This weekend, I found a record store in Baltimore County that carries Swishahouse stuff. This was sort of like finding the Holy Grail in the lumber section of a Home Depot. After bumping nothing but First Round Draft Picks and The Day Hell Broke Loose 2 for a couple of days, other music doesn't sound quite right. It's like, "This Concretes album is good and all, but why isn't anyone yelling 'Mike Jones!' every twenty seconds?"

I don't have cable, and even when I did I didn't watch The Wire. I'd catch the odd episode here and there, and it wouldn't make any sense and I'd be bored. The thing about The Wire, the thing that'll probably cause its cancellation, is that if you only see one episode it looks like complete shit. It's boring and the acting seems bad and the look seems way too glossy in the office scenes and way too much like Juice or Fresh or something in the street scenes. But it's perfect on DVD. I've been watching the first season whenever Video Americain has copies in (not often), and I am so caught up right now. It really juggles all its interweaving storylines and protagonists with perfect grace, keeping everything simmering until it's time to bring out one of the mini-climaxes, a couple of which have left me speechless. And it bears mentioning how well it nails Baltimore. It's not like Serial Mom where Kathleen Turner is driving down Coldspring and then all of a sudden she's at Hammerjacks. It gets all the little things right: geographical details, nicknames for neighborhoods, accents (though McNulty sometimes does this pseudo-Irish burr thing that I've never heard an actual person do), East Side vs. West Side rivalries, carryout markets with bulletproof glass, takeout crab joints, the little mini-ghettos in the County, everything. Most of all, it's right that Baltimore is a fucked-up, dirty, violent city, poor and ugly and riddled with drugs. So far this year, there have been four murders within six blocks of my apartment, and I live in one of the good neighborhoods. Coke has pretty much decimated the local indie-rock scene over the last couple of years. There's a new pile of broken car window glass on my block's sidewalk every couple of days. One of my favorite shows of all time forever is Homicide, David Simon's first show, and it seemed like the realest, grittiest thing in the world when I was in middle school and high school. But that show painted a picture of Baltimore police as colorful, heroic, snappy Gen-X characters, passionate about their jobs and about doing what's right, rarely mired in corruption and alcoholism and an entrenched system of political favors like the one in The Wire. I don't know which one is closer to the truth, but I have my suspicions.

House of Flying Daggers is pretty much the perfect antidote to that little spiral of thought. It's light and beautiful and ethereal, taking place in some alternate universe where everything is always lovely, especially death. It's not grand and sweeping like Hero and Crouching Tiger; it's just a small love-triangle story, and that might be the best thing about it. I only had a couple of moments where I was like, "Wait! Who's that guy? What's going on?". And wow, those daggers got me bugging out like the breakdancing-across-the-floor scene in Ocean's Twelve, which probably just means I'm easily entertained but whatever.

I'm deeply honored that the Village Voice web page has linked this blog. I'm also vaguely perplexed. Does this mean that Chuck Eddy reads this blog? I wish I'd said something more articulate about that Patton record now. Hey Chuck! Hire me!

Um, shit, now I have to say something insightful about music. OK, we'll go with this: The funniest thing about I'm Wide Awake It's Morning is the way that Conor Obherst uses Emylou Harris' voice like a Hi-Liter. Like, "Oh wow, this line is really important! I better get Emmylou Harris to sing along with it!"

I haven't seen a single one of the movies nominated for Best Picture, but I can still say with certainty that that is a weakass list of nominees. Finding Neverland? Please.

Napoleon Dynamite is fucking bullshit. Fucking Anacondas was better than that shit. At least Anacondas was funny. Can someone please tell me what people liked about Napoleon Dynamite? It meant nothing to me. Not a thing.

The Mike Patton vs. X-Ecutioners album is just balls. Every time the X-Ecutioners come up with any sort of halfway-listenable redundant generic old-school wickety-wickety groove, Patton has to fuck it all up by throwing in horrible fragmented cocktail jazz or weird organ music or whatever. Patton's singing is sounding more and more like Marylin Manson imitating Mike Patton. Faith No More was, once upon a time, my favorite band in the world (also first band I ever saw live, opening for Guns N Roses/Metallica, July 1992, RFK Stadium), but Mike Patton just keeps getting lamer and lamer, further into "avante-garde" fifth-grade-art-nerd shit with absolutely no redeeming aesthetic features (his role in the Bjork album excepted [mostly]). I cannot think of any reason for this album to exist. I hate it when I have to review something like this because it means I end up wasting valuable listening time so I can bump it over and over in the hopes of coming up with something insightful to say about it.

