[via Rolling Stone] Well, someone’s on the ball, eh? Sorta like Macy’s and Starbucks, with their preemptive barrage of all things holiday that just sorta make the rest of us feel bad for not even being prepared to serve Thanksgiving dinner let alone know if we’re going to have enough money to buy presents for the upcoming holidays, British music news source NME comes in with a list of the decade’s 100 best albums. I guess maybe it’s because they don’t have Thanksgiving that they’re weighing in so early? Oh wait, Paste Magazine has their Top 50 of the decade already up, too. So do a bunch of other people… I guess we’re just slackers over here at Crawdaddy!.

Anyway, NME chose the Strokes’ 2001 debut Is This It. In my mind, this isn’t so far off the mark. I think it’s much more on the mark than Paste’s number one, which was Sufjan Steven’s Illinois. It was around this time, at the beginning of the decade, where rock ‘n’ roll claimed some airwaves back from all the pop shmaltz (which we can attribute to the Strokes, along with the White Stripes, who were technically on the scene a few years before the Strokes were) that previously held the radio captive for more years than I myself was convinced that bubblegum crap would. According to Rolling Stone, they gave the record a 10/10 at the time of its release. The White Stripes don’t show up on their Top 10 at all. In fact, White Blood Cells and Elephant show up at 19 and 18 respectively. Elephant before White Blood Cells. Really? Perhaps that is a debate for another day. Or not. The NME list is riddled with head-scratchin’ picks.

This brings up an interesting thought though. If you look at their Top 10 of the decade, the majority of them are from the early part of the decade… seven out of 10. Is this because many of the records being released at the beginning of the decade were that tone setting? Did the decade’s earlier records impact the aural landscape for the 10 years that followed that much? When going back to listen to these records, did the passage of time grant them some sort of definitiveness that newer records simply cannot attain? Does the migration from a buyer’s consumption of albums to mp3 singles have something to do with this? No albums from the past three years cracked the Top 30 threshold on NME’s list.

I suppose lists are just lists, hardly conclusive, and people like you and me enjoy reading them and then debating them. It’s fun. If you’re, you know, ready for this sort of question: What’s your pick for best album of the decade?

Side note: I got soooo sick of this song when I was living in NYC in 2001, but you know what? It ain’t bad at all.

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