• “The tribe has spoken”: In May 2000, an American version of the Swedish game show Expedition Robinson premiered on CBS. The show’s first season attracted 28.3 million viewers and was a summer hit. The show’s second season premiered after the Baltimore Ravens decimated the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXXV and was the most-watched show on television during that 2000-01 television year. That show, of course, was Survivor and launched the phenomenon known as reality-competition television.
  • Ironically, the show that popularized the format never won an Emmy for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program. Another show on the Tiffany Network, The Amazing Race, has won the Emmy each year since it was first awarded in 2003.

• “Come on down”: Bob Barker retired from The Price is Right in 2007 after fifty years in television and thirty-five years hosting. Comedian Drew Carey replaced him as host of the popular game show.
• The UK kills the traditional sitcom: In 2001, comedians Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant created the BBC mockumentary The Office, a comedy series shot in the documentary style. In 2003, BBC America began broadcasting the show and it became a popular hit. Around the same time, both Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond left the airwaves as NBC, looking for a sitcom hit after the Americanized version of Coupling was a failure. NBC remade The Office with Steve Carell occupying the main role as a bumbling office manager. The series was a great success and has prompted most every new comedy series to shoot in a single-camera, no laugh track, and interstitial-based format.
  • Coincidentally, the original episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm was a 1999 mockumentary that detailed Larry David performing an HBO special. The show adopted its current format in 2000. This information has no real relevance other than the fact that it got me to talk about Curb Your Enthusiamsm, a show of which I’m particularly fond.
• Wardrobe Malfunction: Janet Jackson revealed her nipple during a halftime performance with Justin Timberlake on Super Bowl XXXVIII. This incident sparked a review of live television policies that led to the institution of tape delay for most major live performances. Furthermore, this incident prompted a wave of re-editing violent or sexually suggestive television programming.
• “Tell me where the bomb is!”: 24 premiered in 2001, giving new life to the careers of men previously known for the roles of a KKK leader in A Time to Kill (he became the counter-terror hero) and Pedro Cerrano (he became the president).

• “You think that’s bad…”: Fox cancelled Family Guy in 2002, only to bring it back to air in 2005 after a series of fan petitions and strong DVD sales. Seth McFarlane launched a comedy empire with spin-offs American Dad and The Cleveland Show. However, much like the fact that the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t holy, wasn’t Roman, and wasn’t an empire, McFarlane’s empire lost its humor with dumb cutaway gags (Family Guy) or were never funny to begin with (American Dad and The Cleveland Show)
• All good shows go to cable: HBO cements itself as the place to watch great serial dramas and comedies with the success of The Sopranos, Rome, Deadwood, John Adams, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, and True Blood among many others. Additionally, Michael Chiklis finds success on The Shield on FX, Bryan Cranston with Breaking Bad on AMC, and of course, Mad Men on AMC.
• Science fiction finds its way into the mainstream again: Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SG-1 pick up a strong cult following over the decade while Lost premieres to much success on ABC.
• The success of game shows: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? continued to build on its momentum from its 1999 premiere and spawned a host of competitors (including shows hosted by Maury Povich, Dick Clark, and Anne Robinson). Ken Jennings won over $3 million on Jeopardy! in 2004.
• Hard science goes primetime: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which detailed forensic science investigations, premiered in 2000. The show spawned two other spin-offs and led to the success of other science-based television shows such as Numbers.

…and Law and Order is still on the air.

Yes, that statement has strong implications. Much like the NBA trying to find the next Michael Jordan, the comparison to The Beatles’ 1967 album means that greatness necessarily was present in the album. Indeed, Radiohead’s 2000 effort displays a bold vision of musical experimentation and a triumphant defiance of accepted music convention, making it a clear choice for album of the decade.

The risks in this album are enormous but ultimately paid off in the end. Forgoing the rock melodies that made their previous album, OK Computer, a dramatic success, Radiohead embraces the unconventional in Kid A. The album opens with “Everything In Its Right Place”, a mixture of piano and computer sounds, with nonsensically minimal lyrics (e.g. “Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon”). But, what the lyrics lack in sense, the music makes up for with power and feeling. Never has there been such a deeply meaningful connection between listener and instruments. The complex rhythms and progressions allow for the listener to become lost in the depravity that is the focus of “Everything In Its Right Place”.

This experimentation continues throughout the album, particularly in songs such as “The National Anthem” and “Idioteque”. It is this experimentation that makes Kid A so unique. At the turn of the millennium, the prevailing trends in music were boy band pop, conventional rock, and the resurrection of rap. Radiohead broke with the prevailing trends in this album. While they could have created another rock album in the vein of OK Computer and it still would have been a hit, the group created one of the most uniquely intricate albums ever.

This defiant experimentation is what should be expected from music as a serious art form. A truly great artist will push past convention and create a masterpiece that will be remembered for generations. There are only a few such artists in any given time. This decade, the one who exemplified that spirit the most was Radiohead.

