60. Alexandra Stan – Mr. Saxobeat
There should be a law to stipulate at least one hit like this every year - a perfect bit of cheap-and-easy euro-dancepop, existing entirely outside of the norms and trends of the Anglo-American mainstream. Romanian singer Alexandra Stan would, apparently, like us to hear the song's title as "Mr sex-o-beat"; but given the track's actual title, and the saxophone loop that blares more or less throughout, she might as well be singing to the music itself rather than the "sexy boy" she addresses more directly. "You make me dance, bring me up, bring me down, play it sweet," she entreaties - the perfect love song from the singer to her riotous backing track.
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59. Will Young – Jealousy
Listening to 'Jealousy', I can't help but think that if, say, M83 or Neon Indian had come up with it, it would have sent the indie blogosphere into a meltdown of delirious joy. For that matter, if it were by Kings of Leon, it would have probably been a worldwide number one. It could never have sounded more perfect, however, than it did being sung by Will Young and produced by British pop veteran Richard X. The track's sparkly-but-downcast disco glow is brought fiercely to life by Young's vocal performance; he really sings like he's struggling to swallow and contain the creeping emotional darkness the song describes. When he snatches his way swiftly, in muted and suppressed panic, through "it feels like I can't breathe", you believe him; when he sighs, exhausted, "I'm tired of waiting, I'm tired of thinking", you are convinced. It's dark, adult pop worthy of Behaviour-era Pet Shop Boys. (Which reminds me - Behaviour actually closes with another song called 'Jealousy'.) High praise indeed.
58. Mosca – Bax
Just an absolutely spot-on bit of dancefloor wizardry from Mosca; 'Bax' is a magnificently simple four-to-the-floor garage rush with a rough-and-ready feel, laced with chopped-and-sliced diva vocals and occasional lo-fi snatches of MC chat ("my DJ is live in the place!"). Phenomenal.
57. Emeli Sandé – Heaven
A big, epic trip-hop ballad, a 'funky drummer' beat drenched in massive, epic strings, a stoical 'Unfinished Sympathy' ambience and some ruminative, vaguely spiritual lyrics - 'Heaven' pushed some easy buttons but managed to be tremendously affecting anyway. It was a deserved breakthrough for Scottish singer-songwriter Sandé, who soars beautifully over a glorious, airy soundscape, with subtle horn touches filling in just the right gaps for colour. "I wake with good intentions, but the day it always lasts too long" is perhaps the key lyric in a song about exhaustion, desperation, and the daily struggle to do, and be, right.
56. Katy B – Witches' Brew
'Witches' Brew' is produced by DJ Zinc, the man behind Ms Dynamite's stone-cold-classic 'Wile Out' - and Zinc works wonders on the backing track, filling the air with synths, swooping, spiralling and stabbing, alternating between four-to-the-floor house on the verses and clattering, breakbeat-driven future garage on the chorus. The instrumental on its own could have been an anthem, but Katy B is the perfect 2011 pop star, and was always going to transform it into something more. She cut her teeth as an anonymous session-vocalist for funky house producers, and knows how to make herself one with the music, guiding the listener through it and enhancing it. Her songs actually feel, and work, like dance music, rather than just appropriating its sounds; but she lends the music all the warmth, immediacy, humanity and personality of great pop. 'Witches Brew' is a perfect example of this formula, a standout on an album of back-to-back classics.
55. Cher Lloyd – Swagger Jagger
After writing almost two and a half thousand words on the topic of 'Swagger Jagger' earlier this year, is there anything left for me to say? Just that I still love listening to it: those huge, echoey bass drums, that squawking siren-meets-parrot synth, that fuzzy, hard-rock bassline underpinning the bridge, that unexpectedly melodic avalanche of trance synths on the chorus. For a song casually dismissed by so many as a contentless and repetitive nursery rhyme, there's an awful lot going on in 'Swagger Jagger'.
