wouldn't you know, bri, that as you entered that in, i was indeed furiously typing away in this space and also compiling all our lists into a spreadsheet for analysis. will let you know the results in the coming days and will ponder your question about musical artist of the decade.

gun to my head response: The White Stripes, who weren't my favourite, but were very profilic, always had a few interesting releases of each album, and who seem to be interesting, talented, and decent people to boot.

perhaps we could each nominate an artist/group and give reasons why.

another question for the group (the one i furiously typed out and responded to earlier) is, "How does this decade in music compare to other decades? Better? Worse?"

i'm calling it a great decade in music, possibly better than the three that preceeded it. the 90s was a very much front-loaded decade, with most of the interesting and important stuff happening from 90-94, and the rest of the decade mostly filled with music which unsuccessfully tried to appropriate and popularize the grunge, shoegaze, and indie lo-fi sound that came to define the decade. we've discussed the 80s and 70s before so i won't rehash, suffice to say that i still favour the former over the latter, though i recognize demography plays a role in this preference. i also recognize that maybe the reason why i'm so bullish on this decade is that i was able, through advances in technology, to gain access to so much of it, to an extent which would have been, if not impossible than highly improbable, given economics and time availability, in previous decades. no longer do i need to bitch and complain about the pitiful state of commercial radio in toronto (though i still do, from time to time) because i can completely bypass the dreck and find what i need online. while i may take too much direction from the likes of pitchfork, npr, and emusic, i'd argue that these are far more trustworthy and honest information brokers than television or radio. but beyond access to a larger library is the sheer quality of the music and particularly, entire albums, that were released this decade. i can't recall another decade with as many albums that i've wanted to listen to all the way through, again and again. it was actually difficult to whittle my list down to 100. anyhow, just wanted to get your thoughts/impressions overall. it would be good if we could start looking at our calendars for january to see if there's a time when we can all meet for a post-decade cd club wrapup. i'm thinking that we could maybe take a few pics from our list and explain why we selected them, as well as reasons why we didn't select others.