My Year In The Top 40
The forty best tracks to be a UK Top 40 hit for the first time last year, as judged by me.
SONGS WHICH ARE AMONG MY FAVOURITES ALL DECADE BUT CAME OUT IN 2007
MIA – “Paper Planes”
Britney Spears – “Piece Of Me”
SONGS WHICH ARE AMONG MY FAVOURITES ALL DECADE AND ACTUALLY CAME OUT LAST YEAR HURRAH
Wiley – “Wearing My Rolex”
Goldfrapp – “A&E”
SONGS IN WHICH HUMAN INTERACTION CONFUSES ROBOTS AND MAKES THEM SAD
Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”
Ultrabeat ft Darren Styles – “Discolights”
SONGS ABOUT FANCYING PEOPLE IN DISCOS
Chris Brown – “Forever”
Hot Chip – “Ready For The Floor”
Usher – “Love In This Club”
SONGS BY NE-YO
Ne-Yo – “Closer”
Ne-Yo – “Miss Independent”
Ne-Yo – “Mad”
SONGS WHICH MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN BY NE-YO
John Legend – “Green Light”
SONGS I TRIED NOT TO LIKE BUT WHOSE CHORUSES GRABBED ME BY THE BOLLOCKS
Katy Perry – “Hot N Cold”
Alphabeat – “Fascination”
SONGS IN WHICH THE SINGER LIKES THIS PART
Britney Spears – “Break The Ice”
SONGS IN WHICH THE SINGER HATES THIS PART
Pussycat Dolls – “I Hate This Part”
SONGS FLICKERING WANLY IN THE DYING EMBERS OF THE 00S POP REVOLUTION
Girls Aloud – “The Loving Kind”
Kylie Minogue – “The One”
SONGS CONCERNING THEMSELVES WITH THE PLEASURES AND PERILS OF DATING KANYE WEST
Kanye West – “Flashing Lights”
Estelle ft Kanye West – “American Boy”
SONGS ABOUT THE LOSS OF VITAL FUNCTIONS
Jordin Sparks and Chris Brown – “No Air”
Hercules and Love Affair – “Blind”
SONGS THAT WERE QUITE GOOD BY STARS WHO CAN AND HAVE DONE BETTER
Britney Spears – “Womanizer”
Mariah Carey – “Touch My Body”
Rihanna – “Disturbia”
SONGS THAT MADE ME WISH MORE BASSLINE RECORDS HAD CHARTED THIS YEAR
H20 ft Platnum – “What’s It Gonna Be”
Platnum – “Love Shy”
OBLIGATORY INDIE SONGS
Santogold – “LES Artistes”
Vampire Weekend – “Oxford Comma”
OBLIGATORY ROCK SONGS
Fall Out Boy – “I Don’t Care”
Ashlee Simpson – “Outta My Head (Ay Yay Ya)”
SONGS I REMEMBER LIKING AT THE TIME BUT COULD NOT IN ALL HONESTY TELL YOU HOW THEY WENT
Taio Cruz – “Come On Girl”
T-Pain ft Teddy Verseti – “Church”
Flo Rida – “Low”
SONGS I REMEMBER NOT LIKING AT THE TIME BUT WHICH CHARMED ME IN THE END
September – “Cry For You”
Eric Prydz – “Pjanoo”
SONG WHICH I LIKED MAINLY BECAUSE IT MADE ME THINK OF HOW AWESOME THE FIRST THREE ISSUES OF FINAL CRISIS WERE
Gnarls Barkley – “Run”
SONG WHICH I WAS SURPRISED TO LIKE
Keane – “Spiralling”
SONG WHICH I CANNOT REMOTELY JUSTIFY ENJOYING BUT WHICH SEDUCES ME WITH ITS PREPOSTEROUSNESS
The Killers – “Human”
1. I don’t see the Ne-Yo/Green Light thing at all. I find Ne-Yo’s songs utterly unengaging (although he seems v. charming and smart in interviews) while Green Light is fab and in line with John Legend’s previous good stuff.
2. Surprised Flo Rida’s Low has vanished from your mind. I, other the hand, disliked it but find it still bouncing around in my memory, alas.