Then again, the song hardly goes out of its way to make its cobbled-together kitchen-sink Frankenstein's monster palatable to those on the fence - there was surely no other song released this year so explicitly designed to wind up listeners who didn't get it. At the time of writing, the song's clocked up almost 20 million YouTube views, with more 'dislikes' than 'likes'; "you can't stop YouTubing me, on repeat," Cher scoffs, pre-emptively. "I'm laughin' all the way!" There's that mocking nursery rhyme of a chorus, that deliberately not-quite-nonsensical title, those shamelessly trend-chasing barks of "get on the floor!", and the literal kiss-off to haters. Cher's advice to those haters? "Just let it go," obviously; but, perhaps more importantly - "get your game up". Lloyd is several steps ahead of you.
54. Girls – Honey Bunny
Pop songwriting like a top-tier Lennon-McCartney composition, and a desperate plea for comfort and unconditional love. The frantic bustle of 'Honey Bunny' is self-effacing and tongue-in-cheek; girls aren't interested in junkie rock star Christopher Owens, he tells us in an unforgettable chorus, because "they don't like! my! bo-ny bo-dy! They don't like! my! dir-ty hair! Or the stuff that I say - or the stuff that I'm on." As always with this band, though, there's a naivety and earnestness underpinning it all - as when Owens sings, to the true love he hasn't met yet, "you're gonna love me for all the reasons everyone hates me", and especially in the song's slow-motion middle-eight where he reminisces about unconditional maternal love.
53. SBTRKT feat. Roses Gabor – Pharaohs
For an album as dominated by nocturnal noises and dark spaces as SBTRKT's fantastic self-titled début, it seems a little unfair and unrepresentative to pick out for special comment something as bouncy and joyful as 'Pharaohs'. That's the way it goes sometimes, though - 'Pharaohs' is joyful, summery disco-house, which is something I can never really get too much of. What it's all about is anybody's guess - Roses Gabor's memorable chorus runs "all I see is you - stars - open arms - pharoahs - God - kings and queens", which communicates the mood of the thing well enough: transcendent, magisterial, divine, but - those "open arms" being key - welcoming.
52. WooWoos – Fizzy Lettuce
One of those songs that just came out of absolutely nowhere, this track - a limited-edition 7-inch début single from a three-piece girlband - sounds absolutely nothing like you'd imagine a song called 'Fizzy Lettuce' by an artist called WooWoos would. It's intense, dark and brooding - like All Saints being produced by Tricky circa 1997, all fuzzy, dirty, whirring beats, creepy pianos, and film-score strings. An incredibly intriguing opening salvo from an artist who it's hard to find out much about; also contains the lyric, "pharmaceutical run - that's just so much fun".
51. Vato Gonzalez feat. Foreign Beggars – Badman Riddim (Jump)
That cover probably describes 'Badman Riddim (Jump)' better than I ever could - it's an impossibly colourful, brash and ridiculous few minutes of noise, a comic book monster stomping all over everything in its path. It's a multicultural party - extended samples of blaring melodrama from Japanese composer Akira Ifukube's Godzilla soundtrack, rampaging dirty house beats from Dutch producer Gonzalez, and roughneck grime vocals from genre-hopping London crew Foreign Beggars. Fantastic.
50. Beyoncé – Run The World (Girls)
'Run The World (Girls)' is feminist in broadly the same way as, say, 'Girls Just Want To Have Fun'; which is to say that its jumble of ideas doesn't really stand up to any particularly close scrutiny (after all, it's a pop song, not an academic sociological treatise), but as a hyper-kinetic piece of visual/sonic rhetoric, it's undeniable. A lot of it is the way Beyoncé's towering presence contrasts with the alien minimalism of the beat; for an awful lot of the track, she's singing over nothing but those skittery, chaotic, martial drums, and the other main sound on the track is that Diplo-trademarked indescribable high-pitched blare. Beyoncé's always a staggeringly talented vocalist technically speaking, but this is a really incredible vocal performance all around - her fierce snarl of "disrespect us? No they won't"; her perfectly drawled "Houston, Texas, baby"; her deadpan "I remind you, I'm so hood with this"; and, best of all, the genuinely unsettling, sneering, switch-and-bait sarcasm of "boy, I'm just playing/come here, baby/hope you still like me".
