Commentary, Pt. 1: Pitchfork Top 500 of the 2000s

So I doubt many people who read GSATW visit Pitchfork on a daily basis. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that a large percentage of people who do make the daily click on that site wouldn't admit it anyway. Pitchfork, an original online purveyor of indie rock criticism, has apparently turned into the pariah of a scene they helped build. Now, most trendy, hip blogs and legitimate sites continually knock Pitchfork, regardless of the quality of their material. Say what you want, but it's fairly clear that they're still a cornerstone of the indie rock community, and what they write has weight.

During the rest of the year, Pitchfork is releasing a number of features centered around "Music of the 2000s," and their first piece is probably the most ambitious (and foolhardy?): the Top 500 Songs of the 2000s. The link will take you straight to #20-1, with links to all 480 other songs. Breaking down each of them would be a complete waste of time... how could anyone say whether the #287 song is better or worse than the #172 song. Rather, we're going to play with some data in Excel and pop out some information... hopefully providing some interesting analysis to the discussion (although probably not). This isn't a novel idea, and I'm sure other site have done it much better and with much prettier graphics.

Our first foray into the list is a simple one: to determine which year had the most songs on the list.

So what's notable (besides the horrible blurriness)? Well, the pollsters clearly needed a few years to fully put a song's importance in perspective (insert sarcasm, eye-rolling). The list is heavy on songs from 2000-2005, and while we're obviously only 8 months into 2009, there's no reason to believe that this year only has 15 of the 500 best songs of the entire decade. From this graph, it would appear that 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2006 would be the best years for music in the 2000s, although we're going to analyze that claim a lot more throughout the week.