And here we are – the final section! Thanks again for everyone who’s voted, and a special thanks to all the commenters who’ve joined in the discussion on it. Certainly worth doing again next year, I think.
11. KELIS – “Acapella”: More than a touch of the Gagas in Kelis’ video for this, but the song itself is slinkier and less bonkers than Lady G. A deserved hit, but could the modish, inventive parent album follow suit? Could it bollocks.
And into the top 10!
10. GIRL UNIT – “Wut”: Near-wordless, snare-driven prettiness from the Night Slugs label. I’d be really interested to hear about how this works in a club – I find it great music for doing almost anything else to but being the sedentary fellow I am I’ve never actually danced to it!
(92 points, 8 voters)
9. KATY B – “Katy On A Mission”: My favourite British hit of the year (though not quite yours!) – a pen-portrait of a night out set to spring-heeled beats, the drag and release in the keyboards gives it a different sound to pretty much anything that got into the Top Ten this year.
(96 points, 12 voters)
8. BIG BOI ft CUTTY – “Shutterbugg”: One voter compared this to “Nothin’ Serious (Just Buggin)” and it’s certainly got much of the same joie de vivre, Big Boi bouncing syllables around for the sheer delight of it.
(103 points, 12 voters)
7. ROBYN – “Hang With Me”: Until the last day of polling this languished on one first-place vote and I thought it was going to be a shock omission – then a surge of fans landed it in the top ten. Robyn showing her wise side to a suitor.
(128 points, 7 voters)
6. ALICIA KEYS – “Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart”: End-of-an-80s-blockbuster belter which snuck out at the end of last year but receives due reward here.
(133 pts, 9 voters)
5. CEE-LO GREEN – “Fuck You”: Perhaps aptly given how many voters are Popular commenters, the first of 3 number ones in the Top 5! Though this only reached the top in bowdlerised form. The appeal wore off a bit for me personally but in sheer catchiness terms this is definitely one of the year’s standouts.
(139 pts, 11 voters)
4. LADY GAGA ft BEYONCE – “Telephone”: The video – potentially the peak of her imperial phase – overshadowed the song a bit, a shame in a sense as I think it’s the best thing she’s done yet, absolutely stuffed with hooks: people who kept on taking an “oh she’s very interesting but the music is so bland” stance after this and “Bad Romance” looked ever more wrong.
(154 pts, 13 voters)
3. ROBYN – “Dancing On My Own”: A constant presence on every tracks of 2010 list and this is no exception – it’s odd to see people praise it as escapist pop fun, though, I like it because of the big dour paralysing clouds of synth and it doesn’t seem like fun at all.
(174 pts, 12 voters)
2. TINIE TEMPAH – “Pass Out”: This, on the other hand, captures a night about to get messy very well, with Tempah as a wicked ringmaster. I resisted this for a long time because I don’t like his voice much, but there’s an inventiveness and swagger to it which got me in the end.
(204 pts, 15 voters)
1. JANELLE MONAE ft BIG BOI – “Tightrope”: This was ahead from pretty much the third or fourth ballot and only looked like being overtaken right at the end, when Tinie got a bunch of low-on-the-ballot votes. Effervescent, jazz-handed, funky shuffle which (I think) failed to chart here, much to a lot of people’s disappointment. But here it is – your winner!
(213 pts, 14 voters)
Extra stats, songs which failed to make the cut, etc. in the comments box.
That track is all about the vocal for me, Benga’s backing himself I can take or leave. I would be quite happy with a housier remix that erases Benga’s contribution altogether.
Had I got around to voting, I might have pushed Girl Unit, Robyn’s ‘Hang With Me’ and Cee-Lo up a place each. That’s a pretty good list, though.
I like all these songs very much except for the Robyn ones! Well done everyone. If anyone’s interested in the Poptimists 2010 top 40 polls then the results are here (that page also includes the poptimist votes partitioned off from this poll!)
#31 The preference is more sentimentality than merit, in all honesty — I really, really love Katy’s vocal on it, after all, but Man on a Mission made a *huge* impact on me after a year of increasing disillusionment with Benga’s productions.
My problem with “Telephone” — and it’s a big one — is that it’s such a stupid, pointless premise for a song. Turn the phone off, lady.
I’m sorry, but it’s such a ridiculously minor problem to base a whole song around, especially from an artist we expect something much more epic from like Lady Gaga. (I look forward to her next singles, “My Leg Itches” and “Out of Stamps.” The videos will be amazing.)
