2001: The Year in Music
by Flak Staff

Anyone skeptical about the decreasing commercial viability of the single need look no further last year than at how BMG/RCA handled its release of Is This It, the debut album by perhaps the year's most widely hyped new artist, The Strokes.

Before the US version of the album got pushed back because of Sept. 11, BMG/RCA planned to release an 11-track album containing all five songs from the band's two pre-album singles. Though the three tunes from the first single, The Modern Age EP, were re-recorded for Is This It, the album versions are overproduced start-to-finish copies of the blistering garage rock that justifiably earned the group all its pre-album hype.

In the days when the record-buying public actually bought singles, this would have been an unconscionable career move for the band, undercutting royalties from sales of The Modern Age and hurting album sales due to the repetition of songs. In, um, the modern age, however, such concerns are moot. Though singles remain a somewhat viable format in the United Kingdom, US record labels have all but abandoned them.

But even if the bigs have given up on the 7", CD5 and cassingle, the concept lives on in the minds of music nerd fans, who rip each other mp3s of their favorite tracks, clandestinely download songs off of servers via FTP and exchange mix CDs of their favorite music.

It's in keeping with that spirit that Flak's staff of music geeks presents its favorite music of 2001. Based around the idea of a mix CD, the 21-track compilation boasts a slate of songs that exists only on the hard drive of Flak's music editor. In assembling this limited-edition-of-one mix, virtually every method of modern music distribution was used, with tracks being scanned directly off of CD, sent via e-mail as mp3s or uploaded and downloaded via FTP. In the case of one CD that couldn't be read by a computer, a song was recorded as it played in a stereo.

The graphic for this feature is inspired by decades of record sleeve design, and a 7"-sized version can be viewed here. The compilation, Gold Teeth and a Curse for this Town, takes its name from a lyric in the Shins' "New Slang," which two of this feature's eight writers went so far as to call the song of the year. Furthermore, four of those eight writers assembled their own mix CDs of the year's best music and whipped up annotated track listings that make up another part of this feature.

Disclaimer: Due to a desire not to be sued and a lack of time to complete necessary legal footwork, Flak Magazine will not be distributing Gold Teeth and a Curse for This Town. It exists only as a vehicle through which to discuss the year's top music. The hope here is that you'll get up off your butt and track some of this stuff down for yourself.

On to the music...