The game is sort of given away when Beyoncé, as if singing on behalf of an entire gender, boasts "we smart enough to make these millions!" Ultimately, the song is less about girls running the world, and more about Beyoncé Knowles running the world. Less ideologically coherent and powerful than some of us would have perhaps liked it to be, but exceptional pop music nonetheless.
49. Falty DL – Hip Love
Just one of those really magical bits of breakbeat alchemy; Falty DL's greatest track of a great and prolific year, 'Hip Love' managed to take just a few, minimal elements - that impossible-to-figure-out beat, some subtle touches of horns, muted vocal samples - and create something staggeringly affecting and endlessly fascinating.
48. Kendrick Lamar feat. Ashtro Bot – Keisha’s Song (Her Pain)
Kendrick Lamar's Section.80 is, in some ways, an old-fashioned sort of rap album - it's a detailed and cinematic portrait of the messy realities of underclass life in a geographically specific locale. 'Keisha's Song' is the 24-year-old Compton newcomer's attempt to write about the experiences of prostitutes in his area. The specificity (references to Long Beach Boulevard and Lueder's Park, a Compton park notorious as a centre of gang activity), painful cinematic detail, and a Rosa Parks reference with layers of tragic resonance make the track incredibly arresting. Lamar doesn't offer any answers, easy or otherwise; rather, 'Keisha's Song' does what hip-hop has always been great at - a relatively untutored processing of life's everyday horrors. It's also, sadly, a rare thing indeed for a male street-rap artist to take female perspectives and experiences as seriously as this. It'd be easy to find the song a little naive or clusmy; but every single time I hear it, it hits with far too much emotional force for me to be cynical about it.
47. James Blake – The Wilhelm Scream
'The Wilhelm Scream', although most of us didn't realise it at first, turned out to be a cover of 'Where To Turn', a song by James Blake's father, singer-songwriter James Litherlake. A lot of Blake's most brilliant work, from 'CMYK' to 'Limit To Your Love', has involved him in artful re-interpretation of some source material or other, and a comparison between the two songs brings out a lot of what's so interesting about 'The Wilhelm Scream'. Blake lifts some rote-seeming lyrics set to a simple, circular melody, and casts the song into a maelstrom of creepy beats and echoey space, the uncertainty and depressive despair of the song brought vividly to life in the sonic world Blake builds around it.
46. Girls – Just A Song
The epic, downcast centrepiece of Girls' phenomenal Father, Son, Holy Ghost album. 'Just A Song' opens with a minute or so of classical guitar; its almost seven-minute whole stays almost impossibly quiet, soft and vulnerable throughout. There aren't many words to it, but there are two key refrains. The first, which opens the song, runs "it just feels like it's gone, oh it's gone, gone away/seems like nobody's happy now" - a sense of magic and innocence lost, of disconnection and malaise. The second, which closes proceedings, repeats: "love - it's just a song". But that "just a song," from a song this rich and perfectly-constructed, from a songwriter clearly in love with songs and convinced of their importance and power, is double-edged. If love, or happiness, is 'just' a song, then maybe it's always within our grasp; maybe that magic that had departed is always within touching distance. 'Just A Song' is just a song, but perhaps, it seems to say, that's enough.
45. Africa Hitech – Out In The Streets
British dance producers have been absorbing the influence of Chicago footwork for a short while now, and, along with last year's 'Footcrab' from Addison Groove, 'Out In The Streets' is surely one of the best examples of the trend. Production duo Africa Hitech get the vibe, the rhythms and the production tics of footwork exactly right; but they also put their own spin on it, making the track fuller, richer and more layered than the rough-and-ready minimalism of the Chicago producers. With a head-spinningly relentless Junior Reid sample at its heart, 'Out In The Streets' really evokes the humid, frantic bustle that its title suggests.