I am so totally buying those Bright Eyes albums today. Just you watch.

A Very Long Engagement is like Amelie if it had people being blown to pieces in filthy trenches or Cold Mountain if you pulled out most of the oppressive heavy-handed self-righteous portentiousness and replaced it with a deft, light, comic storytelling touch and also beefed up the horrors-of-war stuff so that it became tangible death and pain and insanity rather than muddy vague ugliness. It's too long, but it'll stick with me. Also highly recommended: Friday Night Lights. Iconic images, perfectly paced and acted and photographed with great late-80s period details (gold dookie ropechains, Poison) and a truly powerful depiction of the sort of pressure we put on kids. But then, I'm easily entertained.

Yao Ming's autobiography is jammed with genial cultural befuddlement and ephemeral NBA trivia. In other words, it's a great read. My favorite moment is the first conversation between Yao and Steve Francis. Francis is giving Yao a ride in his Hummer to a pre-season charity golf thing, and he asks Yao if Yao has a girlfriend. Yao says yes, and Francis tells him she's just after his money. Hilarious! Also, fascinating!

The new Sage Francis sounds like every other Anticon album I've ever heard (all two of them), except cleaner. And a couple of songs sound like Gravity Kills.

That new Game single is amazing, gorgeous, swirling clappy ticktock music-box production, Game riding perfectly just off the beat, 50 just beautiful pushing the track with singsong playground taunting you about "that Es-co-lade". It's just totally magnetic. Like, I own the album and I still go "YES!" and turn it up when it comes on the radio. It gets me. The whole album is really good but not great and sonically consistent in the way that every single G-Unit solo album is really good but not great and sonically consistent. These albums, they take regional hip-hop out of the region, even like DJ Paul and Juicy J don't sound like themselves, they sound like generic worldwide cinematic triumphant hazy boom. Game talks about the West Coast constantly, but he doesn't sound West Coast at all; he sounds like someone took every rapper that went gold but not platinum in the past ten years and put them all in a blender, put together the ultimate generic rapper from all the pieces. The beats don't sound West Coast either except that a few of the producers who aren't Dr. Dre bite The Chronic 2001 hard, "Still DRE" pianos and everything. Game talks the gansta talk, the sensitive-thug lovesong talk, the this-is-how-I-got-signed talk, the I-almost-got-killed talk, the pitiful misogynist talk ("I look down on hoes", whatever dude). Sean is right that he's totally, sort of awkwardly obsessed with hip-hop history, with classic rappers and especially Eazy (one of the best lines: "Who walked through the White House without a business suit / Compton hat, jheri curl dripping on Ronald Reagan's shoes"), like maybe he should just sit back and relax and enjoy being a rapper. I love the last song, the story-of-his-son's-birth one. Finally emotion creeps in, finally he sounds happy and sad and totally committed. I love stuff like that. I don't know when exactly hip-hop power ballads started hitting me right where it hurts, but it happened. Watch for the Pitchfork review!

The Dungen album is OK and all, but it's like: we already have Comets on Fire. Why do we have to outsource their job to some Swedish band? It's the exact same thing.

I've read every single one of the Da Capo Best Music Writing books, and the new one is just like the old ones, with all the good parts and all the problems of the old ones. For the first time, there's a few people here who I consider to be peers or at least close elders, people I've shared e-mails or page space with: Hopper (killing it), Matos (not his best work), Bowers (a beautifully written but sort of annoying piece). But then there are a million stories about forgotten singers or forgotten blues singers or Johnny Cash, and I just don't care (I love Johnny Cash, but I just don't care. It's been done.), a million stories about music that isn't being made right now or maybe shouldn't be made right now. And yeah, I'm really happy about Elizabeth Mendez-Barry's Jay-Z thing and Corey Takahashi's globally influenced hip-hop production thing and Jeff Sharlet's Clear Channel thing, but for every one of those there's like Adam Mansbach's painfully clueless hip-hop intellectuals thing or a completely superfluous history thing on Stevie Wonder. The funniest thing is "guest editor" Mickey Hart's introduction, all like "Whoa, dude, music is like sex and drugs to me and music is just like love man, music"; I'd be shocked if he actually had anything to do with the selection of these pieces, but at least it means there's no Grateful Dead pieces.

