THE DECADE IS OVER! THE DECADE IS OVER!

well, kind of. i mean, the decade will be over, in seventeen months, five if you don't count right. whatever, the decade is over. do you people even know what that means?

it means soon we get to find out what were the best albums, tracks, and music videos of the last ten years. we'll surely get to find out what some writers think the decade "meant" -- lots of long essays about mp3's, about how online distribution is SO FUCKIN AWESOME!

one thing's for sure: the current crop of pitchfork writers is probably starting to get nostalgic for their college days. consequentially, look for smarmy indie dance bands to be extremely well represented (you know, fast guitar music with no backbeat [whites gotta dance, too]), competing most directly with smarmy indie folk bands (sweet christ on a cracker, i hate those woodland brooklynites who seem to practice their instruments as frequently as they shave).

expect certain TITS bands to be erased down the memory hole (black kids, arctic monkeys, clap your hands...), and expect the editorial staff to show diversity of taste by including a bunch of hip-hop records that they never bothered to promote.

i won't miss the 00's (pronounced "oooohs"). it's kind of been a militarist corporatist nightmare of a decade. if there's one thing we can learn from it, it's that dystopian writers like Huxley and Orwell weren't as imaginative as modern-day republicans and democrats.

musically? general taste has been eviscerated by the atomization of the public, corporate sponsership of music is UP (sales are, of course, DOWN), and brittney spears had more fight in her than the beta band.

while pitchfork has presided over the death of anything like counter-culture, many of us just last november participated in the untimely death of political activism. the next decade's movers and shakers need to survey the wreckage, and realize that being king of the mountain now means only that you reach the peak of a pile of rubble.

morrissey, box sets, and reissues

so EMI is putting out two box sets of morrissey singles, and morrissey is pissed(through a fansite) because EMI hasn't paid him any money for seventeen years, and since he's in no position to collect royalties from songs he doesn't own, he instructs his fans not to buy the box set.

now, i approve of morrissey's edict, if not his singing. record companies love box sets and reissues and "retrospectives", usually because they own all the rights to the music, don't have to front any money to produce it (it already exists) and make one hundred percent of the profits from sales.

pitchfork has recently unveiled a "reissues" subheading in their "best new music" section, where congolese blues rock meets REM collecters editions. and what do the far flung members of the "best new reissue" category have in common? the artists no longer own the rights to the music being distributed.

YAY FOR SONY!