A Singular Offence

I had the distinct misfortune over Christmas to watch Channel 4’s The Greatest Songs of the Noughties: one of those inane and, ultimately meaningless shows where a selected voting British public strokes the egos of those musicians who actually give a toss about appearing on them. If they were up and coming artists you could forgive them for taking the free publicity, but really, it’s not like they’re the Q Awards or the Rock N’Roll Hall of Fame. They’re not even the NME Awards, and that’s saying something about their pointlessness. The list, admittedly, included some incredibly fine pop songs such as the sensational Crazy by Gnarls Barkley and Hey Ya by Outkast, but it also rated James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful as warranting a place. Watching the video again, you wish the hamster-voiced idiot would choke himself violently while removing one of the items of clothing, rather than offending the general population with the sight of his pasty chest-buttocks.

However, I don’t think I’ve been more offended by one of these votes, than in seeing Snow Patrol rated as having penned the anthem of the 21st Century so far. Chasing Cars is a well written pop song but it’s not even the band’s best song, and even Run and Set the Fire to the Third Bar don’t deserve the accolade. You could say that placing that song above I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor is a punch in the faces of the people who recognise the strides made by popular music towards clever, exciting songs entering the charts, but then that would suggest that these lists actually matter – which they don’t. They’re like David Cameron’s latest press release, or Paris Hilton’s existence – pointless and utterly devoid of meaning. Also, how could anyone compile or vote for a list of the greatest songs of the Noughties without including a band that defined the Indie explosion into popular music? In The Libertines, Docherty and Barat’s fragile and brief creative partnership brought about one of the greatest British albums since The Queen is Dead, and paved the way for the success of The Arctic Monkeys and (unfortunately) Razorlight, bands who defined the Noughties in terms of chart success.

Perhaps if these programmes could tear themselves out of the iTunes generation, where a couple of hooky lead singles are all that matter, maybe they might actually be worth watching. The Greatest Albums of the Noughties would be a fantastic show. And herein lies the issue with the advent of iTunes and the convenience of downloading a single, stand-alone song. Imagine, if you will, the list of complete and microcosmic albums which were released in the Noughties: Johnny Cash’s American IV: The Man Comes Around, Elbow’s The Seldom Seen Kid, Green Day’s American Idiot or Biffy Clyro’s breakthrough, Puzzle, and I could go on to mention The Gaslight Anthem, The Strokes, Bob Dylan or Queens of the Stone Age, along with a host of others. These are albums, which are all the more impressive because the songs compliment each other in the album’s context and, as the endless list of one-hit-wonders proves, it’s not exactly hard to have one great song on an album of filler; the challenge is to produce an album of those songs. It really is a comment on the state of single downloads, that Killing in the Name Of, the last number one of the decade, was released in 1992. Even a program of overlooked songs on records would be better. In fact that would be a great TV show, especially with some decent interviewees, rather than Will Young mincing around vapidly, while a sneering voice over pokes fun at him from a safe distance. It could feature Slash talking about Rocket Queen, or Eddie Vedder on Light Years – great, forgotten gems discussed by people who know what they’re talking about.

All this is just conjecture, but it would sort the great, hulking odysseys of albums from the stud-wall thin efforts of the majority of pop acts of the Noughties. Instead of the stand-alone, saccharine hit of the chart single, the viewer could revel in the depth and beauty of great albums and their achievement as an entire entity, rather than a fragmented flash of brilliance (or not in the case of much of Channel 4’s compilation).