Imagine a pop­u­lar record-​review web­site pub­lish­ing a list of what its con­trib­u­tors believe to be the 500 best songs of what they believe to be the first decade of the twenty-​first cen­tury (2000-2009, although the decade actu­ally began in 2001 & will be fin­ished at the end of 2010, but never mind)—without includ­ing a single coun­try song (that Loretta Lynn/Jack White thing doesn’t count). Silly, right? Well, it was just a thought exper­i­ment. No one who writes about pop­u­lar music could really be that parochial, that insu­lar, that obliv­i­ous to the “popular” in “pop.”

But it got me think­ing about what my own list of the best songs of, um, 2000-2009 might look like (the twenty-​one best songs, mind you, because I don’t have all day, & twenty wasn’t enough). After com­pil­ing it, I was delighted to real­ize that it is not just one music votary’s sub­jec­tive impres­sions of the last ten years, but an objec­tively defin­i­tive list of their twenty-​one best songs. With one exception—I indulged an anti-​indie bias, not because LCD Soundsys­tem, TV on the Radio, Destroyer, the National, Joanna Newsom, Modest Mouse, the Wrens, Spoon, the Moun­tain Goats, Bon Iver, et al., did not make some of the period’s best music, but because many of the internet’s native fauna believe they made the only good music of the period. (I also left Out­Kast off this list, but I con­fess they belong on it some­where.) In a bold depar­ture from nor­ma­tive music blog­ging, I will have little of sub­stance to say about my choices.

21. Gary Allan, “Watching Airplanes” (2007)
Sad songs say so much.

20. Missy Elliott, “Work It” (2004)
?tihs a sevig ohw siht ekil staeb htiW ?gnos ytlevoN

19. Beyoncé, “Irreplaceable” (2006)
I am not sure whether this is a better song than Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” They are very dif­fer­ent songs, but they inhab­ited the same green shade in the brain part of my body for the entire summer of 2007, thank you very much.

18. Drive-​By Truck­ers, “Decoration Day” (2003)
Sing that dead band’s song.

17. Fucked Up, “Black Albino Bones” (2008)
I almost picked “Year of the Pig,” but that would’ve vio­lated my “no eighteen-minute-long songs about pigs” rule.

16. Sonic Youth, “The Empty Page” (2002)
Sonic Youth is better than your band, what­ever your band is called.

15. Pig Destroyer, “Girl in the Slayer Jacket” (2007)
This song con­tains the lines “Her eyes had been dead since she was five / She just hadn’t dis­posed of her body.” Ah, teenagers in love.

14. Jay-Z, “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)” (2001)
Before Kanye was an idiot, he was an idiot who made insanely great beats. Before Jay-Z retired from being a great rapper to become a mediocre rapper, he was a great rapper.

13. Mastodon, “The Wolf Is Loose” (2006)
The ini­ti­ated tr00 sniff at Mastodon’s “hipster metal”: proggy epics about one-​eyed sasquatches & Rasputin, with cover art by Capri-​Sun. Like that’s not totes fuck­ing awesome!

12. Justin Tim­ber­lake, “My Love” (2006)
If only all songs that rhyme “countryside” with “side by side” sounded this good.

11. Burial, “Ghost Hardware” (2007)
In dystopia, no one can hear your coffee percolate.

10. Brit­ney Spears, “Toxic” (2004)
My sister says that when she first heard this song, she thought, “This is what music sounds like in the future.”

9. Clipse, “Hate It or Love It” (2005)
Hell Hath No Fury is the best hip-​hop record since the Hard­ing admin­is­tra­tion, but on this mix­tape joint the broth­ers Thornton—who really do deal drugs, honest—rescue the Trammps from the Game. Har­monic convergence!

8. Taylor Swift, “Tim McGraw” (2006)
The most per­fect piece of art pro­duced by a six­teen year old since “Le Bateau ivre.” Wikipedia: “Swift got the idea for the song during math class as is stated above.”

7. The Hold Steady, “Most People Are DJs” (2004)
Will kids still feel pretty sweet in the world of tomorrow?

6. Ghost­face Killah, “The Champ” (2006)
OK, listen up! Has anyone seen Ghost’s fake arm?

5. Pink, “Don’t Let Me Get Me” (2001)
I used to cry for Pink because she was my only friend.

4. Lil Wayne, “We Takin’ Over [Remix]” (2007)
There are metrists who deny the exis­tence of spon­dees. They don’t know Weezy.

3. Miranda Lam­bert, “Kerosene” (2005)
Never any­thing to do in this town.

2. Kelly Clark­son, “Since U Been Gone” (2004)
People are sad that musi­cians are man­u­fac­tured. But that was thirty years ago & Never Mind the Bol­locks is a pretty good record, so they should get over it. Mean­while, there are tremen­dous pop songs like this to listen to.

1. M.I.A., “Paper Planes” (2007)
Really, the best song of the 2000’s is what­ever M.I.A. track hap­pens to be play­ing. But it’s usu­ally this one.