Top of the Pop(punk)s: Albums of the Decade

It has been said in the past by some of my more critical friends that I've not got the most eclectic of musical tastes, and to a degree they do have a point. I was caught up in the alternative rock wave that washed over us in the early noughties, when the likes of Blink-182, The Offspring and Green Day were starting to make appearences within mainstream media. At this time nearly all of my friends and I shared musical tastes ranging from the poppy punk of Blink and Green Day to the horribly embarrassing nu-metal of Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach. This stayed the same for a number of years, as we generally veered away from the awful middle-class white boys rapping over horrid dirging guitars and got more into the melodic stylings of American pop-punk and eventually, dare I say it, 'emo'.
However, as we got older, it was clear that to some of us this was merely a phase and people moved on with their tastes and began to explore more diverse avenues, while others steered back towards the mainstream. This wasn't the case with me though, as I continually threw myself back into pop-punk and emo, always listening out for the 'next big thing' or discovering an obscure, well-kept secret.
This is not to say that I didn't and don't listen to and enjoy other kinds of music, it's just that my feet have well and truly stayed rooted in the same area and I think they always will.
A lot of my friends say that I need to grow up and listen to 'real' music, but I don't really understand what this means. This comes from people who listen to slow pounding beats interspersed with a selection of electronic blips which to me qualifies as music about as much as the mind-numbing din of a pneumatic drill.