The pre­dictably yawn-​inducing results (by which I mean I pre­dicted the top six in my sleep—check my dream jour­nal if you don’t believe me—& the reason I was asleep is that I had been lis­ten­ing to the top six) are in for the 37th (or, I insist, 38th) Vil­lage Voice Pazz & Jop music poll. Here’s my ballot:

And some of my com­ments here (note that I pro­vide the tag line). As usual, this list doesn’t reflect my cur­rent think­ing about

The first CD I bought was But­t­hole Surfers’ Locust Abor­tion Tech­ni­cian. I was 15, 16, con­ced­ing to the mar­ket­place despite my sus­pi­cion that the com­pact disc was, in Steve Albini’s semi-​prescient phrase, the rich man’s eight track tape. Many of the first CDs I bought were, of course, trans­fers into the new format from back cat­a­logs of bands I liked. Over the years, I—& prob­a­bly you, too—have bought the same albums sev­eral times over, becom­ing some­thing of a con­nois­seur of the usu­ally infin­i­tes­i­mal dif­fer­ences among var­i­ous remas­ters. The second remas­ter of Sticky Fin­gers, for exam­ple, cuts off Mick Taylor’s solo at the end of “Sway” just a half-​second before it actu­ally fades out on the record. Only a crazy person would buy each new edi­tion of a novel. But I appear to be exactly as stupid as the record com­pa­nies hope I am. (At least until recently: these days most of my music takes the form of gifts from the inter­net.)

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.

1/ Donald Barthelme, “For I’m the Boy” (1964):

The bottle was old and dirty but the brandy when Huber returned with it was tasty in the extreme.

2/ Grate­ful Dead, “Brown-Eyed Women” (1971):

The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.