20-ish Songs From 2015 I Was Obsessed With

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I love reading end of the year round-ups in music, movies and literature because it gives me the chance to find the stuff I missed or reminds me of the stuff I was totally going to check out and forgot about. Since music increasingly comes to us in diffuse ways – Spotify, free tracks on the Internet, YouTube clips shared by friends – it’s not always easy to periodize music, or, rather, my obsessions for music are often months or years after they were properly “released.” While music is often intrinsically linked to times in my life – like the summer and fall I was deeply obsessed with Joni Mitchell’s back catalog or the fall I listened to one Alicia Keys song on repeat for months in my dorm room – it can be hard to remember the years (and the calendar is a fairly arbitrary marker for everything, but especially tastes and loves). Still, here is my attempt to present twenty-ish songs that made me wanna dance or served as mood stabilizers or were just continually looped for days on end. Some come from equally amazing albums (everyone should listen to Jazmine Sullivan’s Reality Show, for example) and others are songs that floated separately from an album or don’t really need to be appreciated alongside the rest of the tracks (we live in a world where we increasingly learn songs as discrete units through commercials, movies, the incidental music at Kroger, a friend’s Facebook, a dance party). With that preamble, here are in no particular order are 20-ish tracks that were very very necessary to me this year.

1.     “Four Door Aventador” / “The Crying Game” – Nicki Minaj – Technically, Nicki’s album The Pinkprint was released last December but I preceded to listen to it on repeat for the entirety of winter 2015. This was the album where Nicki finally melded her talents for rapping and spectacle with a cohesive record that plays well from top to bottom; I’ve always loved Nicki but her first albums felt like a series of producers each attempting to make a successful single without any consideration of the balance of the album as a singular unit. The Pinkprint has less of Nicki’s outsize personalities and the central character her is “Nicki” the “real” person underneath it all. “The Crying Game” balances Jessie Ware’s haunting lament with Nicki’s sly verses (“Blood drippin' out your arm on my Asian rugs / We was just planning a wedding, Caucasian doves”) to tell a story of heartbreak that resonates. “Four Door Aventador” find Nicki slowing her flow but slaying against a driving beat that never stops – basically every line is quotable and the song never arrives because Nicki’s already arrived.

2.     “#HoodLove” and “Dumb” (featuring Meek Mill) – Jazmine Sullivan – Jazmine Sullivan consistently makes some of the best contemporary R&B with a voice far beyond her age, a swagger that insists that the listener pay attention, and a willingness to play across time periods and influences. Reality Show is a nearly perfect album with the concept of turning inside out the tropes of reality tv – I kept remembering other songs on the album that I wanted to put on this list and suffice it to say you should just go listen to it all. “Dumb” which opens the album is an epic track that tells off a man as only Jazmine can – “now if my tears don’t mean nothing / don’t insult me with lies” – but she’s through with the idiot who left her. “#HoodLove” was made for blasting in the car as the insistent bass underpins Jazmine’s statement of love. Across the album, Jazmine’s voice moves from a plaintive coo to an enraged growl; her influences range from blissed out late 80s/early 90s R&B funk on “Let It Burn” to the enchanting 60s girl group sound of “Stupid Girl.” Loves loves loves it.

3.     “Tunnels” – MS MR – With their second album, MS MR went all in on 80s pop with synthy goodness while maintaining their bluesy vocals. I loved the whole of  How Does It Feel but this was the track I kept coming back too – it’s a dark song (about the ways we mechanize ourselves against emotion) masquerading as a dance song: “A slave to the pulse / it’s sink or swim / I think I’ve dug myself in too deep again.”

4.     “bodyache” – Purity Ring – Melding glitchy, twitchy music box sounds with Megan James’s crystalline vocals, this song circles and circles in a sort of 80s fairytale about what happens to our body when we lose someone’s intimacy.

5.     “Hands to Myself” – Selena Gomez – In a year of pop princesses making a bid for “adult” pop moodiness, Selena’s Revival was the attempt I most enjoyed. “Hands to Myself” is the clear standout with its hand claps, foreboding guitars and a message about physical need and want that borders on obsession. And it’s so damned catchy.

6.     “LA Hallucinations” – Carly Rae Jepsen – The “Call Me Maybe” wunderkind also made her grownup album packed, one that made use of Carly Rae’s supple voice and placed her in the midst of a faded Polaroid version of love. My favorite was definitely “LA Hallucinations” which name drops Buzzfeed and TMZ in the service of a classic pop star trope – the pop star questioning the validity of her life and love given her substantial fame – what saves the song from becoming too obvious is the care given to producing the strong and maintaining a sheen that feel just scuffed and just unsettled enough. These are hallucinations after all.

7.     “Confident” – Demi Lovato – Demi’s album was for me the also-ran of this triptych (Selena, Carly Rae, Demi) of pop ladies. There are some exceptionally fun tracks on her album but I honestly never made it past the song with Iggy (in fact, I often turned the volume when Iggy showed up and ruined the song). BUT, I love this song – the militant horns and drums, the insistence of the beat, the chorus, the killer video where Demi and Michelle Rodriguez sublimate their sexual desires through a love of shared tattoos and physical violence. And there’s always place for another up-tempo pump up song.

