Annal:2000 Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album

Two Against Nature

Steely Dan

• 2000 Grammy-Album winner
• 2000 Grammy-Pop winner
• Score: 20.5

Never so much a band as the slyly crafted specter of one, Steely Dan’s mid-1990s “return” to live performance was as surprising as it was perverse. They’d previously toured only once, round about the era of Watergate, pet rocks, and Shaft. A half-decade after their concert comeback and a mere 19 years after Gaucho seemingly closed out their recording career, the jazz-pop conceit of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen deliberately dropped back into a recording landscape where they weren’t so much seasoned vets as alien ambassadors…

Inside Job

Don Henley

• 2000 Grammy-Pop nominee
• Score: 6.5

Often taken to task for the maudlin mellowness of his back catalog, Don Henley’s viewpoint on Inside Job is frequently as astringent as any of the best of his solo work, if refreshingly more stylistically diverse. Whether skewering the self-absorbed target of “Nobody Else in the World but You” with some welcome funk or lambasting the corporate co-opting of Mother Nature in “Goodbye to a River,” Henley still wears his heart proudly on his sleeve. But the changes in his life have also blunted a previous propensity for self-righteousness into something more…

Oops!... I Did It Again

Britney Spears

• 2000 Grammy-Pop nominee
• Score: 6.5

Yes, she did. Even if the title track’s chorus is a blatant rip-off of the Barbra Streisand/Barry Gibb duet, “Woman in Love,” it’s still darn catchy—much more than anything from 1999’s …Baby One More Time (save the album’s fab title tune, of course). With the rest of the 12 songs here, the teen queen pretty much delivers a remake of her last album. Songs like “What U See (Is What U Get)” and “Stronger” show Swedish songwriter-producer Max Martin in his element, churning out another and yet another slick smash with staccato synth beats and heavily…

No Strings Attached

Nsync

• 2000 Grammy-Pop nominee
• Score: 6.5

Despite millions of album sales, ‘N Sync are an obvious No. 2 to label mates the Backstreet Boys. Fittingly, they try harder—too hard, in fact—through most of their second non-Christmas disc, No Strings Attached. The quintet and Strings’ dozen-plus producers fill these 47 minutes with bland ballads by Diane Warren and Richard Marx, mildly funky workouts like a cover of Johnny Kemp’s “Just Got Paid” and the muddled “Space Cowboy,” and gimmicks such as “Digital Get Down” that hardly lend credence to whatever career-longevity claims they might want to…

Music

Madonna

• 2000 Grammy-Pop nominee
• Score: 6.5

Madonna’s never really been a musical trendsetter; she’s a trend champion. She’s always felt an affinity with underground culture, but not until her soul-searching trip-hop breakthrough Ray of Light had this love been the sole mainstay of her albums. On Music, she’s inducted the cool funk of Parisian electro-pop as the latest addition to her musical court, abruptly closing the chapter of the movement’s niche status. Here, French DJ Mirwais Ahmadzai takes on the majority of production credit, with Light’s William Orbit billed on two tracks;…