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.

Brad Paisley’s ter­rific new record, Amer­i­can Sat­ur­day Night, arrives freighted with con­tra­dic­tions. So does all good pop music. But they’re rarely announced as starkly as they are on “Welcome to the Future,” a song seem­ingly designed to illus­trate the prim­i­tiv­ity of the tra­di­tional model of licens­ing pop­u­lar songs for use in adver­tis­ing described by Greil Marcus in Lip­stick Traces:

At first, [Michael Jackson's] will­ing­ness to imme­di­ately trans­form ["Billie Jean"] into an adver­tis­ing jingle seemed like a slap in the face to every­one who loved it. But months later, when the con­stant air­play bought for the com­mer­cial allowed it not just to replace but almost to erase the orig­i­nal, one could hear “You’re a Whole New Generation” [the Pepsi anthem that reworked "Billie Jean"] as a new piece of music…. When he sang the line, “That choice is up to you,” dra­ma­tiz­ing the consumer’s option of Pepsi versus Coke, he made it sound like a moral choice.

“Welcome to the Future” ren­ders this entire process super­flu­ous. The song arrives already trans­formed into an adver­tis­ing jingle,