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.

In an arti­cle on the dollar’s depre­ci­a­tion in today’s NYT, Katie Hammer and Julia Wedigier write:

The dollar’s fall has been so dras­tic, it has seeped into the pop­u­lar con­scious­ness. In his last video, rapper Jay-Z cruised the streets of New York flash­ing not a stack of Ben­jamins, but a fist­ful of euros.

The impli­ca­tion seems pretty clear*; as James Cramer put it last month: “When things have gotten to the point that even people like Gisele [Bund­chen] and Jay-Z real­ize the dollar is too weak, things have gotten out of control” (my emphasis).

Yes, we get it: the point of the anec­dote is to add color (no com­ment) to the story, to break up more mun­dane sen­tences like the one that fol­lows. (“The dollar had been at rel­a­tively low levels against the pound and euro for most of this year, but in April it broke the $2 for £1 barrier…”)

But stop for a moment and ask your­self: by what stan­dards does Jay-Z count as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pop­u­lar con­scious­ness? Con­sider what it means to be a person “like” Jay-Z:

+ Accord­ing to Rolling Stone, Jay-Z earned $17.5 mil­lion in income during 2005

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