86. 8Ball & MJG - Space Age 4 Eva
(8 Ways/Interscope Records, 2000)
One of the most annoying trends of the past few years is rappers lazily throwing around the most basic entry level outer space references or saying the word "futuristic" and expecting people to think they’re the most off the wall creative weirdos in hip hop because of it, like sci-fi isn’t pretty much a universal part of pop culture that everyone knows about. And granted, when Ball & G named an album Space Age 4 Eva and made that video where they and DJ Quik were cyborgs, it was just unexpected enough to be memorable, but it’s not like they were making that their whole schtick, “I am a Martian”-style. Plus, this was way before robot voices and Euro shit were in vogue, and they didn’t even go especially techno with the production ("At The Club" aside), considering this was the height of the Timbaland era, so this ends up just being another dope down to earth album not too far off from their Suave House releases, with awesome “I stay hard like fake tits/big like ice picks”-type 8Ball lyics, that happened to have a vague space theme. Even the Swizz Beatz stuff kind of feels of a piece with the rest of the album (and here I used to think "Bring Em Out" was his first significant Southern production), although maybe 10 years on patchwork sellout super producer albums are so much more transparent and desperate that going back to 2000 such albums just seem cohesive and natural by comparison.

87. Pink - Funhouse
(LaFace/Sony, 2008)
Along the same lines as the space theme overkill in rap, I wish circus themes could be banished from pop albums for a good long while; hell, Britney Spears and T-Pain also had their own similarly themed albums out within a month of Pink releasing this. But beneath the played out title and ripped-from-the-headlines tabloid autobiographical bent of the lyrics, this is just a hugely ingratiating, entertaining, and emotionally compelling album, real life divorce or not. It bums me out that some of the lesser songs on the album have been released as the last couple singles, but it also means that “It’s All Your Fault” and “Mean” are still gems waiting to be discovered by anyone that gives the whole record a chance.

88. Portastatic - Bright Ideas
(Merge Records, 2005)
One of these days, probably when I do one of these lists for the ‘90s, I’ll get into why I think Superchunk is maybe the best indie rock band of that decade. But in the meantime, I’ll just say that Mac’s music in this decade, mostly as Portastatic, also counts among some of the best post-’00s work of a gradually mellowing ‘90s rocker. If this were favorite songs of the ‘00s, “I Wanna Know Girls” would be very near the top, that track just kills me every time.



89. Rod Lee - Vol. 2: Operation Not Done Yet
(Club Kingz Records, 2002)
I spent a huge amount of time in the past decade listening to and writing about Baltimore club music, but it’s really hard to even begin to represent that in any way on a list like this, because as a genre it’s so driven by individual tracks, and most of the releases are either short EPs, or mix CDs that rarely hang together as cohesive albums. Still, if anyone consistently released club mixes in the past 10 years that actually hold together as a body of work, it’s Rod Lee and the seven volumes of his mix series. The first installment, 2001’s Operation: Start-Up, and this follow-up were among the first club music CDs I ever bought and got really into, and after Morphius Urban found some success with the nationally distributed release of 2005’s Vol. 5: The Official, they went back and reissued the first four volumes, including my favorite early installments. Lee is such a prolific producer that he’s practically the only guy in club music that can fill mix after mix with primarily his own tracks, and this set in particular features a highlight reel of some of his best jams from the beginning of the decade.

90. Twista - Kamikaze
(Atlantic Records, 2004)
It’s funny to think how this debuted at #1 a month before The College Dropout got shut out by Norah Jones and had to settle for #2. Especially since it was already clear at that point that Kanye was going for big capital I important and Twista was just this dude with a weird prodigous technical talent and a long-running regional fanbase who was finally getting his one big shot, which probably wouldn’t last (and didn’t). Still, it’s worth remembering that as much as this remains in the shadow of that other album with “Slow Jamz” on it, it’s a hugely enjoyable pop rap album with a lot of dark goth Midwest rap shit mixed in among the R&B and one of the most ferocious and underrated Ludacris collabs ever.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 1:32 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.