Rolling Stone has compiled a list of "the most important music of the '00s as chosen by more than 100 artists, critics and industry insiders." This list includes 100 albums considered to be the best of the past decade. Here are the top ten albums with brief quotes from the magazine.
10. The College Dropout / Kanye West - "Maybe all he wanted to do was become an international superstar, but in the process, Kanye expanded the musical and emotional language of hip-hop."
9. Kala / M.I.A. - "The London-via-Sri Lanka art-punk funkateer came on like she knew she was kind of a big deal, and it didn't take her long to convince everyone in earshot."
8. Modern Times / Bob Dylan - "Mother Nature's revenge, silk-suited robber barons, the spiritual and romantic salvation always just beyond reach: Modern Times is history repeating itself, in Dylan's specific echoes of Slim Harpo and Memphis Minnie, and his refusal to bend even in the harshest winds."
7. The Marshall Mathers LP / Eminem - "...a masterpiece of psychodrama, 18 tracks that solidified Em's position as the new decade's most fascinating pop star and rap's most inventive new voice."
6. Funeral / Arcade Fire - "Built on family ties (leader Win Butler, his wife, Regine Chassagne, his brother Will) and a rich, folkie musicality, the band made symphonic rock that truly rocked, using accordions and strings as central elements rather than merely as accessories, with a rythm section that never let up."
5. Elephant / The White Stripes - "After they grabbed the world's ear with White Blood Cells, it turned out Jack and Meg were just getting warm. They went from minimal to maximal on Elephant, with a hot-blooded rock throb that blew every other band off the radio."
4. The Blueprint / Jay-Z - "...what really stands out is the rapper's sheer musicality: the new flows, timbres and tones that Jay-Z unveils in every song, with a virtuosity that marked him a vocal stylist on par with pop's greatest singers."
3. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot / Wilco - "Wilco's great leap forward was a mix of rock tradition, electronics, oddball rhythms and experimental gestures: a new vocabulary for an overwhelmed, dislocated age where we'd need to draw on both history and invention to survive."
2. Is This It / The Strokes - "...there was no missing the burn marks left by the guitars and Casablancas' vocals, mixed to the fore and ringed with distortion like he was singing from a pay phone. We got only two more albums from the Strokes, but they inspired a ragged revolt in Britain, led by the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys, and reverberated back home with the Kings of Leon."
1. Kid A / Radiohead - "...the weirdest hit album of that year, by a band poised to be the modern-rock Beatles, following the breakthrough of OK Computer. In fact, only 10 months into the century, Radiohead had made the decade's best album - by rebuilding rock itself, with a new set of basics and a bleak but potent humanity."
Visit Rolling Stone's website for the complete list. Do you agree with these selections? What were your favorite albums of the last decade?
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