PLEEEEEEZZZZZZ reduce the size of the thumbnails or offer a text-only link to the lists! A third of us are still stuck on dial-up and that’s just in the U.S. It is a royal pain in the ass to have to either wait for the list to load or to tease it out of the source text.

Thank you!

Well, there’s your Miley Cyrus, so maybe you can stop worrying about her. ;o)

Too many of us are too inclined, IMHO, to view the Olympics as they once were (or were intended to be, at least), a gathering of the finest athletes from around the world transcending political boundaries. I suspect this applies to otherwise well-meaning artists, too. Unfortunately the Olympics has become nothing more than a corporate hand-out that has destroyed cities and countries. (It was no coincidence that war broke out in the Balkans just months after the Sarajevo Olympics. There were a slew of geo-political factors, but the Olympics was a huge catalyst.) Chicago and the U.S. should count our lucky stars that Chicago lost the most recent Olympic city contest (although woe to Rio) and it pains me that a president I voted for was so ignorant of the problems (even after the fiasco that was SLC) that he actually went to lobby for the damn things. They have become an extension of the same mindset that has caused the global economy to implode, and are akin in a world being destroyed by unsustainable greed-driven corporate practice to Hitler’s 1930′s European con job. And, no, I am not exaggerating. This latest mess in Vancouver is a nightmare, and the corporate greed-meisters know it, which is why they are clamping down on free speech across the board. When Amy Goodman goes to Vancouver to promote a book that has NOTHING in it about the Olympics in Vancouver or elsewhere and is detained just because she’s Amy Goodman and she MIGHT say something critical about the Vancouver Olympics, then you know this whole thing reeks of evil. The only silver lining I can see is that evil often reigns for a time as paradigms shift, so perhaps we are shifting the paradigm, and the evil ones know it and are trying to stop us. I hope they won’t (history tells us they rarely prevail for long), but I also worry that we won’t be in time. As George Carlin aptly said (paraphrasing), it’s arrogant to think we humans can destroy Mother Nature, because if we even attempt to, Mother Nature will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. Unless of course we stop acting collectively like a bunch of terrible two-year-olds. Thanks for the piece, it’s timely and an important aspect to a chillingly horrible evolution in our society. All the more chilling because it’s been so subtle even the Steve Earles and Amy Goodmans haven’t fully realized the implications. (Although I think Amy does now.) And, please, please, please, if you aren’t already, plan to boycott anything and everything associated with the Vancouver Olympics, including YouTube. I’m sorry we’ll miss some of our favorite musicians, but the stakes are just too high. And to you naysayers out there, “stakes too high? for the Olympics? are you on crack?”, I say, yes, yes, and absolutely not. I am as DEAD serious as the homeless in Vancouver.

First a trivia note: The “naught” play on words refers to the first decade of a century traditionally being called the “aughts.” As for the list, as usual, most of the artists are probably appropriate to the overall pop/rock landscape, but we couid do with a little bit less Coldplay and a few more important artists, like the aforementioned and the Decemberists, Neko Case, Jose Gonzalez, Josh Ritter, Stars, Feist, Metric, and Belle & Sebastian. At the very least, include Broken Social Scene for it’s groundbreaking structure, style and spin-offs. And, of course, the choice of material and order of precedence is stupid. For example, M.I.A.’s “Paper Airplanes” is far more significant than Kala, especially as it was a major part of the soundtrack of Oscar-winning Best Film. I am also one of those annoying indie lovers who also loves U2 (probably b/c I’m a geezer who fell in love with them when they were indie post-punk at the same time as Joy Division), but *No Line on the Horizon* has no place on any best-of list. (The other two albums I’ll grant ‘em, and ATYCLB actually belongs IMHO.) And I would really like it if the folk weighing in would pay attention to covers. There is probably no song on this list covered more this decade than “Heartbeats,” and yet it is #87? I don’t think so. Even if you don’t like the song, pay attention to the artists who do. And no “Breathe Me” (Sia) when it was all we heard the summer of 05? (It was just as ubiquitious as “:Crazy” was the following summer, and Feist was later that year.) I AM glad to see LCD SS & Radiohead getting love (although, again, I’d do some re-arranging, except for Kid A), and I do like the hip-hop inclusions, but as for the latter, the exclusion of K’naan is also unforgivable. Another commenter said it well, none of these lists will do justice to the artists we love, and we just have to make our own.