn't hear DJ Shadow's "Entroducing" until years after it came out and I still don't see the appeal of it yet it's still considered a very important album. So does that make 1999's most "important" albums list suck?

Point being, who are any of us to judge how "this list sucks" in the context that it's given at it's present time.

Also, Loog and Mick win for the most knee jerk reactionary bullshit responses in this thread.

everyone should just skip timmy's post, read your first one and then go back.

I'm not assailing the list, Benji. My post kind of derailed, I guess. I really just meant that "important" is really not much different than "best" or "favorite" anyway because there are so many ways something could be defined as important. Which, I gather, you kind of agree with? - Because you wouldn't consider "Entroducing" as important but you concede that someone else would. Then I just explained what I thought important was as way of example.

You must really like this list. How many coffee mugs with your donation did they send you?

Not even man. I guess I just thought that this first salvo into the best of decade abyss might be some opportunity to get into some discussion about the decade.

I think I was having a liberal moment. I should've known better. I figured we'd be well into Spin's best of the decade before we devolved into contradiction comments of "I like" or "worst list evar" as full posts.

FWIW, I do think that Danger Mouse album was important culturally. While mash ups had long been a technique, I think that album took it mainstream.

I'd agree that Danger Mouse took mash-ups mainstream, and I'd probably go as far as to say it was the first mash-up that didn't sound amatuerish, and was actually mostly cohesive sounding like nothing before it was.

But I'm not sure that's really important culturally. I think the amount of influence doesn't say much to the quality of it. This kind of goes back to the legacy of KISS that we argued about in the Hall of Fame thread. Is there any artistic merit in mash-ups?(I really don't know as I've never thought about it) I know some think there's artistic merit in all music. I've never really prescribed to that. I think what makes VU important is not that they inspired a bunch of bands in their wake. It's that they kept gritty urban rock'n'roll alive. What underlies the music is much more important to me than a bunch of kids like it now.

The problem is this list failed at it's original point, AND it sucks. It is a vague collection of indie bullshit, with some country and rap thrown in to seem cool. Knowing what you know about music, justify that Brad Paisley album over, say, Tim McGraw, Toby Keith, or hell even Miranda Lambert?

The concept of important in this instance is pretty clear: having influenced or changed something about the industry. Thus, the inclusion of CYHSY and Danger Mouse.

Correct me if you don't see anything culturally significant about the fact that Nicklecrap remains a bigger band in terms of sales than everyone on that list combined + U2 + The Rolling Stones.....

Just because you feel the need to give everything its just do, doesn't mean that the concept behind it isn't fundamentally flawed.

I actually heard a bunch of praise for Brad Paisley from some music editor on Slate. He practically blew him into the microphone. Apparently he's a good songwriter and a helluva guitarist.

there is no excuse for putting little brother on any list.

I won't disagree that the concept behind this list doomed it from the start, but even still, it certainly wouldn't have been improved by including the biggest albums by all of the highest-selling acts like Nickelback.

Regardless of how popular they've been, they're not really individually important at all, I don't think. Rather they're more a symptom of an overall trend, the further devolution and ugly inbreeding of popular music, or at least what's been pushed by some of the increasingly desperate and clueless major labels. Really they followed down a path paved by Creed, who in turn were followers of grunge coattail-riders like Bush, who themselves were, obviously, capitalizing on the succes of grunge-proxy bands like Stone Temple Pilots who were initially derided as Pearl Jam clones.

Alice in Chains and Live don't get blamed enough for that train of horrible.

Oh yeah, Live.

Alice in Chains get a semi-pass for at least being part of the original wave.

alice in chains and live, apples and oranges

I wouldn't mind if a few Nickelback-esq band members follow Staley's lead a little more literally and od'ed though.

agree, but they both inspired a band like Creed in different ways.

oh yeah, no denying that

I've always felt Alice In Chains was the biggest influencer of Nu Metal or whatever they're calling music of the Nickleback/Stained/etc. variety but no one really wanted to admit it since they were a respected band. Nice to see I'm not alone in that opinion.

that would be post grunge

nu metal is/was a primate-level devolution of faith no more

The wife was a big fan of his song Alcohol, which while not bad, I think you can discern from the title is a little facile.

And Drinky, I think that mass culture = fail culture and indie = goog is an underrated argument of our times, and is certainly 98.3+ percent of why we are all here, and I think it is an interesting, and nigh important, phenomenon that even though music is essentially free, there are a million blogs, XM/Sirius, etc available to the consumer, yet a significant proportion of people like spoon fed crap like this. Sort of like network news - even if a broadcast "only" gets 11 million viewers a night, that is still 10 x the amount of people who ever watch Mad Men and 100 x the people who see The Wire.

Except that Mad Men and The Wire are part of that mainstream culture. So just admit you like Nickelback and get to it.