100. A$AP Rocky – Wassup
As with more or less every A$AP Rocky track, the real hero of 'Wassup' is the production, rather than Rocky himself. He's a wilfully basic rapper, generally sticking to fairly generic drugs/sex/violence-talk; but he does know how to stay out of the way of an awesome beat, content to sit, "sippin' on that codeine", in the middle of this billowing, slow-motion, druggy noise. And even though Rocky's generally more about minimalist flow and ear-pleasing assonance than content, he manages to get a couple of good lyrics in on 'Wassup'. He drops some recession-era street reality into these hazy proceedings, spitting "I ain't talkin' 'bout no money, I ain't talkin' 'bout no cars/or talkin' 'bout no diamonds, 'cause that shit is a façade/times is really hard". He's clearly not above caring about his image, though; in probably my favourite lyric of his much-fêted LiveLoveA$AP mixtape, he brags: "pretty nigga in some shit you never hear of/only thing bigger than my ego is my mirror/clothes get weirder/money get longer, pretty nigga pin your hair up!"
As I say, though, it's really all about that backing track, courtesy of 2011's most important hip-hop producer, Clams Casino, whose sound - typified here - is a complete inversion of the taut, tense, hard sounds that New York hip-hop has classically embraced. This is a layered, detached, soft-focus haze, and about as epic and massive as a two-and-a-half-minute slice of East Coast gangster rap could ever sound.
99. Kuedo – Truth Flood
Vangelis-style sci-fi melancholia in the foreground; rattling, stuttering footwork-esque kicks and 808s underneath. Kuedo (formerly Jamie of Vex'd) hit on a simple - and phenomenally effective - formula on his recent Severant album, and 'Truth Flood' works that formula to stark, uneasy perfection.
98. Loick Essien feat. Tanya Lacey – How We Roll
Paeans to fidelity and commitment - 'Umbrella' aside - don't usually feel this intense; 21-year-old Harrow singer Loick Essien makes it feel like a battle ("we only roll through guns blazin', so you don't wanna war with either me or my lady!" he exclaims at one point). His air of steely resolve and defiance masks an undercurrent of panic - "stop trying to scare me" is one key lyric, and he veritably explodes on "if only you knew the things we've been through, then maybe you would leave us both alone!" Tanya Lacey's contribution, a few patois-inflected bars of chatting serving as a bridge, is minimal but crucial, and also inverts some of urban pop's sonic gender archetypes - he is smooth, soft and silky, she is rough-hewn, hard and grounded. Meanwhile, synths buzz, drum machines thump and clap; "the sky falls down", the track comes to a halt, and Essien resurrects it with an impassioned, autotuned wail. Oh yeah, and 2011 pop's best gingerbread man reference. Probably.
97. CocknBullKid – Asthma Attack
Still in urban London, then, and another British soul singer born in London to African parents; but this is the London of early-'90s Morrissey and McAlmont & Butler's 'Yes'. 'Asthma Attack' is a conflicted ode to the city itself; the song wants to be triumphant, but it can't help but sound a bit flattened and tragic, its sweeping strings and driving pianos more Spector than disco (and its disco beats sounding closer to Pulp than Chic), built around a tremendous and undeniable chorus, and the catchiest use of the word 'fluoride' that pop has presumably ever seen.
96. Touché Amoré – Home Away From Here
'Home Away From Here' is one of the longest songs on Touché Amoré's Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me, and it still clocks in at less than two minutes - it's a straightforward enough thing, a frenetic, high-speed bit of post-hardcore about living the frenetic, high-speed life that comes from being in a frenetic, high-speed post-hardcore band. Vocalist Jeremy Bolm screams his way through it like it's one long chorus, and against all odds it ends up as hooky as you could want it to be, its barrelling, blistering energy a suitable fit for the song's lyrical ideas - "I have this problem where I want to be everywhere I'm not"; "I can't afford to eat"; the guitars let up to add an extra melancholy urgency to Bolm's frantic confession "this place looks better from a passenger window"; the final staccato shrieks of "no ties - no roots - I'm fine".
