Best Albums 2000 (6-10)

10. Madonna — Music Well, after “American Pie” the skinny bitch owed us for damn sure. So with the reins passing from Yahweh to Mirwais, she simplified, sifting only the schlockiest sound effects from the latest electrodance trend which, ever so conveniently, was sonically akin to her one true love, disco. Fans who prefer Madonna [...]

Papa Roach – “Last Resort”

Released: 9.18.00 Peak: #57 All dour reserve and sleek surface, the Deftones were the millennial aesthete’s post-grungers of choice. But if “Change (In the House of Flies)” offered putative evidence of life after nu-metal to alt-snobs, to some of us, their low-affect alienation intimated a fate worse than Korn. Since when should teen angst be [...]

Ludacris feat. Shawna – “What’s Your Fantasy?”

Released: 9.12.00 Peak: #21 Is there any filthier-sounding word than “lick”? Not “fuck” or “pussy,” that’s for sure–them’s just playground pottymouth, their impact diluted through gratuitous overuse. But the hard “k” cutting short that liquid “l” has a fleshy lewdness to it, as does the tongue itself, a moist muscle slab flexible enough to squish [...]

OutKast – “B.O.B.”

Released: 9.6.00 Peak: #69 [Hip-Hop/ R&B Songs] In a decade that sought post facto prophets, a song called “Bombs Over Baghdad” would inevitably tempt listeners to trace tomorrow’s detours in yesterday’s tea leaves. But the intuitive clamor to hear OutKast’s ingenuity as a glimmer into the unforeseeable, a “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” [...]

Madonna – “Music”

Released: 8.21.00 Peak: #1 Musically, the three great pop superstars to come of age in the ’80s–Michael, Madonna, Prince– were above all solipsists and sensualists. (Note to quibblers: Bruce was a rock superstar, and of a generation earlier at that.) Their arresting visual styles, their facility with deploying an array of symbols in ways that [...]

M.O.P. – “Ante Up (Robbing-Hoodz Theory)”

Released: 7.25.00 Peak: # 74 [R&B/ Hip-Hop Songs] Billy Danze and Lil’ Fame are just thugs who wanna have fun in a hood already marked as a war zone back when its Jews bypassed Prohibition and that’s nowadays so blood-steeped the U.S. Army trains reserve medics in the county hospital. “True player-hater[s]” and proud, gawd [...]

Best Albums 2000 (11-15)

15. Merle Haggard — If I Could Only Fly In a decade of C&W comebacks that read better than they sounded — Jack dolling up Loretta, Dolly trying to prove that wigs have roots, Kristofferson failing to camouflage tunelessness as aged wisdom — Merle eased back in the game with no big concept, unless giving [...]

The Baha Men – “Who Let the Dogs Out?”

Released: 7.25.00 Peak: #40 I come neither to praise the Baha Men nor even to critique them. My sole duty is to acknowledge them, with the appropriately slack-jawed respect due such a gonzo force of commerce. Some pop songs devour their moment whole, inflecting events in our lives with shades of irony or deepening catharses [...]

Kandi – “Don’t Think I’m Not”

Released: 7.18.00 Peak: #24 Before she was a real housewife in the ATL, Kandi Burruss played a major role in crafting a new bottom-line-minded R&B persona, unimpressed by then-fashionable boudoir fibs and gratuitous cash-flashing. True to the memory of Gwen Guthrie and the earthy realism of the old-school blues women, this new girl was sassy [...]

Matchbox Twenty – “Bent”

Released: 7.4.01 Peak: #1 In 2000, Matchbox 20 celebrated its newfound success by renaming itself matchbox twenty. I’ve yet to hear an explanation for this momentous defiance of AP style, but there are audible differences between the two, um, incarnations(?) With “Bent,” the first single from Mad Season, the casually Hootie-fied jangle of the band’s [...]