DENNIS COOPER
1. Pinback, Blue Screen Life The year’s most enigmatic, impeccable, swoonily beautiful songs.
2. Weezer, The Green Album America’s most popular great band brings rock formalism to the masses. Thirty perfect minutes.
3. Björk, Vespertine She escapes Lars von Trier and Matthew Barney unscathed.
4. Daft Punk, Discovery Intricate, vapid, irresistible, brainy French electro-pop piffle.
5. Mouse on Mars, Idiology Electronic music’s creative recession continued this year with a few eccentric exceptions. This was the wackiest.
6. Stephen Malkmus, Stephen Malkmus Even wiser words and music from Pavement’s brilliant crusader for and against irony.
7. Sigur Rós, Ágaetis Byrjun Weirdly charismatic, progressive rock–inflected borderline sonic tedium.
8. DJ Screw & the Screwed-up Click, Soldiers United for Cash Posthumous CD of erratic slo-mo hip-hop celebrating the effects of cough syrup by a Houston DJ who allegedly died from an overdose of same.
9. The White Stripes, White Blood Cells Suspiciously stylish but sincere brother-and-sister act (or divorced couple, depending on the interview) out of Detroit. Sparse, impassioned, quasi-gimmicky blues rock.
10. Autechre, Confield Music so cold and abstract it makes Carl Andre seem like Kiki Smith.
Contributing editor Dennis Cooper’s sixth novel, My Loose Thread, is forthcoming from Canongate Books in May 2002.
