3. AnnieAnniemal
I remember when this album came out in 2004, I was super young and it revealed a lot to me. Mostly that I don’t give a shit about ‘rockism’ and the conservative masculinity that usually goes along with it. The songwriting is so bomb, the music so catchy and sonically adventurous.
This album sounds so good still, it’s kind of surprising to me it’s not more of a touchstone both for contemporary pop music and its critics. ‘My Heartbeat’ remains one of the best songs of this century. I found out about it through the internet! At the time it was kind of a weird record because nobody was doing anything like this. It was before the Robyn record, stuff like that. Nobody was really doing that super controlled and really pop music, in that way, in a non-purely commercial way. Hearing ‘My Heartbeat’ and understanding that song… when Katy Perry first came out I was saying, "I swear ‘Hot N Cold’ is really good!" And people would be saying, "Dude, what the fuck!" And I’d be saying "No, listen: it is! Remember that Annie song you really liked? It’s like that." This whole album has affected the way that I listen to other pop music. It’s funny, I know that some writer from Pitchfork, a writer quoted me saying that I wanted to make pop music that wasn’t populist, and the writer said that they weren’t sure if this was possible or what this means. And I was thinking: "Are you kidding me? You don’t know what that means? You don’t believe that pop music as a genre or rather as a fundamental approach to music is separable from commerce?"