95. Todd Terje – Snooze 4 Love
'Snooze 4 Love' is just one of those inexplicably beautiful techno symphonies - 8 minutes of gradually unfolding computer sadness from Norwegian producer Terje on the flip of his 'Ragysh' single.
94. Frank Ocean – American Wedding
Romantic relationships are, at least on the surface, the subject matter of the overwhelming majority of pop music. But it's a rare song that stares hard into the face of the social construction of romantic relationships, wondering whether we can really find happiness therein. "Thank God for Mom and Dad for stickin' through together - 'cause we don't know how," sang Andre 3000 on 'Hey Ya!', probably still the best song of the last ten years. Frank Ocean draws similar conclusions on 'American Wedding', but is rather less accepting - and more despairing - than Dre.
'American Wedding' is a reworking of 'Hotel California', the Eagles' cautionary tale casting 1970s rock excess as an alluring prison, a lie that you can't easily escape from once you have seen through it - the implication being, presumably, that we might see the romance myth in much the same way. He opens the song reminiscing - "sangria in the canteen, talking to myself/this tattoo on my left hand is turning purplish blue" is poetry itself. His musings on "Islamic virgin brides and arranged marriages/hijabs and polygamous husbands/those poor unamerican girls" contain layers and layers of tragic irony. And that Don Felder/Joe Walsh guitar non-solo, a thing of trapped, impotent fury recorded some 35 years before, is left more or less untouched, swirling off into FM radio darkness. Human beings still don't know how to be happy, and which myths to believe; 'American Wedding' is the sound of irresolution.
93. Funkystepz feat. Rhian Moore – Our Love
North London funky house duo Funkystepz were responsible for a slew of consistently great releases in 2011. Predictably enough, my favourite track of theirs is their most pop moment, this collaboration with vocalist Rhian Moore. Marrying this sort of breezy, summery, vaguely Latin ambience to roughneck London breakbeats was part of what made UK garage such a refreshingly brilliant pop phenomenon, and the funky house scene has learned those lessons well.
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92. Wretch 32 feat. Example – Unorthodox
One of the laziest, most shameless pop smashes of the year. 'Unorthodox' sounds like it probably took all of five minutes to write - Wretch 32's almost mockingly simplistic flow; a middle eight that Example might as well have made up on the spot; the 'Fools Gold' sample that more or less exhausts the track's musical ideas; a general air of clichéd and contentless rebellion-by-numbers. It should have been terrible.
Or should it even? After all, shameless theft, simple lyrics and unconvincing claims to originality and nonconformity have all been at the heart of some of the most thrilling pop music since at least the 1950s. Anyway, 'Unorthodox' is actually brilliant. Wretch 32 frames being a pop star as hard, unglamorous work ("I'm the type of guy that'll have no life") but finds joy in it anyway ("that sounds sad, but I'm happy" - just one of the deceptively deep gems he casually drops during the track). Wretch shoots for good-natured silliness rather than trying to be threatening or aggressive, teasingly declaring "I'm a good guy, and if you heard otherwise, that's a true lie"; even when he says "I bark up every tree, and I do bite" he can't help but undercut himself immediately with another one of those deceptively simple couplets: "psyche, I'm only playing/we all got freedom of speech, I'm only saying". Meanwhile, when Example triumphantly booms "we don't follow no sound - they follow us!" he may as well be speaking for urban London itself, the sound and spirit of which we will be continuing to hear plenty from in this list. 'Unorthodox' is the irresistible grin of the underdog, finally on top.
91. St. Vincent – Cruel
The title word is wailed, crooned, and sometimes virtually sobbed many times over through the course of 'Cruel'; the word is made into a quite brilliant multisyllabic hook all its own. The song's key phrase in its entirety, though, runs: "how could they be cas-u-al-ly cruel?" And Annie Clarke takes that cruelty on in a suitably casual manner herself, always an icy and inscrutable presence, rolling her way through an inscrutable lyric, staring down that casual cruelty with a perfectly-constructed indie pop song. With a swooning Disney string section behind her, she picks out an incongruously chirpy guitar figure, and blares through a sarcastic solo to rival 'Boredom' or 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. The song is a Rubix Cube of contradictory elements; light and dark, hard and soft, sweet and nasty, all coalescing perfectly together.
