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Pop punk is a tricky subgenre. Unlike most other genres, the rules of the game are strictly upheld, and the pleasures of the music arise from the incisiveness of the lyrics and the subtle ingenuity of performing those three magic chords just so.

In the broad pantheon of pop punk, which include a few greats and, let's face it, innumerable also-rans, the Soviettes stand singular. Rarely had the music felt so finely crafted, rarely had vocal harmonies been so elegantly simple, and rarely had the pleasures of vanishing youth felt more worthwhile.

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​The advent of inexpensive or free means of creating and distributing music has come with a cost: propagating crap attempts at pop, rap, rock, or any other genre or sub-genre you care to name had become easier than ever. That's why two of the entries on this particular list are concepts, while one is a collective of rappers, another is a genre, and the other is a rock band. In decades prior, a list like this would have been all artists, and to be fair, a blog or publication catering to specific tastes might have an easier time generating a list of the Top Five Unjustly Hyped DJs or the Top Five Unjustly Hyped Speed Metal Bands or what have you.

But let's face it: in the 2000s, for the generalist listener or trainspotter, there was simply too much going on, all the blasted time, to keep track of. So we're taking a somewhat broader approach here at Gimme Noise, even as we secretly wish we could rewind to December 1999 and sneer at all the critical and cultural adoration projects like Sleater-Kinney and Handsome Boy Modeling School got back in the day. Snootchie boochies, snitches!


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​Ah, reissues.  At times, they're an opportunity to do justice to a long-last masterpiece, at others simply one more way for labels to squeeze a little more profit out of an old cash cow .  Most recently, this category's been nothing short of an extravaganza: if the '90s were the decade of box sets, then the '00s saw almost every imaginable back catalog get the deluxe treatment, from all the old favorites to the most obscure cult rarities, as free downloading and file sharing forced labels to find new justifications for us to fork over our hard-earned (and increasingly scarce) dough on endless repackaging.

In honor of this trend, Gimme Noise offers a handful of representative reissues to help illustrate the best and worst trends that those of us (re)collecting all the old faves had to parse through in the aughts.

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​Ten years ago when the '00s sputtered into existence, this writer was not one. Instead, what is now barely a shell of a memory recalls a wide-eyed college student working part-time at the mall and using this very paper's gracious internship to attend raves and chronicle them whilst wearing -- I'm going to regret this later --  hot pink phat pants and a forearm rendered nearly immobile by plastic bracelets.

Several crucial fashion tips, a couple wars, an incredible recession, the collapse of the "rave scene" and about 65,091,881 DJs and producers later, here we are. Here I am. Back at City Pages (after a handful of years away) as editor of this web site and attempting to recap the entire decade of the music that's at the heart of both my personal and professional life. Not looking for sympathy, but what a task -- and  after 10 years of parties that go until noon the next day, who's to say anyone in the Twin Cities scene or beyond would remember it even remotely the same way?

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by *hoodrat*

​Fashion trends emerging from the runways of NYC and the streets of L.A. take their sweet time before landing in the Midwest. In the Twin Cities, a few people get on the bandwagon early when trendy fashion pieces plucked out of the pages of magazines are brought into local boutiques and department stores. They are coveted for a few months and then pushed aside to make way for the next big thing.

However, for the average Minnesotan outside any "scene", trends have a much different lifecycle. Most of us are taught never to waste anything: There are poor people in other countries who would be lucky to have gaucho pants! These last-season looks take on a groundswell of local support and wear out their welcome. The '00s will be over in a few short weeks, but these trends will always remind us of the most regrettable fashion moments Minnesotans embraced during the decade.

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​On Tuesday -- remember Tuesday? seems like that was ages ago, doesn't it? Tiger Woods was still definitely married back then! -- Gimme Noise singled out this past decade's most successful comeback attempts. But what of the comebacks that fizzled, or just weren't all that? The ones where rappers, rockers, and underground titans strutted back into the limelight -- and we all just sort of shrugged, or worse yet, barely even noticed?

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Photo by Alexander Mussard

​Let's face it: this was a fucked up decade for hip hop. It was a fucked up decade for just about everything, really, but any timespan that starts with both mainstream and indie rap looking bound for a next golden age and ends with a race to write the genre's most fatalist eulogy is one people are going to be puzzling over for a while. And good luck canonizing it - depending on who you ask, hip hop was either defined or destroyed by East Coast classicism, the South's ascendance, R&B/club crossover, international overtures, skinny-jeans iconoclasts or Internet-hyped mixtape phenoms.

If anything characterized hip hop in the 2000s - at least aside from the fact that nobody's ever going to go sextuple-platinum again - it's that nobody could agree on how to define hip hop. So this isn't exactly a definitive 25 best hip hop tracks of the year, at least in the sense that you probably couldn't get most fans to agree on more than, say, half of this list. It's actually more of a cross-section, which is why I decided to limit it to one headlining appearance per artist in favor of getting a bigger picture of the way things went down. And while I personally think all these tracks are classic, I guarantee that every other diehard hip hop fan will find at least one they love unreservedly and one they think is absolute total irredeemable garbage - so maybe that does make this list definitive, in a way.More >>

When people think of Minnesota, they don't usually think "sex scandal." How wrong they are.

Our state has been known to get into some seriously sexy mischief over the years, and the 2000s might be our sexiest, most scandalous decade of all time. That's why this week, we celebrate our sleazy side by counting down the top 9 sexiest Minnesota scandals of the past decade.

(Author's note: I chose to do 9 instead of 10 because 9 is a much sexier number. And because I'm terribly lazy.)

​The Vikings Sex Boat
 
Did you hear? Last month Adrian Peterson got busted for SPEEDING! Yep, he was driving too fast and he even got a ticket! Now if that doesn't rock the
Vikings to their core, I don't know what will! Oh, right. Totally forgot about the sex boat thing.
 
In 2005, a group of our boys in purple decided to take a classy gentleman's cruise out on Lake Minnetonka. Since no one invited me, I can't tell you for sure what happened that day (*rails line off Dante Culpepper trading card, punches through wall*).

However, thanks to the good folks at Wikipedia, we know what ALLEGEDLY went down that afternoon:

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​Gaze, dear readers, into the nadir of civilization--Britney Spears' bared breast.

In such a decade of ignominy, choosing valedictorian is no easy task. Alas, there but for the grace of God goes Gimme Noise. We tirelessly sifted through the bushel of stars who tumbled like Tetris blocks over the last 10 years.

Head below the jump to see our picks for the biggest downfalls of the 2000s.

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​We thought they were gone forever, for good, kaput. Then they came storming back into the limelight to blow our minds.

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