I usually imagine Lady Gaga and Beyonce are worried about the baby sitter calling so they have to keep their phones on. Or perhaps they are on call at work, I think they are perhaps emergency surgeons or line men for the county, or keyholders at the bank.
We can’t all turn our phones off just cos we’re out in the club and sipping that bub.
I think the club is 1x METAPHOR.
I love the Janelle album but am lukewarm on that particular track (I voted for “Say You’ll Go”), that said I like it a lot more than the Tinie Tempah so I’m glad it won out.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only person who voted for Rose Elinor Dougall, although I picked two different songs.
(Actually I don’t think the club is a metaphor. But the song isn’t about the problem of her guy calling her, it’s about the problem of her relationship with the guy breaking down and how she’d rather be out partying instead.)
I think the relationship is the metaphor! It’s tapping into the trope of the club as historical site of escapism and liberation and adapting it to a world in which we’re meant to be connected to everything all the time – our Blackberrys continually buzzing, phones always going off, the stress and malaise of technological ubiquity and the expectation of constant communication. Possessive boyfriends are part of that, but it is this Brave New Digital World that is really the possessive boyfriend here.
And the club is somewhere where you shouldn’t have to be subject to this – it’s the place where you dance all night, become wholly human again. It partly rings true because so many clubs have shitty reception.
Or doesn’t ring at all cos of the shitty reception.
I have been toying with the idea of the ubiquity of the club situation in current pop (as seen here: #s 9, 4, 3 and 2 of the top 10 explicitly relate to it, and Shutterbugg could do too) as a reflection of social media and wired-ness so it’s good to know I’m not just being loopy!
Its a wonderfully fluid non-signifier “club”. It ranges from football club to youth club in areas of membership organisations but it also represents the physical spaces those organisations took plac ein until it meant was was going on was secondary to what the building was (ie going clubbing can take place almost anywhere). And its a stick to hit people with and its a slightly rubbishy chocolate biscuit too.
“it’s about the problem of her relationship with the guy breaking down and how she’d rather be out partying instead.”
Mmm… no, don’t see it. The song doesn’t really make it seem like this is representative of deeper problems within the relationship (“It’s not that I don’t like you, I’m just at a par-tay.”) I really have difficulty seeing the premise of the song as anything more than a minor annoyance that can and will be resolved within a half hour, at most. There’s a reason why Lady Gaga’s eight-minute video was not about a telephone ringing at a club, is all I’m saying.
“I cannot text you with a drink in my hand.” Put the drink down?
I think “Acapella” sounds way different to the rest of the album – much less rich and thick, less of a rush, more staccato and spacey (or Guetta’s idea of “spacey” anyway GOD I HATE HIM SO MUCH).
Lex, should this not be “GOD I HATE HIM SO MUCH RIGHT NOW”? (Not that I expect your hatred to diminish.)
The only Robyn-related track to make my list was “Caesar”! In general I think she did much better in 2005 with spare arrangements than in 2010 with regular filled-out ones.
(Though truth be told there’s an utterly horrible segment in “Caesar” where Coco and Robyn banter, “Can you fly?” “Yup!” “I thought Robyns could fly.” Fortunately, it’s brief and almost drowned out by the music. But Lex, do not listen to this song. I admire you as a critic and would hate you to be jailed for murder.)
[i]segment in “Caesar” where Coco and Robyn banter, “Can you fly?” “Yup!” “I thought Robyns could fly.” [/i]
WHAT UGHHHH JKDFKJFFKSL;IDFL;IFJL DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
There is no excuse for that sort of behaviour. GOD I HATE ROBYN SO MUCH (BOTH RIGHT NOW AND FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE)
@18,byebyepride. ‘With every heartbeat’ dreadful? Surely you jest.
Re 43: and hence ‘clubbable’ can mean both suitable for letting into your group or suitable for clobbering around the head.
Virtually my entire Top 20 made the FT Top 75, or were on that list of songs which got more than one vote but failed to make it in.
Disappointingly though, my overall #1 (‘Doe Deer’) didn’t make the list at all. Suffered from Crystal Castles vote-splitting, I guess.
I did some analysis of how this compares to the ILM poll, which just finished
http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/2965771437/two-polls-2010-aka-cluster-analysis
Just reviving this thread to let you know that part of Janelle Monae’s set at Glastonbury is on a loop on the BBC red button service this evening. And coming up on Friday, Bellowhead, which is also of interest to some of us on here (I hope it’s not just me anyway).