90. Wiley – Numbers In Action
Like a lot of Wiley's most compelling work, there's something gleefully, mind-bogglingly Dada-esque about 'Numbers In Action'. There's hardly anything to it at all - a typically minimal beat, Wiley babbling over the top of it about nothing in particular. He's still a fan of Michael Jackson, he tells us repeatedly, and for no discernible reason (did someone accuse him of not being?). He rhymes "shoehorn" with "dual-core" (and, brilliantly, "tutor"). He's never aggressive, he raps with roughly the intensity of a tube tannoy announcement. Wiley probably has more of a claim than anyone on the invention of grime, but with grime artists suddenly crossing over to the mainstream like never before, he's ploughing more or less the same furrow he always has. But he still finds a way to make it all into pop magic on moments like 'Numbers In Action'; Wiley is a brilliantly reductive producer, turning out bouncing-and-bleeping beats like this one, and locking just the right syllables in just the right places to bring them to life, sounding initially awkward but more and more right with each listen.
89. Holy Other – Touch
Tri Angle are one of those record labels whose releases are pretty much always worth a listen; and this year, the slow-motion, dark-and-hazy 'witch house' aesthetic that they have pioneered was more in tune with the zeitgeist than ever before - a fact underlined when the label put out an instrumental EP by Clams Casino in the summer. The other big EP released by Tri Angle this year, though, was even better - Manchester producer Holy Other's With U, from which 'Touch' is a highlight. It's like 2-step gone slow, creepy, and sinister; vocals pitched down, pitched up, drenched in reverb and echo, and sliced in and out of each other, punctuated by off-kilter beeps and set in dark, billowing clouds of bass. Magisterial.
88. Jennifer Lopez feat. Pitbull – On The Floor
When the dust has settled, and the great 'in the club' obsession of 2009-2011 chart pop is laid down in the history books, 'On The Floor' will surely stand as one of its definitive statements. The song is a great argument for formula in pop, making the most of its contrasts: hard-edged verses underpinned by wobbly, growling bass, explosions of floaty, melodica-accompanied joy on the chorus. It's a paean to the party which actually makes the party sound like fun, rather than some grim chore. Jennifer Lopez sings "on the floor" twenty-four times in this song, in as many novel formulations as she can muster ("if you're a criminal, kill it on the floor/steal it quick on the floor"), but by the time she runs out of language and explodes into that wordless refrain, she is soaring above, and doesn't sound confined to anything as mundane as a floor. (There's someone else on this song, too, but I do my best to ignore him. It's surprisingly easy. And he only says "on the floor" four times. Amateur.)
87. Indian – The Fate Before Fate
Doom metal from Chicago - five minutes of buzzing, rumbling, slow noise; somehow, melodic guitar lines rise out of the murk periodically. It possesses a staggering heaviness measured in emotional intensity, rather than speed of blastbeat. What passes for a hook is a repeated refrain of "only the dead can love", whatever that might mean; the inhuman scream that follows is issues from the very depths of the soul.
86. King Krule – The Noose Of Jah City
Yet another young Londoner, King Krule - real name Archy Marshall, formerly known as Zoo Kid - is, astonishingly, just 17. He's studied Marx, dislikes capitalism, and apparently supports violent insurrection. But there's nothing violent about 'The Noose Of Jah City' - or if there is, it's a sublimated, internalised violence. The track is bright, dewey-morning melancholy, while Krule's vocal is wracked, deep and strained, a croaky, whispered croon. He sounds weighed down and hemmed in throughout, muttering "it eats away, the grey" and complaining of "drowning in concrete". I suppose it makes sense that teenage existential angst in 2011 would sound like this - exhausted, burned out and over-saturated rather than bored, angry and frustrated. The key line, perhaps, comes towards the end of the song, when Krule cries out "I question why". He sounds like he doesn't have any answers, but - crucially - he also sounds like he expects them.