So WHFS, the DC alt-rock station that's existed since before I was born, is no more. Yesterday they fired the entire staff with no warning and switched it over to a Spanish pop station in the middle of the day. It's kind of sad; I spent countless hours listening to the station in middle school and high school, and the 95 HFStival was one of my first concerts. But HFS started sucking when nu-metal became popular, and it started sucking anymore when nu-metal stopped being popular. Over the past couple of years, it's been a confused pileup of nu-emo, nu-metal, hipster-oriented retro-new-wave, and a ridiculously huge amount of tired 90s alt-rock (like, "Come As You Are" every two hours). It's not like it was ever going to become good again.

My Jean Grae profile is up on citypaper.com. In other news, I'm growing a beard.

Last night I went to see the Constantines, except I wasn't really going to see the Constantines. I was going to see the Ram's Head Live!, a giant new club in downtown Baltimore. Most of the shows are like Joe Cocker or Keller Williams or whatever, and most of them cost like 40 bucks. This was an eight-dollar indie-rock show with a band I liked, so I had to see it. I was not disappointed. That place is ridonkulous. Speakers in the bathroom that play whatever's going on onstage, flat-screen TVs showing the stage everywhere, three different food spots, a giant balcony, murals of silhouettes with guitars and saxophones all over the walls, door guys who don't know who the bands are, great sound, overblown lights, 1400 capacity. Total cleanliness. Ridiculously expensive beer. Pictures of a man and a women dancing on the men and women's room doors. It's like what would happen if you asked a 12-year-old to design a rock club. There were maybe 100 people there, so a lot of it was roped off, but I still got an eyeful. I give that place a year, tops.

The Constantines were good, even in this setting. They sound just like Fugazi on record, but my friend Van was right when he pointed out that they sound like the Who live. They rock a giant empty club like it was a giant full club. I wish them well.

Oh, and Oakley Hall is the closest I've ever heard alt-country come to actual Nashville country. Pretty good!

Look! Comments! Now you can clown me for forgetting about "No Escapin' This" and "Special Delivery (Remix)" and the entire genre of Baltimore club music in the best-of-the-00s singles list! Thanks to Sean Fennessy for spelling out the whole Haloscan thing for me. I'll put all those links back in when I get around to it.

By the time you read this, this blog should have a new template and comments. However! I know seriously zero about computers, so maybe someone could tell me why my shit don't work right. Because I know something is going wrong, seriously.

What is up with all the new characters on 24? I do not care about any of these people, for real.

Top ten list season is the bigtime for music critics because it's the only time of the year that the general public actually listens to us on any sort of widespread basis. (The kid behind me in line at Record and Tape Traders the other day was buying the Arcade Fire album; you explain that some other way.) I still pay cash money for most of my music, so I'm really no exception. I've bought a lot of music since the year-end lists started coming out, and I'm sure I'll keep doing it until like March. Here's how it stacks up, from best to worst:

Concretes: s/t
I really had no reason to ignore this when it first dropped. It's a close-to-perfect synthesis of Nancy Sinatra lush retro-cheeze late-60s Wonderbread soul, Patsy Cline drippy countrypolitan, Velvet Underground sleepy glammy heroin drone, and Slumber Party intentionally-naive twee slo-core. All these instruments sweep in and lift the songs up until they're these huge, grand monuments of sound, but it's hard to imagine the songs existing without even one of the layers. It's total retro pastiche, but it's done with verve and style and grace, and everyone involved knows how to flesh out a melody just right. The slower songs can get a bit boring, but the uptempo jams are just lovely.

The Ex: Turn
I slept on this for a while, probably because I'd seen them live twice and been impressed but not blown away both times. This is a double album, so it's too long, and there's more messy abrasive guitar squall than I'd like, but then again it's a decades-old Dutch art-punk band on Touch & Go, so you really just have to accept a certain amount of messy abrasive guitar squall if you're going to hang. But about two thirds of the songs on here are excellent: taut, hallucinatory, expansive post-punk in the Fugazi mold. The best songs play around with African motifs. My favorite song, "Huriyet", is a cover of an Eritrean freedom song, and it's just gorgeous.

