(t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes: Intro

 

Hi! I’m back. Welcome to (t5!)



I won’t go through the major excuses for my hiatus, not just yet; but one of the minor reasons though is because I’ve been preparing for this mega-post that I’m about to unveil. As you know, the decade ended about a month and a half ago, so quickly in fact that they don’t even know what to call it until now. I prefer the denomination “the zeroes” because it made sense sequentially—the seventies, the eightees, the ninetees, the zeroes, the tens, etc. (we’ll worry about what to call the years between 3000-3009 when we get there). Also, I like “the zeroes” because it rhymes with “heroes”. Put the two together and I have a neat little rhyme-time name to label the lists of the bests of the decade: (t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes.

Back to the decade reaching its conclusion. The nineties seemed like it was yesterday, didn’t it, despite the fact that there have been infinite quantities of music, pop culture entities, and history between the time when we were stocking up canned food for Y2K and the time when we were lining up to see Avatar on IMAX 3D? Maybe that’s because one of the greatest advancement of the zeroes is how fast everything zoomed by; download times have shrunk, songs and other forms of art and entertainment are consumed in break-neck speed. Everything is so fast that albums are heard before their release date. Ten years ago, we couldn’t have envisioned instant streaming video and audio of practically everything imaginable. Ten years ago, the notion of having 128 gigabytes of music in something that I can fit in my back pocket is ridiculous. D’Angelo’s Voodoo may seem like it was released yesterday, but thinking that a Pentium 4 on your computer was a technological luxury seems like forever ago.

The downside of all the post-millenium speed is how we haven’t taken the time to smell the roses, so to speak. We give up on albums and songs after a couple of listens and TV series after a couple of episodes where before, we would have endured them and maybe, eventually adored them. That’s why I love lists like these, they’re like serums that slow down time. It allows me to revisit everything, imposes order on an era where chaos triumphs, ensures that nothing significant is missed (even though I’m sure I missed something).

Anyway, thanks for your time. Enjoy.