Freedom! Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar at the BET Awards, Los Angeles, June 26, 2016.
(Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
MUSICSET
Alright Alright Alright: The 2010s in Music
Blondes, butterflies, Beyoncé and the best of everything and everyone else that moved the musical needle in a decade that began when Billie Eilish was 8 and you were still buying MP3s.
Matty Karas, curator
October 13, 2019

The 101 Best Albums of the 2010s

The most pleasurable, innovative, infinitely replayable, groundbreaking, heartbreaking, hilarious, challenging, emotionally overwhelming, unrelenting, memorable, did-we-already-say-pleasurable collections of music that we leaned on over the last 10 years for pure life-enhancing sensation.

The AllMusic Decade in Review

Our editors' list of the decade's 200 best albums reflects the complexities of modern listening: from our favorite French robots to the final dispatches of now-departed icons to a surprising number of Odd Future affiliates, even this quantity and variety of albums likely leaves a few stones unturned. But we did our best.

Aquarium Drunkard : Decade / 2010-19

Well, that was fast. Decade is just about over, and as it draws to a close, its highs look awfully high in the rearview. Presented here, an unranked sprawl of 100 records that stuck with us, managing to break through the noise of an increasingly distracting age, and stick around in our heads.
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A truly historic landmark: 'Harlem Shake,' a passable trap-rave instrumental from the Mad Decent producer Baauer, shot all the way to #1 on the strength of user-made videos centered on a recurring meme in which a roomful of people would stand still during the buildup and then go nuts at the drop. This particular form of virality has been completely normalized, but at the time it was a radical phenomenon.

The 2010s: The Rise Of Bandcamp

Since its founding in 2008, Bandcamp has become a buzzing, artist-friendly hub for music lovers, with pay-what-you-want pricing and lots of rabbit holes leading to music you won't find anywhere else. In this episode of All Songs Considered, CEO and co-founder Ethan Diamond says that when an artist succeeds on Bandcamp, Bandcamp succeeds.
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The lead single from Adele's blockbuster second album was a four-minute primal scream shaped into a rolling-thunder epic, with the British belter's formidable alto making every charge against her ex—abandonment, manipulation, just being a generally bad guy—add up until they were as high as a funeral pyre. It's an exercise in pop catharsis that doubles as an exorcism for the demons that lurk after an affair flames out.

The Young Folks' Top 50 Albums of the 2010s

In a decade that saw the rise of streaming, the album came out of the 2010s alive and well. The LP rose again, dwarfing the dying compact disc by the end of the decade, and some of the biggest artists of the era issued defining album statements that demanded to be played all the way through.
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Just as Andy Warhol's canvases of Marilyn Monroe managed to both underline and undermine the power of celebrity in the 60s, Sophie's 'Bipp' exists as a mirror-like meta-commentary on the 00s, celebrating all that we reject.
What is a REDEF Set?
A REDEF Set is a curated collection of articles from around a topic, designed to show a variety of outlooks on a subject
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