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists: Shake the Sheets
Here's the thing about the word "spastic": it doesn't mean flopping around like a fish. People with spasticity can't control their muscles, but that's because their muscles are constantly so tight that they just can't do anything with them; they're clenching and unclenching uncontrollably. I used to work with this one guy who had to have one of his arms strapped down because it would just swing around and clock you. When I was putting him in bed, he'd be like, "Watch the arm." So anyway, Shake the Sheets sounds spastic to me, indie-rock wound so tight that might just swing around and slap you by accident. I wasn't really feeling Hearts of Oak because I don't think Ted Leo has the voice to pull off the looser singer-songwriter thing, but he shines when he shoehorns his melodies into these sparkling little pop-punk tunes that sound just a little too tight, like they're just on the verge of unraveling. His lyrics don't generally do that much for me, and his voice still grates on me, but he can crunch a whole lot into a three-minute song.

Cut Copy: Bright Like Neon Love
Cut Copy basically sounds like what would happen if Ratatat had a singer: shimmering squelchy woozy filter-disco new wave. The liner notes are a bit precious, what with the sixth-grade binder portrait of Giorgio Moroder and everything, but I like this kind of thing. It's not Daft Punk, but it's well-done and pleasant, and my work day moves a lot faster when it's on. I don't think I'm being a rockist when I say that they sound better when they're doing indie-rock with disco flourishes than they do when they're doing disco with indie-rock flourishes.

Futureheads: s/t
Some people are saying that the Futureheads are the pinnacle of the post-punk revival, the band that should be making that Franz Ferdinand money. These people are straight tripping. The Futureheads have some good songs, but they have none of Franz Ferdinand's frisky, playful melodic sense and none of their big drum thwack. Really, they're somewhere between Franz Ferdinand and California mall punks like Lagwagon; they sound the best when they stop sprinting and look around, as on "Danger of the Water". Their four-part harmonies get a lot of love, but these harmonies would mean more to me if they weren't sung in this pubescent Cockney squeak. TV on the Radio has the indie-rock multi-part harmony game wrapped up right now.

Comets on Fire: Blue Cathedral
I was expecting this to be a lot more metal. It could stand to be a lot more metal. The hazy, expansive psychedelic parts are cool, but they'd work better if the heavier parts had more of a crush stop boom swing to them. The Old Man Gloom record pulls of the same trick much better by actually delivering on the "rock" bits, grooving hard with authority. Comets on Fire can do pretty, and their Southern-rock bits have actual swing to them, but they don't really deliver the heavy reliably. Maybe cleaner production would help. I think they'd probably crush live.

Animal Collective: Sung Tongs
The early press on Animal Collective made them sound really cool: spazzed-out acoustic Brooklyn hippie drum circle! I'm in! But then I went to see Avery Tare and Panda Bear play the Talking Head in front of like five people and they were so boring, sub-Beaches and Canyons self-indulgent experimental garbage with lots of squeaking and no drums. And then I snatched Here Comes the Indian from a pile of rejects at my editor's office and probably didn't make it through the disc once. I've avoided them ever since. But so I was shocked that the first two songs on Sung Tongs are really great, spaced-out pretty unhinged psychedelia, not "pop" like some people are saying but nice nonetheless. But then the album gets boring. It's not boring in an offensively self-obsessed way like the older stuff was, but it never really goes anywhere, especially that one pointless thirteen-minute song. It sounds OK in the background while I'm at work, though.

Turf Talk: The Street Novelist
Total garbage. I really wanted to like the new Bay Area sound, but it's seriously just electro-Timbaland bells and whistles with none of Tim's sense of swing or space. It's tinny and obnoxious. The Rick Rock beats are better than the others, but even those are just barely OK. Turf himself has no flow; he just yells lame shit over the top of everything, and his army of anonymous guest MCs is no better. And I don't like E-40. He sounds like a fucking dork. Sorry. This is going back to the store tomorrow.

....Aaaaand now here we go with the singles list.

But first, here's what I learned:

Remember in like 01-03 when just about every well-known hip-hop or R&B track had fake Eastern motifs all over it? Yeah? Well, that was the BEST SHIT EVER. In 2059, I'll be 80 and sitting in my rocket-powered wheelchair smoking my government-issue medicinal marajauna like, "Remember back when hip-hop and R&B producers used fake Eastern motifs? That was MY SHIT!" And then someone else will be like, "No, the real hot shit was like 06 when Kanye and the Neptunes and Seven Aurelius totally owned it with all them Billy Joel and Steely Dan samples." And then I will have to throw my lazer bong at this fool. And then we'll all be chased inside by the mutant zombie radioactive dinosaur ninja space robots.