HNY…
ditto 2, but i liked it and still like it enough
‘Come On Girl’ goes “Come on girl! Come on girl! Come on girl!” iirc
I have just done a Tumblr post justifying ‘The One’s existence.
I went and checked “Low” and of course I did know it, what had me confused is that I assumed it was about 5 years old so the Flo Rida one had to be something else!
I kind of agree with Mark M – Ne-Yo’s tasteful setting is too high, which is why he could never make anything as great as Green Light.
Just to give yous a laff, it was embarassingly very very long after i had heard Flo Rida that i eventually saw a poster for the album that had the florida-outline logo, and i ‘got the joke’ in the name. srs.
haha rock songs, dude…
A fine breakdown, the outline of which I will brutally beat-jack for my own nefarious purposes. I think the “might as well have been by Ne-Yo” category might be under-represented by 504 songs or so.
I have no idea where to even start with the criticism of Ne-Yo as “too tasteful” except
1) what on earth is wrong with being tasteful
2) how on earth is ‘Green Light’, and John Legend generally, not the most tasteful thing released in this or any year (obv not a slight)
3) especially compared to a dude who has sung the line “no / I / am / not / I’m not / ADDICTED TO SEX! / but girl I guarantee / that if u lay with me / u just might be, ayyyy”
1) Tasteful is generally the exercise of unnecessary restraint, the opposite of what brings me joy (IE joy).
2) It thumps and squelches and ticks along at a pace, Andre 3000′s verse starts “So I’ve been hard like Medusa’s staring at me”, backed by what seems like a different sample every three seconds – to an extent it’s wind up Andre and let him laugh his way through, but even without him it would be a joyous record.
3) Well of course I might be wrong! I only know him from the three songs here and Tom’s description of him as the David Gedge of R&B. Which to translate from Indie is a hesitant and heartbroken loser – not generally my scene – the impression I had of him is that he’s more likely to record a single called Yellow Light.
(haha okay yet again technology has introduced awkward facts: I am not listening to Put Your Hands Up, which suggests I am talking largely rubbish)
I think of “Year Of The Gentleman” as sort of pop’s equivalent of a Jane Austen novel. If you’re the kind of viewer who prefers the more tits-out Andrew Davies adaptations it might not be yr bag. I think he’s operating in the sort of space where you actually can’t get “too tasteful” – it’s sort of like Eno, or Basic Channel, or late Steely Dan, or Red Apple Falls era Smog, or Roxy Music, in that regard: the poetics of the tiny restrained gesture.
(bah that should have read “am now listening to”)
I don’t know what “David Gedge of R&B” refers to but I don’t even get the sense of Ne-Yo as a hesitant loser from this (concept) album, let alone his overall body of work. There’s only one song on it where I think he confuses “being chivalrous” with “being a pussy” and it’s my least favourite (‘Why Does She Stay?’) – certainly he doesn’t come across as that on any of these singles, like, in the slightest. “Jane Austen of R&B” is OTM though. (Also, remember that Ne-Yo wrote ‘Unfaithful’ for Rihanna, ie one of the most mental R&B ballads of…all time, really! “I don’t wanna be – A MURDERAHHH!!!”)
As for ‘Green Light’ – the music is basically Kelis’s ‘Millionaire’ redux, and Andre 3000 is about the most tasteful rapper you can imagine, crass sexual metaphors or not. I like it but it’s about as “pleasantly there” as you got in male R&B this year.
Restraint and exuberance aren’t a priori value judgments in themselves, they just have to be used in the right places. You couldn’t perform ‘Mad’, for example, in any other way than restrained because the song is ABOUT restraint.
Tasteful gets flung at all kinds of people, seemingly whenever the sound of their music comes off too eager to please a big audience and leaving little room for any sense of ‘error’ musically (no roughness, no capacity to offend other than through being boring). I do see Ne-Yo that way musically (so have been avoiding his album) but I see John Legend that way too (assuming ‘American Boy’ and ‘Green Light’ are as close as he’s come so far to ‘the edge’ musically/production-wise). I like ‘Closer’ but could never love it.