Originally Posted by justriiingo
I'm just curious, how many of those 10 albums are from hugely popular artists?
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This is an interesting point--not many of them, really. Either they're from a non-mainstream act or an act that was mainstream in the 90s, stopped being quite so popular but released their best work in the 00s (Bjork, Erykah Badu, Radiohead). The most mainstream album is probably the new Feist album--it may not be considered mainstream in the states, but here it Toronto she's every other song on the radio, in every commercial, and listened to by everyone of all age groups, by metal heads, by gangstas...
Yet it's difficult to judge a decade by its hitmakers. If you look back at the #1s for the 60s and 70s, most of them were forgettable crap--of course the only ones remembered are, well, the memorable ones, the Sinatras and the Beatles.
Even so, I would argue that the beginning of this decade was one of the only times since The Beatles that some of the most innovative music was also topping the charts--Outkast, for example, and Missy Elliott. And the popular music scape right now is fascinating; what's with the current trend towards minimalism? Two of the biggest hits are just so simple in terms of arrangement--"Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne and "Umbrella" by Rihanna are little more than drums and another instrument that sometimes kicks in--was this a reaction to the excess of the aforementioned hip hop artists of just a few years ago?
It's almost like the fashion industry--though every decade past had their own distinct looks and styles, the 00s really don't. It's a mixtape, basically. It's all over the place. And with the increased anarchy of music downloading and ways-to-find hot artists, the free-for-all of the music industry makes it just that more diverse--Lily Allen became a star! M.I.A. became famous!
Anyway, I could go on and on.