This has been an amazing half-decade for singles.

This has been a terrible half-decade for rock singles. I only charted twelve of them, and that's using a really, really nebulous definition of "rock" - like, Postal Service and Le Tigre are "rock".

I never thought of Jay-Z as much of a guest appearance guy, but he has two guest spots on here before any of his own singles.

The Neptunes charted eleven times. Timbaland charted ten. This makes it seem like I like the Neptunes better than Timbaland. That is not the case.

My taste in music totally fucking rules.

If you were to listen to all of these songs back to back, it would be a fucking party.

Tom Breihan’s Top 100 Singles of 2000-20004

1. Baby ft. Clipse: What Happened to That Boy?
2. Outkast: B.O.B.
3. Eminem: Without Me
4. M.O.P.: Ante Up
5. Big & Rich: Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)
6. Le Tigre: Deceptacon
7. Justin Timberlake: Cry Me a River
8. Destiny’s Child: Bootylicious
9. Fischerspooner: Emerge
10. Sean Paul: Like Glue

11. Armand Van Helden ft. Spalding Rockwell: Hear My Name
12. Electric Six: Danger! High Voltage!
13. Missy Elliott ft. Ludacris: One Minute Man
14. Dead Prez: Hip-Hop
15. Belle & Sebastian: I’m Waking Up to Us
16. Memphis Bleek ft. Jay-Z & Missy Elliott: Is That Yo Bitch?
17. T.O.K.: Money 2 Burn
18. Kardinal Offishall: Belly Dancer
19. Coldplay: Clocks
20. Nina Sky ft. Jabba: Move Ya Body

21. So Solid Crew: 21 Seconds
22. Ms. Jade: Big Head
23. Streets: Dry Your Eyes
24. Trina ft. Rick Ross: Told Y’all
25. Atmosphere: The Bass and the Movement
26. D12: Purple Pills
27. Crime Mob: Knuck If You Buck
28. Ghostface ft. Jadakiss: Run
29. N.E.R.D. ft. Lee Harvey: Lapdance
30. Ludacris: Southern Hospitality

31. Andrew WK: Party Hard
32. Lethal B ft. One Million Dudes: Forward
33. Clipse ft. Pharrell: When the Last Time
34. Rapture: Sister Savior
35. Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz ft. Ludacris, Too Short & Chyna White: Bia Bia
36. Eminem: The Real Slim Shady
37. Justin Timberlake ft. Clipse: Like I Love You
38. Beyonce: Naughty Girl
39. Truth Hurts ft. Rakim: Addictive
40. Eminem: Stan

41. Ghostface Killah ft. Raekwon: Apollo Kids
42. Missy Elliott ft. Ludacris: Gossip Folks
43. 50 Cent: In Da Club
44. More Fire Crew: Oi
45. T.I.: Rubber Band Man
46. Sugababes: Freak Like Me
47. Panjabi MC ft. Jay-Z: Beware of the Boys
48. Fabolous ft. Pharrell: Young’n (Holla Back)
49. R. Kelly: Snake
50. Madonna: Don’t Tell Me

51. M. Mayer / Reinhard Voigt: Unter Null
52. Lumidee: Never Leave You (Uh-Ohhh, Uh-Ohhh)
53. Jay-Z: Excuse Me Miss Again
54. Eve: Who’s That Girl?
55. R. Kelly: Thoia Thoing
56. Dandy Warhols: Bohemian Like You
57. Coldplay: Yellow
58. Postal Service: Such Great Heights
59. Snow Patrol: Run
60. 50 Cent: Wanksta

61. Ludacris ft. Shawnna: What’s Your Fantasy?
62. Big & Rich: Holy Water
63. Missy Elliott: Get Ur Freak On
64. Destiny’s Child: Jumpin’ Jumpin’
65. White Stripes: Seven Nation Army
66. Cee-Lo: Closet Freak
67. David Banner ft. Lil Flip: Like a Pimp
68. City High: What Would You Do?
69. Dr. Dre ft. Eminem: Forgot About Dre
70. Slim Thug ft. Mike Jones & Paul Wall: Still Tippin’

