A little over ten years ago I started writing about my Top 100 Singles Of The 90s. Pretty much as soon as I’d finished I started looking forward to writing this feature on Freaky Trigger. In between, this site has – directly or indirectly – reinvented my social circle, landed me a fascinating job, and been a remarkably rewarding hobby.

So, even though I really don’t have the time to do a 100 Songs Of The 00s, I couldn’t not. In fact I’m going to go better: I’m going to talk about 200 songs. Here are my ground rules:

1. I’m going to split the songs between here and my tumblr. The ones that go here will have more discussion, the ones on my tumblr will have an audio component. (An index page here will include links to them all, eventually.) This is because last time I ended up blocking on certain tracks, and this gives me an option each day to at least choose one from two.

2. I’m not actually going to start counting down until we’ve got to 100, possibly higher, in the list. This reflects the fact that I picked my 200 from a field twice that big (and I was adding 10-20 more each time I thought about it) and there was a large element of whim.

3. No Number Ones. I sliced 15 or 16 songs from the list on the grounds that I don’t intend to write about them before I get to them on Popular.

4. Songs not singles. I lost track of what is or isn’t a single long ago.

5. The biggest difference between 1999 and now is that I have spent the last 10 years writing about music. So if I’ve already said something about a song – here or elsewhere – I will most likely reprint it.

6. The other biggest difference is one of outlook. In 1999 I didn’t know many other people writing critically about music online, and almost none with my tastes. In 2009 there are hundreds. There is no need for another list, particularly as I have Popular to write. So I’m not going to try and be authoritative, and I’m not going to try to be definitive or anything like that. If a post is taking me more than half an hour I’m going to stop it wherever it is and just publish. This is just some stuff I liked, and let’s see where that takes us.

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