The Best of the Rest

Honorable Mentions:

• The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem (2000): There has never been, and never will be, a rapper as incendiary as Eminem. In his sophomore effort, Eminem intertwines the struggles of fame with the frustration of the state of popular music at the turn of the millennium. Equal parts comedy (“The Real Slim Shady”) and raw drama (“The Way I Am”), The Marshall Mathers LP, set the standard for rap in the 21^st century that hasn’t been met yet.
• Chinese Democracy, Guns ‘N Roses (2008): The album that is to music what Duke Nuke’em Forever is to videogames (often delayed, G’NR started writing material for the album in 1996 and started recording in 1998). Axl Rose’s magnum opus rocks and it rocks hard, recalling days when rock made no apologies for itself. Fans of power vocals, heavy guitar riffs, and audio clips of Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches (in “Madagascar”) will enjoy this throwback to the days of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. For the sheer magnitude of the project alone, Chinese Democracy deserves some recognition. Thankfully, the music itself is a great listen.
• Paper Trail, T.I. (2008): Recorded as he was anticipating trial and sentencing on weapons charges, T.I. provided the decade’s party anthem (“Live Your Life”) while appearing equally contrite and non-remorseful for legal woes. A deep display of human emotion and the best collaborative rap effort of the decade (“Swagga Like Us”) make Paper Trail and easy recommendation.
• Speakerboxx/The Love Below, OutKast (2004): The Grammy for Album of the Year went to this double album, and for once the Academy got it right. Each disc has a unique focus: Big Boi’s Speakerboxx is a traditional southern rap album, while Andre 3000’s The Love Below explores the ways which hip-hop, funk, and R&B come together. Each stand alone on its own merits, but combined make for one enjoyable listening experience.

The discussion doesn’t end here. Respond to Matt in the comments or on twitter (www.twitter.com/lamagnam or www.twitter.com/entertainium). The next installment of The Best of the Decade will run on Sunday, November 29^th with television in review.

(As an aside, what are we going to call this decade? There’s no convenient numbering system like the eighties or nineties. Do we go with the aughts? The Robert Parrishes? The one with the global financial crisis?)

So, to get you ready for our end-of-the-decade feature, I thought it would be helpful to list some of the events that happened this decade in music:

• Out of the fourteen members of the “Big 3” boy bands of the 1990’s, only one, Justin Timberlake, had any success after the dissolution of the group.
  • That number jumps to two if you count Drew Lachey winning Dancing with the Stars.
  • It jumps to three if you count Nick Lachey marrying Jessica Simpson and chronicling their life on the short-lived reality show Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica.
  • And it jumps to four if you count Nick Carter’s even-shorter-lived reality TV series House of Carters, which featured such memorable moments as the time Nick and Aaron fought over such pressing topics as dating Paris Hilton and the no music after 12 o’clock rule (NSFW-language):

• The National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, in an effort to rectify past mistakes of not giving Grammys to Led Zeppelin and Steely Dan when they were relevant music groups, showed its age and awarded Grammys for Album of the Year to Steely Dan in 2001 and Robert Plant (and Allison Krauss) in 2009. In arguably the two best years for music in the decade, two aging representatives for the deification of classic rock were given awards instead of Radiohead or Eminem in 2001 or Coldplay, Lil Wayne, or Radiohead (again!) in 2009.

• In a shocker, the general public complained that the music from this decade sucked. This opinion was a direct contrast to the music of the nineties, which people said was…nevermind, people thought music then sucked as well (and in the eighties, seventies, sixties, fifties…). For audiences reading Entertainium in 2020, get ready for the Nick Jonas Grammy Award for Album of the Year! Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

No guitar licks and references to "Cousin Dupree" here

• Speaking of Nick Jonas, the Jonas Brothers go from playing an anti-drug concert at my high school in 2005 to playing at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade the very next year. This is honestly the biggest music story of the decade. They went from basically booed off of a high school auditorium stage to fame, fortune, and a hilarious South Park parody.
  • By the way, I personally think that their music is awful. If I ever change this opinion, feel free to try and to do to me what those guys in Project Mayhem attempted to do when Edward Norton was trying to expose what the true purpose of the project was.
• And as a summation of music in the decade, here is the list of the top 20 best-selling music acts of the decade: http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/chart_watch/34074/chart-watch-extra-the-top-20-album-sellers-of-the-2000s
  • Interesting facts supporting the “this decade sucked” theory: The Beatles, which had not released any new material in this decade, were the number-two act of the decade. Most of this was due to the release of 1, a compilation of number 1 hits that moved over 11 million units and set a precedent for every musician to come out with a number 1 hits collection (see Elv1s: 30 #1 Hits, Michael Jackson: Number Ones, Rocket Man – Number Ones, Number 1’s Stevie Wonder, and Conway Twitty- Number 1’s).
    • As an aside on the “Number Ones” phenomenon, there are only a few artists (namely The Beatles and Elvis) that the criterion allows a greatest hits collection that encompasses their entire career. Stevie’s collection leaves out some hits from the sixties and eighties and Elton John’s collection doesn’t have “Levon”. Most egregiously, Jackson’s collection includes nothing before Off the Wall except for a re-release of “Ben”, completely ignoring his work with The Jackson 5, the Jacksons, and his solo work for Motown (but, at least it has “Earth Song” and “One More Chance”!)
    

    Not Included: "ABC", "I Want You Back", or, the biggest omission of them all, the song from Free Willy.

***

So, what is Entertainium’s end of the decade feature? Every Sunday, we will have a decade in review primer to get you ready for Tuesday- the day where we reveal the best of the decade in music, movies, television, and video games.

Here’s the schedule:

• Music: Primer 11/22 (today!), Album of the decade 11/24
• Television: Primer 11/29, Program of the decade 12/1
• Video Games: Primer 12/6, Game of the decade 12/8
• Movies: Primer 12/13, Film of the decade 12/15

This feature will bring an exciting conclusion to the decade and we hope that you continue reading our site through the end of this decade and the start of the next!

“The Best of the Decade” feature will be Matt’s primary focus on Entertainium until the end of the year. Follow him on twitter at www.twitter.com/lamagnam