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The Best Songs of the 2000s Defined Generation Y

Image credit: Spinserpent.com
In the 2000s, it seemed that anything interesting, with enough hits on YouTube, was solid enough to be worth something – our attention, reverie, sympathy, whatever. From Rihanna covering strange Romanian pop songs, to William Hung’s soaring success covering an already crappy Ricky Martin number, it seems almost impossible to pick out the songs that were actually significant in a way YouTube hits can’t measure; songs that represented something even if that something isn’t quite tangible. It is often the ephemeral things that mean the most. The previous decade was not a happy one. Two wars, economic collapse, bloody revolutions, terrorist attacks both at home and abroad – these musicians offer no answers, they simply attempt to chart the experience, and questions, of the average Generation Y-er.

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The Best Songs of the 2000s Defined Generation Y
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Image credit: Spinserpent.com
In the 2000s, it seemed that anything interesting, with enough hits on YouTube, was solid enough to be worth something – our attention, reverie, sympathy, whatever. From Rihanna covering strange Romanian pop songs, to William Hung’s soaring success covering an already crappy Ricky Martin number, it seems almost impossible to pick out the songs that were actually significant in a way YouTube hits can’t measure; songs that represented something even if that something isn’t quite tangible. It is often the ephemeral things that mean the most. The previous decade was not a happy one. Two wars, economic collapse, bloody revolutions, terrorist attacks both at home and abroad – these musicians offer no answers, they simply attempt to chart the experience, and questions, of the average Generation Y-er.
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Conclusion

According to our favorite websource, Wikipedia, Generation Y is also called “The Peter Pan Generation”; a generation delaying rites of passage into adult hood… after having watched our parents get divorced, lose the jobs they hated in the first place, and have to move from a city they may not have wanted to settle in at all, it’s no wonder we’re stalling. We’ve seen mass gun violence, in our schools and on our streets; we’ve seen towers crash, economies collapse, and cultures crumble. And all the while we’ve been told to sit tight and everything will be okay – but obviously, they were wrong. The lessons we’ve learned in the last decade have taught us that the traditional path isn’t necessarily the right path. Each of these artists broke the mold in their own ways, carving out their own place in the bizarre decade of the 2000s. In a decade that seems almost culturally void for all the global culture we have, these songs prove that true (and honest) art will always stand above the rest; these songs truly speak for a generation, and that is what makes them the best.

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