Albums in My Life: 2000

In late 2000, I turned 10. This was the start of the decade of my adolescence, and it still only feels only a few years back, even though its almost 20 now.

The Barenaked Ladies- Maroon
In my opinion, this is the band's strongest album. They'd done away with a little bit of the humor, but I feel like the songs are the strongest they'd ever write. There's not a single dud in the tracklist. I feel like people wanted more of the same after Stunt broke them into the US mainstream, and they didn't know what to do with a more mature album, but I loved it. Still do.






D'Angelo- Voodoo
I'm not the hugest fan of '90s and 2000s R&B. It's got a formula, sound, and overall aesthetic that's pretty uninteresting to me. However D'Angelo, as well as others performing neo-soul borrow a lot from '70s soul and R&B, and his focus on jams and extended grooves are a lot more appealing to me. This album almost seems like a '70s gem that never saw a release until 2000, and I mean that in the best way possible. Maybe we'll get a new D'Angelo album in the next decade (please?)




Eminem- The Marshall Mathers LP
I didn't hear Eminem until a little later (probably around The Eminem Show), but for kids a little older than my 9 year old self, this was probably life changing. Coming across it later, it's still just as good. Em's rapping is top notch, the songs dark but also comical, and 'Stan' is still one of the best storytelling hip hop songs in my opinion. It's really evident that people that I'd come to enjoy in my late teens and early 20s like Tyler the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt owe a lot to Eminem and a lot of the themes and ideas he played with on this album.



Linkin Park-Hybrid Theory
This album really spoke to tons of angry kids in the early 2000s and is probably the top selling nu metal album of all time. I played the crap out of this and my Meteora CD for many years. I had never heard anything like it before. Something that heavy had never bubbled very far above the underground to that part. It's a little tame to me now, now that I'm listening to black metal and power electronics and the like, but for a kid, Chester's screaming and those guitar riffs were as hardcore as it got. On a side note, I really hope Linkin Park call it quits, or at least change their name after losing Chester. We don't need anything like those weird Morrison-less Doors albums or the new Alice in Chains.

The Smashing Pumpkins- Machina II
I feel like the Pumpkins are very underappreciated as innovators within music in terms of sound, but also in terms of music rollout. For example, Machina II was released over the internet for free about 7 years before Radiohead's In Rainbows, and even 5 years before the first release of Bomb the Music Industry. I didn't really have the internet growing up, so I didn't even know this album existed until I got to college, and it was like discovering buried treasure. I really hope the rumors of a complete Machina box set release are true, because I'd really like to hear this tracks in a better quality than vinyl mp3 rips. The ones that they included on Rotten Apples and Judas 0 sounded incredible.



So, that's my list for five albums from 2000 that are really important to me and who I became. I'm going to try and review Weezer's Black Album, and then I'll be back to this series, covering the year 2001.


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