The Musical Noughties: A decade of repetition, stagnation and boredom

At the turn of the millennium, few would have expected the next decade to offer another Velvet Underground. Musical revolutions can’t happen in every decade and, with the typical ‘rock band’ format inevitably being pursued relentlessly, no-one would have expected a new band, scene or singer to grab the musical world by the balls and create something to be enjoyed, studied and copied for decades to come. But the musical ‘noughties’ wasn’t thoroughly underwhelming because it didn’t offer The Beatles, Pixies or Sonic Youth, it was thoroughly underwhelming because, for the most part, it lacked any real signs of innovation, creativity or ideas.
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The importance of being Morrissey

In 2004, some twenty years after Steven Patrick Morrissey and musical soul mate Johnny Marr struck commercial success with their magnificent lovechild The Smiths, The Guardian asked a washed-up (but revitalised, nonetheless) Morrissey if he ever felt his audiences ‘missed the point’. To this day, I read those words back, and I figure it was a valid enough question. I knew a girl at secondary school who attached herself to the lines “I wear black on the outside, because black is how I feel on the inside” with such devotion that I came to reckon she surely misunderstood the sarcasm which I had interpreted to drip from every word. Read more