I’ve been waiting patiently all year to get this ball rolling, and I’ve decided that today is the day. There are 60 days left of this decade, and if I really want to make the most of this list-lover’s dream, I need to start now. I figured a good first stop is a list of songs, since there’s little chance something’s going to pop up in the last weeks of the year that warrants inclusion (or I’ll just blame Pitchfork, which did their decade list a month ago).
I turned 16 on the first day of this decade, and will turn 26 on the first day of the next. That’s a pretty intense scope, and I tried to reflect that - as embarrassing as my 16 or 17 year old taste in music might have been - in the 200 songs I’ve decided sonically defined this decade for me. And as much as I’m excited to pull out the cinematic equivalent of this list next month sometime, I have to say it’s probably this list that reflects my decade more than any of the ones to follow.
Music is such a different medium than film, and while I might see a film once or twice or four times, most of the 200 songs that will be listed here have probably received listens in at least in the 100s, if not the 1000s. Many of them define really pivotal moments in a decade that I perhaps naively feel will be hard to top in terms of monumental and dramatic events - from a virginity lost to a move to a big city to intense breakups that can (hopefully) only find such dramatic heights in your early 20s to multiple graduations to first real jobs to the privileged adventures that have met the last year or two of my life - it’s quite the narrative. And over the next 3 weeks, I’ll rank its soundtrack 25 songs at a time every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
To coincide with this story on “The September Issue”‘s remarkable debut this weekend, the 20 best openings for documentaries, as ranked by their per-theater-averages:
1. Across the Sea of Time 71,961 10/20/1995
2. An Inconvenient Truth 70,332 05/24/2006
3. Sicko 68,969 24,540,079 06/22/2007
4. The Aristocrats 60,949 07/29/2005
5. The September Issue $36,736 08/28/2009
6. Everest 36,424 03/06/1998
7. Unzipped 35,638 08/04/1995
8. March Of The Penguin 34,373 06/24/2005
9. Your Mommy Kills… 34,000 07/20/2007
10. Shackleton’s Antarctica 33,137 02/16/2001
11. Winged Migration 33,128 04/18/2003
12. Dark Days 33,039 08/30/2000
13. Bugs! 31,332 03/12/2003
14. Powaqqatsi 27,899 04/29/1988
15. Fahrenheit 9/11 27,558 06/23/2004
16. Step Into Liquid 27,197 08/08/2003
17. Control Room 27,125 05/21/2004
18. Galapagos 26,503 10/27/1999
19. Bowling For Columbine 26,144 10/11/2002
20. Man On Wire 25,696 07/25/2008
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