8.     “I’ve Got Life (Version)” – Miss Lauryn Hill/Nina Simone – Criminally underexposed, Nina Revisited: A Tribute to Nina Simone is a fabulous album – Alice Smith’s cover of “I Put a Spell On You” is a standout but the whole thing is phenomenal. The album also gives us several covers by Lauryn Hill and this amazing track where Miss Hill raps over my favorite Nina Simon song (the medley “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life”). Miss Hill spits that lay bare the ongoing workings of oppression, racism, and more social issues insisting that we “listen” over a looped version of the feverish drums from the Simon song. While she’s been gone for a while, and we can debate the whats and the whys of her disappearance, this track is a reminder of what L Boogie can do when she blesses us with her voice.

9.     “Déjà vu” and “Cheap Thrills” – Sia – Sia has a preternatural ability to craft a perfect pop song and these two songs are keen examples of this. On “Déjà vu” she works with disco god Giorgio Moroder to craft a perfect disco confection that seems scientifically designed to make you dance around your bedroom in your underwear. “Cheap Thrills” which she released in the last few weeks is Sia wearing her best Rihanna drag, down to the oddball phrasing aided by Sia’s own idiosyncratic voice that carries notes in strange fun ways. And who doesn’t love a swell of crowd chanting?

10. “King Kunta” – Kendrick Lamar – I guarantee that anything meaningful I might say about To Pimp a Butterfly has already been said elsewhere but this track remains a deceptively fun song – deceptive since the urgent walking beat and female backup singers trick you into thinking this song is one thing while the actual verses wake you up to something very different. To Pimp a Butterfly is very much an album and this song gathers further salience when listened to as part of the greater tapestry.

11. “On My Mind” – Ellie Goulding – Ellie Goulding has a strange operatic voice that bends around words and notes. With Delirium, she went all in on pop instead of the cyclical synthy electronic that undergirded her last album. I loved this track from when it was very first released and continue to love it even if it’s reached the tipping point (aka it was playing at frat house as I walked by) – the blend of guitars, Ellie’s ululations and the lyrics (“You wanted my heart / I just liked your tattoos”) make for the perfect song questioning the ways our bodies betray our better instincts.

12. “Still Want You” – Brandon Flowers – The Desired Effect, the second album by the front man for the Killers, is a lovely album and this for me is the standout – a love song for apocalyptic times that mines the sweet spot of Talking Heads’ love songs.  J’adore.

13. “Sleepwalker” – Emily King – One of the artists that I could not for the life of me explain how they came across my transom and yet, bless that suggestion or algorithimic nudge. This song is one of several exceptionally enjoyable tracks from King’s The Switch – there’s a bluesy poppy quality to the song that’s timeless and I love the grain of her voice and the way she uses it to make the listener smile and bop their head.

14. “Everyday” – A$AP Rocky featuring Rod Stewart, Miguel, and Mark Ronson – A superbly produced song with Mark Ronson making everything crackle and shine as Rod and Miguel trade off on the hook while A$AP make amends. Rod Stewart may be best known at this point for his songbook pablum but his blue-eyed soul blends perfectly with Miguel’s bedroom voice. Old school/new school and I wanna go there.  

15. “Until the Levee” – Joy Williams – Half of the now disbanded folk group the Civil Wars, Joy Williams made a joyous album Venus that moves between folk, blues and the swelling emotion of the spiritual. “Until the Levee” has an epic quality with its backing choir and the swelling of the music but it’s the voice at the center that makes it all work.

16. “Good Guys” – Mika – Mika just keeps making pure pop music that draws liberally from chamber pop, French 60s pop music, and musical theater. “Good Guys” could easily come at the thoughtful moment in the second act of a musical where our gay hero reconsiders his place in the world and namechecks a laundry list of queer men – the sly movement between “good guys” and “gay guys” adds to the fun. And yes, the chorus cribs from the Wilde quote – “some of us in the gutter are looking up at the stars.”

17. “Talking Body” – Tove Lo – Between this track and “Habits (Stay High),” Tove Lo has made her mark as the go-to for chilly icy songs about hedonism as a lifestyle as regret and yet no one really thinks she regrets these things. Besides using “fuck,” “Talking Body” is quite tame and yet the pure expression of need and the objectification of the other partner pushes this from romance into unhindered late night booty call – sure she says if you do it right, “we fuck for life,” but who hasn’t said that before and then had “a thing” in the morning? In Tove Lo’s world, bodies are simply vessels for pleasure.

18. “YOUTH” – Troye Sivan – Aussie YouTube celebrity Troye Sivan’s first full-length album Blue Neighbourhood plumbs the same moody R&B/soul by way of indie pop lane as Bieber and yet everything here is murkier and more tender, needier but also more confident. I first heard this song in a video of Sivan performing the song on the Tonight Show where he was a wonder of limbs and energy; the song carries that energy with its buzzy charm and the backing singers who come in on the chorus. “YOUTH” is an earworm yet also a heavy love song in which the speaker presents his youth as all he has and all he can offer.