Music Critics Unimpressed by Decade's Most Critically Acclaimed Music

Heads up, friends: This post is part of ENGINE’s decade-closing blogsplosion. Click here to witness the rest of the damage. The aughties!

The decade’s best song and album came out in late 2000, and it was all downhill from there.

“Asking what happened to the feeling that her and me”

“Had”

So music critics have started releasing their best-albums-of-the-decade lists.

According to Metacritic’s and Billboard’s aggregators, albums by Radiohead, Arcade Fire, and the Strokes make up the top three, with a wide margin between them and the next tier. OutKast’s Stankonia comes in at ninth on Metacritic as of this writing, with five top ten list appearances and zero number one spots, and 17th on Billboard. Funny thing is…

When you go by reviews written at the time of each album’s release, however, Stankonia ranks as the decade’s fourth-best-reviewed album behind a Brian Wilson album from 1967, a Led Zeppelin album from 1972, and a Loretta Lynn album actually written after the Vietnam War.

Therefore, second-best-reviewed album of the decade. Since it’s close anyway, let’s give it the edge over Loretta because I’m confident more people can recite an entire verse of Stankonia’s second single than can hum a single bar from Loretta Lynn’s album. Not hating, just stating.

So: Kast slipped from more-or-less second to a distant 17th, while the 87th best-reviewed album (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) takes fourth and Kid A, originally ranked in the 300s, somehow ranks first? How’s all that happen?

(This is all ignoring the fact that critics also forgot about Speakerboxx/The Love Below, the decade’s only worthy Best Album Grammy winner — seriously, look for yourself. We all swore we’d stop watching the Grammys when Steely Dan won over Radiohead, then swore the same thing annually until Robert Plant won over Radiohead. That one might’ve actually done it.)

“I met a critic…”

Maybe critics were just caught up in the moment when Stankonia dropped. If we had the time, I bet we could find quite a few who rated Stankonia higher than Kid A at the time, but have now changed their minds. Why? I’m asking you; I don’t know.

There’s no reason to expect any listener’s musical taste to stay the same for ten years. And just because it’s the same publication doesn’t mean the original reviewer is involved in the end-of-decade list. But there’s enough of a sample size here to see that Kid A and Stankonia have switched places over the years. What’s odd to me is Kid A, one of the oddest albums of any decade, somehow became the safe pick.

Of course there’s only gonna be so many spots for rap albums on these lists, for whatever stupid reason. So why is Stankonia losing that spot ten years later? Is it because Idlewild sucked? Should an artist’s earlier work really be less esteemed if their later work doesn’t live up? If that’s the cause, why are Blueprint or Original Pirate Material making anybody’s lists?

I think the critical overestimation of Jay-Z’s Blueprint is telling. Since most of these critics are rock and/or pop people, they’re excited by adventurous rock music, which is the mildest possible summation of Kid A. But since hip-hop is a little more foreign to the average (read: Caucasian) critic, rap music that colors just barely outside the lines feels the most comfortable. Something like Stankonia is ultimately a thrilling cosmic safari, but not a place to revisit. In this case, we need a rap album that makes immediate sense from every angle. Which describes Blueprint perfectly — it’s a straightforward hip-hop album, done very well.

Anyway. Maybe I can’t speak for the fall from critical grace, but let me make a case for Atlanta’s finest.

“1-9-9-9 Anno Domini: Anything goes”

If any genre defines this decade, it’s weird Southern rap. (Ok, maybe that right there explains the critical backlash…) Yep, there was a lot of good rock and bad rock, and some country; but that’s the same for every decade since the ’50s.

Whether you like it or not — autotune, Timbaland’s transfiguration of Timberlake, “Hot in Herre” and “Yeah!” and “Hey Ya!” and “Crank That” and “Crazy,” and so on — the bizarre South’s ripples were unavoidable. And for that, you have Kast to blame. (Some say you can even blame OutKast for the next wave: hipster rap.) Can we really imagine the world being ready for Lil Wayne and Kanye if it hadn’t first been exposed to this mountain of total from-on-high nonsense:

“You gotta charge the world, cause over a million people took it”

All rappers like to pitch their latest albums as triumphant returns, but “B.O.B.” felt more like Dre and Big Boi were back from some galaxy way beyond Jor-El’s. Remember how hard this video blew your mind at the time? Five minutes before you first saw this, you were downloading “Nookie” from Napster. It’s not your fault.

Next thing you knew, you didn’t know anything anymore. It takes half a minute of thinking to come up with a genre of music Earthtone III didn’t throw in to “B.O.B.”

And even if OutKast was still mastering the sad-song-sounds-happy formula that would later produce their biggest hit, the song’s content reflects its complex sonics. Break down Dre’s verse… it’s as bleak as it gets, from negligent meteorologists to epidemic diseases. But since he raps this while done up like disco Pied Piper Pocahantas galloping with children down a purple meadow at 155 beats per minute, many of us likely never even noticed.

The song reveals itself to be about how the world sucks sometimes, but OutKast are awesome enough rappers to rap to the track that they are rapping to, which is hands-down worth bragging about. And the chorus… an evocative throwaway line, “Bombs over Baghdad,” seems pretty eerie in retrospect.

Pitchfork and Blender got it right: the best song of the decade … the best song since “Billie Jean.”

And that’s just one track.

“So Fresh, So Clean,” for me at least, was the moment when Big Boi became Andre’s equal. Since the mid-90s, it had always been pretty clear Dre was the talent and Big was along for the ride. Until he broke out intricate imagery like “YKK on your zipper,” it wasn’t easy to think of Big Boi as a writer’s writer. (This trend would continue, as Speakerboxx was WAY better than The Love Below.) My point: after Stankonia, both Dre and Big ranked among the top ten best rappers alive. Meaning this was the decade’s only group album that starred strictly top-ten rappers.

“Miss Jackson” is a surefire top-50-of-the-2000s single, delivering some of pop music’s most mature and honest (though not necessarily both at the same time) reflections on failing relationships, parenthood, and growing up. That unsettling rewind sound that hits after the snare, the perfect aural suggestion of regret. Big recounts a frustrated and detailed blow-by-blow, and Andre might’ve peeled off the verse of the decade; thirty years from now, you’ll still be able to finish this line without pausing to remember who wrote it: “Forever? Forever Ever?”

If songs about exes don’t do it for you, how about songs with exes? The strangely slept-on “Humble Mumble” features Erykah Badu, the mother of Andre’s son, almost stealing the show from two of the top ten rappers alive.

Compared to the sentiments that rappers usually express regarding women, a track like (Note: Most links henceforth have cusses.) “Call Before I Come” is basically a feminist anthem. That’s all I’ll say right here.

“Gangsta Shit,” as hard as any piece of music really needs to be, “Spaghetti Junction” (which sounds kind of like “Jazzy Belle”), and jittery creeper “Red Velvet” introduce 25-year-old Andre’s Old Man Andre, who still pops up annually-or-so to deliver the year’s best verse on some club song remix.

And on and on. Even the skits are funny, something at which 99% of rap albums fail catastrophically. I have more than one friend I still quote the repeated “BREAK!” with.

“They gave OutKast the key to the city/ But I still gotta pay my taxes”

I don’t have all day to rant. How do you feel about this? Why did so many critics change their minds?

More importantly, your #1 album of the decade is: _____________