Here in India, everyone’s car has a stereo, and they all have a little USB stick full of Indian mp3’s plugged in. As I have a USB stick with me, I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to create my own little stick in case I’m ever in a situation to show off some American music.

How to do so? I could ponder the perfect 200-song playlist forever, but to make life easier, I decided to just pick 10 albums that I like a lot and that would be good representatives for y’know American slightly-off-mainstream pop music, or whatever it is that I like. So it’s not a “best of all time” list, but it’s the closest I’ve come to doing that in a while. Here’s what I came up with:

- Fiery Furnaces, Blueberry Boat
- Daft Punk, Discovery
- Cut Copy, In Ghost Colours
- Jens Lekman, Night Falls Over Kortedala
- Bloc Party, Silent Alarm
- The Knife, Silent Shout
- Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense
- Janelle Monae, The ArchAndroid
- LCD Soundsystem, The Sound of Silver
- Of Montreal, The Sunlandic Twins

Comments:
- Hissing Fauna is maybe better but I’d like to not scare anyone
- (that doesn’t explain why Blueberry Boat and Silent Shout are on there, but those are two that would be there for sure if I WERE making a best-ever list)
- Stop Making Sense is not even close to the best Talking Heads album, but it might be the best Talking Heads album if you’ve never heard Talking Heads and were unlikely to again
- Janelle Monae’s the only one to make the list since college. Maybe Talking Heads, I wasn’t such a fanboy then. Still, it’s a little past-heavy. (but not distant-past-heavy; no Weezer or Modest Mouse. I might have heard them too much.)