Simon Reynolds’s Notes on the noughties: The musically fragmented decade
The cheapness of home studio and digital audio workstation recording, combined with the wealth of history that musicians can draw on and recombine, fuelled a mushrooming of quality music-making. But the result of all this overproduction was that "we" were spread thin across a vast terrain of sound. That's why, if you look at the end-of-year or end-of-decade polls across the gamut of music magazines, there's so little overlap. If even a relatively non-diffuse community like Pitchfork could only find its centre around records that came out in the early years of the noughties, it suggests that the culture-wide slide into entropy is speeding up.
