And another thought, likely to spark an equal amount of activity:

It's 2008 now, less than two years from the end of the decade and the beginning of the next one. This one has gone by especially quickly, for me.

Musically we tend to group styles and memories into decades - one thinks of the 90's very differently from the 80's, for example - and the continuum of time is thus organized into discrete, framed periods. Partially this is due to writers, critics, historians, etc, partially this is just the way the human brain works.

And so my questions are these - how will we look back at the muic of the "0's" the "noughts"? How will it be summarized? What will be its top few defining musical moments? And who will emerge to lead music into the 10's?

As an aside, I'm listening to Pandora (I'm sure you all know this on-line "music genome" site, but if you don't it is amazing for programming music while you work...www.pandora.com), and I'm running a Hayden mix in honour of my question...since he's a guy who has straddled the last two decades, though still sounds very "90's" to me (which means what?). Anyway, I'm getting a nice mix of mid-late 90's sounds, and loving it in a largely nostalgiac way.