71. Talib Kweli: Get By
72. Three-6 Mafia ft. Lil Flip: Rainbow Colors
73. Fugazi: Furniture
74. White Stripes: Dead Leaves on the Dirty Ground
75. P. Diddy: Diddy
76. Prince: Musicology
77. Wu-Tang Clan: Gravel Pit
78. Avalanches: Frontier Psychiatrist
79. Blu Cantrell: Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops)
80. Streets: Let’s Push Things Forward

81. Clipse: Grindin’
82. Kylie Minogue: Can’t Get You Out of My Head
83. Jay-Z ft. UGK: Big Pimpin’
84. Sean Paul: Get Busy
85. Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz ft. Ying Yang Twins: Get Low
86. Tweet ft. Missy Elliott: Oops (Oh My)
87. Dr. Dre ft. Snoop Dogg & Nate Dogg: The Next Episode
88. Aaliyah ft. Timbaland: We Need a Resolution
89. Alica Keys: Fallin’
90. R. Kelly: Ignition (Remix)

91. Eminem: Lose Yourself
92. Da Band: Bad Boy This, Bad Boy That
93. Juan MacLean: Give Me Every Little Thing
94. Jay-Z ft. Pharrell: I Just Wanna Love U
95. Iconz: Get Crunked Up
96. Khia: My Neck, My Back
97. Transplants: Diamonds & Guns
98. No Doubt ft. Lady Saw: Underneath It All
99. Aaliyah: Try Again
100. Wayne Wonder: No Letting Go

Hi! How's it going? How was your Christmas? Did you get that pony you wanted?

So everyone is posting the votes-recorded e-mails they got from Pazz & Jop, and I'd do the same except umm I'm an idiot and I deleted the e-mail. But it feels like a big moment for me, even if I totally blanked and didn't write any comments, even if like one million people are voting this year. Voting in Pazz & Jop is something I've wanted to do since I was like 15, and I wasn't sure I'd ever get the chance. Now I've got it. I'm in the club. Nice.

And I like making lists. They sort of give you a chance to step back and evaluate your own aesthetic, to see where you're at and where you've been and where you're going. The tastes of a music critic aren't anywhere near as important as that person's writing voice, and I think my voice has changed a lot more than my tastes over the past year, but it still gives you a chance to look in the mirror, you know? Jace Clayton and Yancey Strickler have both done great blog posts recently about how basically ridiculous the top-ten list is (sorry no links, don't have Explorer anymore, not typing in no html), and they have good points, but I find something therapeutic in the whole process. And of course the year is going to end with Brian Wilson or Loretta Lynn or Kanye winning the poll, but now M.I.A. has a better shot at the top ten, you know?

(Oh, and best ten movies I saw last year go like this: Before Sunset, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dawn of the Dead, Anchorman, Mean Girls, The Incredibles, Spider Man 2, Garden State, Saved!, Kill Bill 2.)

But the last few weeks have been like total list-making frenzy, and that can get a little bit difficult. Like Pitchfork wanted fifty albums and singles. That's a lot. When I got back to work on Monday after a week off, I had an e-mail that they wanted 100 albums and singles of the decade so far by Friday. That's like even more. That's pretty hard. It's like I'm starting to think about music just in numbers and comparisons, like: "Which is better? The Hollertronix mix CD or the last Spoon album? Dammit, I have to figure this out in the next five minutes because I've got 75 more albums to pick today!" And then you start to get all paranoid, like what if you forget that "Jumpin' Jumpin'", though released in 99, peaked on the Billboards in 00 and is thus eligible to be listed! It might get lost! And it's a great song! The world would end! I'm looking forward to finally getting done with this so I can get back to thinking in words instead of numbers.

So anyway, here's what I learned from this top 100 albums list.

This list could very well get me fired.

My taste makes no sense.

The final Pitchfork list is so going to look nothing like this.

I will be pleasantly shocked if Luda makes the top 100.

I was way, way into emo for a couple of years there.

This list was made in the middle of winter, which might explain Bright Eyes and Scarface and Rainer Maria beating Clipse and Le Tigre and Daft Punk.

I like indie rap after all.

I don't care if the first Le Tigre album and Volume 3 were released in 1999. They count.

If you were to listen to numbers 91 to 100 back to back, you would fall asleep at least three times.

There were a whole lot more great singles than great albums released this decade. I'll post the singles list tomorrow, and it will rule on this.