85. Cher Lloyd – Want U Back
Cher Lloyd opens 'Want U Back' with an unaccompanied, explosive James Brown grunt (*uhhhh*!); she closes it by making a helicopter noise with her mouth. The track is peppered with the sort of playful vocal affectations that Lloyd so excels in: witness her glottal "got me, got me like this"; her clanging, mocking "pair of clowns, clowns, clowns"; her squeaky background chirrup of "is it true?!"; her guttural, Rihanna-parodying "eh, eh, eh"; and, of course, "res-taur-aaauunnt" (rhymes with 'taunt' and sounds like one). I could go on. In short, Lloyd goes out of her way to make an already-brilliant pop song even more fun to listen to, filling every corner of the track with herself. It's supposed to be about heartbreak, but somehow Lloyd makes it less about her beloved and more about herself being brilliant, less about feeling like shit (or "like shhhh", as she puts it) and more about having as much exhilerating, gleeful fun as can possibly fit into three-and-a-half minutes. She's a brilliant, intuitive pop vocalist, in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with hitting notes (although she's more than capable of doing that, too). That's why they call it the X Factor, remember? (Note to self: after 'Want U Back' ends up being one of the best pop singles of 2012, and I've heard it several thousand more times, I will probably want it for next year's list and be kicking myself for throwing it away at number 85 as an album track.)
84. Azealia Banks – 212
Maximalist pop song construction in the tradition of 'Mamma Mia' or 'Biology' - in the sense that '212' just throws hook after hook at the listener, and keeps coming up with new ideas long after you think there have been enough. But the track doesn't sound meticulously crafted, even though it probably is; you can't shake the feeling that 20-year-old Harlemite Azealia Banks is just making it up as she goes along. She starts out rapping over the song's clanking electro-house beat, making like the ridiculously foul-mouthed offspring of Peaches and Nicki Minaj; but for about 30 seconds in the middle of the song, she unexpectedly wheels out a deep, earthy Ella Fitzgerald singing voice. Obviously she quickly abandons it, preferring to yelp "whatchoo gon' do when I appear?!" at all comers in hysterical patois. The whole thing is ridiculous and brilliant.
83. Egyptrixx feat. Trust – Chrysalis Records
Toronto producer Egyptrixx, the foreign arm of London's neon electro-funky bass music crew Night Slugs, turns in a woozy, hazy, classic with 'Chrysalis Records'. Clipped funky house drumbeats stagger behind shimmering, hypnotic layers of synths to work a quiet, subtle pop magic.
82. Trash Talk – Awake
One minute and forty seconds. A relentless hardcore punk assault. But 'Awake' - the lead-off and title track of a great EP by Californian punks Trash Talk - is more measured than that description makes it sound, and more dynamic and catchy, too. It sounds like a compact, coiled-spring anthem. What it's all about is anyone's guess, frontman Lee Spielman screaming about hammers and sickles and your brain on drugs. What's unmistakeable, though, is the song's wired, furious conclusion: "I just want to stay awake". There was an awful lot of sleepy, dreamy, narcotic music released in 2011; some of it came out of California, and there will be a fair bit of it featured in this list. 'Awake' is the short, sharp, slap-in-the-face antidote.
81. Britney Spears – How I Roll
'How I Roll' is probably about as weird as the weird, warped world of Femme Fatale got. It opens with Britney gasping and breathing hard, before her breaths quickly become cut-up, processed, and warped until they are manage to transform themselves, as though through simply willing it, into the song's beat. There's a ticking, jittery, minimalist drumbeat that almost sounds like a quieter cousin of Chicago footwork; there's a warm, organic progression of piano chords that sounds almost comically out of place amidst all the futuristic noise; there's a chopped-and-spliced duet between a chorus of high-pitched and multi-tracked robot Britneys and some sort of pitched-down, strangulated, Peter Frampton whale call (which might also be Britney - who the hell knows?). Spears references Ol' Dirty Bastard and memorably boasts of having "nine lives, like a kitty cat". The fact that this sort of skeletal, incomprehensible weirdness can pass for major-label mainstream pop in 2011 is a pretty decent argument that we are living in a golden age.
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