Streets ahead

The Guardian has published one of a million definitive guides to the music of the decade. The Streets' Original Pirate Material was named album of the decade. It's a good choice. Whilst much of the decade of the noughties has been dominated by meaningless tat - either an 'ironic' 80s feeling or the whinging indie scene - The Streets genuinely represented something new.

When I first heard Don't Mug Yourself on radio in 2002, I remember feeling that this was something quite new and different. And indeed, both the first and second album were full of gems, often quite radical pieces of music that made much of its contemporary music sound like Barry Manilow reheated.

It's always artificial looking back on a decade and imagining there is some kind of story to be told. Still, humans make sense of the world by labelling, tagging, and identifying trends and currents that define certain periods and time frames.

The noughties have not been great for music. The Streets aside, I can only think of a few mainstream acts that deserve mention. Jarvis Cocker made an impressive comeback with his first solo album. Dizzee Rascal, similarly to The Streets, introduced something quite new. LCD Soundsystem from the US made both the current generation and not current generation feel 'edgy'. There are probably others that deserve a mention.

Of course Simon Cowell and the overt music industry have further eroded and destroyed the music industry (as if the mid 80s weren't bad enough). But there was another telling development:

The demise of so-called indie music.

If there is one type of music I can no longer listen to at all, it is so-called indie music. From raving egoists and heroine addicted poets in the early 1990s, the term indie has now morphed into meaning either vacuous 'fun music' or - worse still - whinging. It is the latter that has utterly relegated 'indie music' (and perhaps the 'classic' guitar-based band setup) to the fourth division of music.

Coldplay, Stereophonics, Oasis, Keane, David Gray, The Strokes, The Zutons, Muse, The Kaiser Chiefs and so on and so forth, all represent the most meaningless, dated form of music. If the 1990s witnessed the commercialisation of what had been a subversive name, the noughties surely have seen the end of guitar-based bands as we know them. Just like Rock'n'Roll died in the 1960s (to be continued in embarrassing form only by the most hideous bands like Bay City Rollers or Shakin' Stevens), so too has indie guitar music come to its end. Not before time.