Decade Songs - Mistakes

A lot can change in a decade. I'm now married, living in a completely different county and with a motorbike that I didn't have ten years ago. 2009 James would've scoffed at the idea of running for fun, eating significantly less meat and drinking beer instead of sugary ciders. I'm a different person - not just legally, after changing my name in 2016, but mentally. I've also stopped giving as much of a toss about what people think of my tastes in music - and so here are a list of corrections to the 2000s countdown I ran. I'm not going to edit those posts as they serve as a good time capsule of my thoughts at the time, rather this is a list of amendments I would make to the list after evaluating it ten years down the line. 

Beyonce ft. Jay-Z - Crazy In Love
I know, technically, this song made it into the list last time round. But as a throwaway track at no. 93, in the ten described as "filler". It's a cracking pop song that deserves to be higher (and that's a line that'll be reused frequently throughout this piece), a guaranteed floor-filler from the moment the horns crash in. The song advances and recedes, teasing you musically and leaving you craving more. 

Kylie Minogue - Can't Get You Out Of My Head
Another song that past-James described as "filler". While my current views are obviously clouded by having seen Kylie performing live twice in the last year, I had a crush on her when I was tiny. I shipped Kylie and Jason back before I knew what shipping was. She's been around for years. Add to that the quality of the song itself, the fact that it was the first UK number 1 after the September 11 attacks and the catharsis it provided to the world being rocked on it's axis, and that it sparked Kylie's second renaissance, this deserves to be far higher in the list than ninety-bloody-five.

Britney Spears - Oops!...I Did It Again
The penultimate (at time of writing) UK number one single to include an exclamation mark, this song was so huge during my teenage years that I'm disappointed in musical snob past James for ignoring it completely. Britney's Imperial Phase, where she's at the top of her game and top of the charts. The confidence to include a spoken word interlude in the song that only makes sense in tandem with both the music video and a then three year old film (which, admittedly, would have a lot of crossover with Britney's demographic)...to leave it out of the list completely was just clumsy. (Oops.)

All Saints - Pure Shores
I was always more on the All Saints divide of the Girl Band wars of the late 90s. They had a coolness to them that the Spice Girls seemed to shy away from (and later clones like Atomic Kitten, B*Witched etc never even neared) and the music seemed to be more adult than pure bubblegum pop. At the time they hit big (with their first two albums) I was heading down an indie route, musically - my tastes were mostly all male groups like Oasis, Manic Street Preachers and Pulp so All Saints were definitely an outlier. Even now revisiting this track and the layers of production, it sounds so modern for a song that's nearly twenty years old. 

Spiller - Groovejet (If This Ain't Love...)
Another example of me taking the alternate, indie-ish side in a manufactured chart war! This song infamously kept Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham from her first solo number one. Featuring vocals from Sophie Ellis-Bextor, then best known as singer for indie band Theaudience (sic) it was presented as the cool alternate single to the Spice Girls' reign of terror, both solo and group efforts. It was released on my 16th birthday, and it takes me back to that summer, free of my GCSE burdens and legally an adult. Fun fact: it's also the first song played on an iPod.

Eminem ft. Dido - Stan
Eminem's laddish attitude never clicked with me. Working at Burger King at the time of The Real Slim Shady's release, with its line about "spitting on your onion rings", got incredibly wearing after 427 times hearing it from teens finding it amusing. This was a different, darker vibe entirely. It launched Dido into the mainstream. It's not just a story driven video (a particular favourite of mine) but a story driven song too, something I'd come to appreciate in a New Jersey blue-collar songwriter and a country barbie with greater depths than first thought. Plus, it's become a codeword for those hardcore, Annie Wilkes-esque fans who perhaps ought to learn the etymology behind the moniker.

Sugababes - Freak Like Me
Mash-ups! Another time capsule, from the time when file-sharing and guerrilla mixes were hot on the internet, before record companies cracked down in response. This was one of the few to make it into the mainstream, a conglomeration of a Gary Numan track and Adina Howard's lyrics. Sugababes were the ideal band to launch the idea of mash-ups onto the public conscience, given how often they seemed to remix their own line-ups. This was version 2.0 of the band, which has now split into two trios - Sugababes 4.0, and Mutya/Keisha/Siobhan, a splinter trio featuring the original members. Come 2030, the entire world's population will have either featured in a Marvel movie or a Sugababes-related band. Or both.

Evanescence - Bring Me To Life
A few years ago I decided to catalogue some CD-Rs I'd had knocking about the place. All audio, from that awkward time when I had access to downloading mp3s but no portable device to play them on, I'd burn roughly one CD a month with what I was listening to at the time. There's some stuff on there I was pleased to rediscover, others that were obviously cool at the time but no longer, and quite a few metal songs with female vocals that even Shazam shrugged at identifying. After Googling the lyrics they would almost all turn out to be obscure Evanescence demos and b-sides. This band were huge to me in the uncatalogued period after I started downloading mp3s (so, not having a physical copy to dig out and listen to) but before I started using last.fm, which has become my go-to site for refreshing my memory musically. I've only scrobbled them 33 times since 2005, nestling them behind Fire Inc - a band from the film Streets Of Fire who have only ever released two songs.

Bruce Springsteen - literally anything off The Rising
I had a Bruce track on the last rundown. It was the opening track from his then most recent album. The Rising was the album that got me listening to The Boss (a consequence of Dad playing it on repeat during a holiday in France) and it's still my favourite of his. Any track from the album is better than Outlaw Pete, a song I suspect made it on there because the riff sounds like I Was Made For Loving You.

Brie Larson - Finally Out Of PE
The final two songs on this list are ones I discovered retroactively, into the 2010s. Indeed, it wasn't until late July 2016 that a wiki wander led me to discover Brie's proto-Avril album release from ten years prior. An actress I'd come to admire, releasing an album sounding similar to (and featuring a writing credit from!) one of my favourite guilty pleasures? It was always going to be a hit! 

Aly & AJ - Potential Breakup Song
I'm fairly certain that I didn't know who Aly Michalka was until autumn 2010. After a role in Bandslam that I didn't appreciate properly, it was either her supporting role in Easy A, or her lead in Hellcats (RIP Hellcats) that brought her to my attention; another wiki wander made me aware of her musical career with her sister, and this pure pop banger.