Here it is:

Tom Breihan’s Top 100 Albums of 2000-20004

1. Sleater-Kinney: One Beat
2. Ludacris: Back for the First Time
3. Lifter Puller: Fiestas & Fiascos
4. Sleater-Kinney: All Hands on the Bad One
5. Postal Service: Give Up
6. Ghostface: The Pretty Toney Album
7. White Stripes: White Blood Cells
8. M.I.A.: Piracy Funds Terrorism, Volume 1
9. Johnny Cash: American IV: The Man Comes Around
10. Dizzee Rascal: Showtime

11. Grand Buffet: Pittsburgh Hearts
12. Ghostface Killah: Supreme Clientele
13. Rapture: Echoes
14. Hold Steady: The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me
15. Jay-Z: The Blueprint
16. Rancid: Indestructible
17. Rainer Maria: A Better Version of Me
18. Bright Eyes: Fevers & Mirrors
19. Scarface: The Fix
20. Streets: A Grand Don’t Come for Free

21. Aaliyah: Aaliyah
22. Clipse: Lord Willin’
23. Jay-Z: The Black Album
24. Hollertronix: Never Scared
25. Spoon: Kill the Moonlight
26. Le Tigre: Le Tigre
27. Faint: Danse Macabre
28. Missy Elliott: Under Construction
29. Beta Band: Hot Shots II
30. Gretchen Wilson: Here for the Party

31. Andrew W.K.: I Get Wet
32. Daft Punk: Discovery
33. Jay-Z: Volume 3: The Life and Times of S. Carter
34. Fugazi: The Argument
35. DJ Quik: Under tha Influence
36. TV on the Radio: Young Liars
37. Dandy Warhols: 13 Tales of Urban Bohemia
38. Radiohead: Kid A
39. Pupils: Pupils
40. Mountain Goats: We Shall All Be Healed

41. Streets: Original Pirate Material
42. DJ Roli Fingaz: Reggaeton Fever
43. Mr. Lif: I Phantom
44. V/A: DFA Compilation #2
45. Trick Daddy: Thug Matrimony: Married to the Streets
46. Spiritualized: Let It Come Down
47. Cannibal Ox: The Cold Vein
48. Mastodon: Leviathan
49. Q and Not U: Different Damage
50. Three-6 Mafia: Da Unbreakables

51. Fannypack: So Stylistic
52. Dizzee Rascal: Boy in Da Corner
53. Outkast: Stankonia
54. Missy Elliott: Miss E … So Addictive
55. Atom and his Package: Redefining Music
56. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Fever to Tell
57. Avalanches: Since I Left You
58. Les Savy Fav: Go Forth
59. Bjork: Selmasongs
60. Cam’ron: Purple Haze

61. Bubba Sparxxx: Deliverance
62. Bjork: Medulla
63. Kanye West: The College Dropout
64. Buck 65: Talkin’ Honky Blues
65. Young Buck: Straight Outta Ca$hville
66. Black Eyes: Black Eyes
67. Cex: Being Ridden
68. Alkaline Trio: From Here to Infirmary
69. Justin Timberlake: Justified
70. Espers: Espers

71. Petey Pablo: Still Writin’ in My Diary: Second Entry
72. Atmosphere: Seven’s Travels
73. 50 Cent: Get Rich or Die Tryin’
74. Ward 21: U Know How We Roll
75. Dropkick Murphys: Sing Loud, Sing Proud
76. Radio 4: Gotham
77. Sole: Selling Live Water
78. Erland Oye: DJ Kicks
79. Devendra Banhart: Rejoicing in the Hands
80. Angels of Light: Everything is Good Here / Please Come Home

81. Atmosphere: God Loves Ugly
82. Transplants: Transplants
83. Pulp: We Love Life
84. Eminem: The Marshall Mathers LP
85. Wiley: Treddin’ on Thin Ice
86. Coldplay: A Rush of Blood to the Head
87. Spiritualized: Amazing Grace
88. Spoon: Girls Can Tell
89. Grand Buffet: Cigarette Beach
90. Brother Ali: Shadows on the Sun

91. Mars Volta: De-Loused at the Cornatorium
92. Pretty Girls Make Graves: Good Health
93. Strokes: Is This It?
94. Hood: Cold House
95. Aesop Rock: Bazooka Tooth
96. Nas: God’s Son
97. At the Drive-In: Relationship of Command
98. Arcade Fire: The Funeral
99. Walkmen: Bows & Arrows
100. Boards of Canada: Geogaddi