44. Kreayshawn – Gucci Gucci
By my count, 'Gucci Gucci' uses the word "bitch", or some variant thereof, 39 times - considerably more times than Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull managed to say "on the floor" between them, for those keeping count. Quite a lot of those are accounted for by that maddeningly catchy hook: a pitched-down sample of Kreayshawn's own voice intoning "one big room, full of bad bitches". That's 'bad' as in 'good', obviously, and presumably 'bitches' as in 'good' as well.
If Kreayshawn is reclaiming misogynistic slurs here, and she certainly is, she's not above using them as a weapon at the same time; in the song's chorus she reels off a list of expensive brands before declaring "them basic bitches wear that shit, so I don't even bother". I had a lightbulb moment regarding 'Gucci Gucci' when I saw an interview with Kreayshawn describing what she means by "basic bitches" and realised that it was more or less exactly what the Slits meant by 'Typical Girls' - she's (relatively gently) lambasting those of her peers who buy unthinkingly into conventional and repressive models of femininity, and claiming her refusal to do so as a mark of honour. It's a celebration of individual DIY style that actually has a lot in common with the London punk scene of the late '70s.
Of course, attacking individuals for being shaped by problematic social structures, rather than attacking those structures themselves, is politically and ethically problematic, too - and that goes for the Slits as well as Kreayshawn. It goes without saying that 'Gucci Gucci' is closer to being a contradictory mess than a coherent call to empowerment. Like 'Run The World (Girls)', though, the main purpose of the track is to browbeat the listener into accepting the amazingness of its performer. Kreayshawn throws out plenty of quoteables: "I'm lookin' like Madonna but I'm flossin' like Ivana... Trump!"; the hilarious "you can't find that? I think you need a Google Map"; "while you lookin' bitter, I be lookin' better"; and, of course, the immortal "I got the swag, and it's pumpin' out my ovaries!" Meanwhile, that old-school g-funk synthline and that very 2011 bass-wobble give the track the force it needs for every one of Kreayshawn's sneers to hit home. Ridiculous, utterly fresh, and totally irresistable.
43. The Field – It’s Up There
'It's Up There' was my favourite track from the wonderful Looping State Of Mind; a coursing, transcendent, and urgent 9-minute journey through the Field's deep, rich and layered shoegaze-techno. Transportative magic.
42. Nicola Roberts – Lucky Day
Just one of the arresting things about 'Lucky Day' was that it showed Nicola Roberts as a stronger, more versatile and more interesting pop vocalist than one would previously have suspected. Her performance is stunning throughout - her voice a hard, glassy presence, peppered with wordless affectations ("waw-waw-waw", "ah-ha"). Lyrically, it retreads the desperate-for-fulfilment territory of 'Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want'; musically, it's a perfect pop construct, driving but quiet pianos giving way to huge skyscraper synths when they need to. An understated and uncommon bit of pop magic.
41. PJ Harvey – The Last Living Rose
The shortest track on Let England Shake, and in some ways that record's most simple and unassuming song. Its title notwithstanding, most of the album stretches its gaze far beyond England, but 'The Last Living Rose' is firmly rooted in Harvey's homeland. Part of the song's uneasy brilliance comes simply from the sheer poetry of its lyrics, with its "grey, damp filthiness of ages" and walking "through the stinking alleys, past the music of drunken beatings"; with the casual description of the Thames "glistening like gold, hastily sold for nothing - nothing!" Harvey draws together natural beauty and global economics in a complex, many-layered metaphor. On that second "nothing", the singer breaks just slightly from her guarded reserve, and the song responds with a forceful and melancholy duet of horns - Harvey herself on the saxophone, underpinned by John Parish's more muted trombone. And in her sly, subtle nod to the world beyond the island's shores, Harvey provides some clue as to what is causing tremors through the land in the song's final section, as "the sky move, the ocean shimmer, the hedge shake, the last living rose ... quiver". Let England shake, indeed.
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