20. Drake feat. Rihanna – Take Care
There's quite a storied ancestry behind this one. 'I'll Take Care Of You' was first recorded as a smoky, nocturnal bit of waltz-time blue soul by Bobby Bland in 1959. Over 50 years later, it was covered - in a similarly smoky and nocturnal, although somewhat more ravaged, fashion - by 60-year-old Gil Scott-Heron on I'm New Here, his last album before his death earlier this year. A few months before Scott-Heron's death, Jamie xx had released We're New Here, an album consisting of his remixes and reworkings of tracks from I'm New Here, and which closed with 'I'll Take Care Of U', Jamie's remix of Scott-Heron's version 'I'll Take Care Of You'. About six months after Gil Scott-Heron died, Drake - partly in tribute - released 'Take Care', a reworking of the song which heavily samples and interpolates 'I'll Take Care Of U' (the Jamie xx version).
Full disclosure: the first time I heard 'Take Care', I was totally unaware of all of the above. It was during my first listen through to Take Care, the album, and as soon as I heard Rihanna sing that opening couplet, straight out of 1959 Bobby Bland ("I know you've been hurt by someone else/I can tell by the way you carry yourself") I knew it was going to be something very special. A lot of the work is certainly done by that gorgeous, achingly sad (and totally recycled) production from Jamie xx; the track, in either iteration, just sounds beautiful. But what the Drake/Rihanna version does is sort of the exact inverse of what Johnny Cash did with Nine Inch Nails' 'Hurt'; it takes a song sung by a man near the end of his life, and makes it about a more open-ended youthful angst. The song, which in this version becomes a conversation rather than a monologue, is about trying to love, and take care of, a person who still bears the scars of their past, while wrestling with your own ghosts and baggage at the same time. The stakes of this for Drake and Rihanna (just 25 and 23 respectively) are rather different; "I've loved and I've lost" means something different coming from Rihanna than it did from Scott-Heron, and is certainly no less affecting.
19. 2NE1 – I Am The Best
One of the interesting things that happened in 2011 was the increased attention paid by the Anglo-American world to Korean pop. K-pop looks well set for a mainstream breakthrough in the world outside of Asia, and is already well beloved by plenty of fans, tastemakers and musicians. It's not hard to see why - the genre is tremendously visually striking (as much about music videos as songs, it's perfect for internet users who do most of their active music listening through YouTube) and full of brilliant songs. The effect actually feels a little bit analogous to the way British groups imitating American pop stormed the US in the '60s; from my perspective, listening to (and viewing) K-pop is like hearing Western pop re-interpreted from a novel new angle and filtered through different cultural norms - the familiar rendered unfamiliar.
I didn't have a chance to delve into K-pop as deeply as I would have liked to this year; my favourite artist, though, were definitely girlgroup 2NE1, and their fantastically-titled 'I Am The Best' was the K-pop song of 2011 for me. I don't speak (or understand) Korean, and my research hasn't extended to finding anything out about the song's lyrics, so all I can understand are the odd bits in English here and there ("I'm hot-hot-hot-hot, fire"; "billion dollar baby"; and, I think, something about Madonna). But the brilliant thing - and one has to think that this has something to do with the craze for K-pop in the West - was how little it mattered what was being said, and how disregarding the words leads the listener to experience a different, more basic, semantics of pop in the combination of sounds and images. The tribal electro-stomp of 'I Am The Best' was equal parts 'Swagger Jagger', 'Run The World (Girls)', 'Hold It Against Me' and 'Notorious'. And better than any of them.
18. Deadboy – Wish U Were Here
Easily one of the year's greatest dance anthems; there's a strong hint of breakbeat garage in the rhythms, but 'Wish U Were Here' is essentially an ecstatic, soaring and hypnotic disco-house epic. It's difficult to say much about it other than it sounds absolutely amazing, one of those happy-sad tunes that works equally well as breezy and summery or as wistful and wintery. A classic.
17. WU LYF – Dirt
Four kids from Manchester, WU LYF recorded one of the most exciting British rock albums of the year in a church in Ancoats, producing and releasing it themselves. The music was vast and earnest, recalling the emotional sprawl of bands like Arcade Fire and Modest Mouse; but the most unique element in the band's sound were Ellery James Roberts' vocals, half raspy whisper, half strangulated bark, utterly alien and virtually incomprehensible. The standout track was the anthemic 'Dirt', a galvanising call-to-arms for the disaffected, the sort of intense and frustrated rock music which demands that the world mean something, which insists, however obliquely, that there are things in the world that matter, a right which is better than what is wrong. Ellery rails against "a liar's town", where "a hundred people hold you down"; he insists upon the power of words and knowledge ("we killed a man/by telling him things he didn't understand"), and vents frustration directly at his parents ("Mum and Dad, look what you done to me"). It feels like the confused and bitter reaction of someone born into an ugly, cruel world, the refusal to numb yourself to that world through self-medication like Kendrick Lamar, the determination to draw some meaningful conclusion. Perhaps the closest the band come to that latter is in the biting slogan "no matter what they said - dollar is not your friend". Or perhaps it's in the song's closing refrain; WU LYF officially stands for World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation, but Ellery closes 'Dirt' by giving an alternative interpretation: "world unite, love you forever".
16. Nicolas Jaar – Don’t Break My Love
American-Chilean producer Nicolas Jaar released his début album, Space Is Only Noise, in January; I liked that album a lot, but 'Don't Break My Love' - a free single Jaar put out online towards the end of the year - actually blew the whole album out of the water. Oddly enough, the track works more like an album than anything else on this list does; its six-minute duration plays out a subtle journey from beginning to end. "Subtle" is really the only word for it - 'Don't Break My Love' starts out as barely-there ambient noise, slowly building into a gorgeous and eerie minimal techno piece before blossoming into an unexpected emotional payoff for the last minute or so, and snapping out with an equally unexpected and abrupt ending. A symphony of synthesizers and samples.
15. Katy B – Broken Record
Of all the moves London bass music made into the realm of pop in 2011, Katy B's On A Mission album was arguably the most powerful, functioning simultaneously as a perfect dance album and a perfect pop album. After the anthems 'Katy On A Mission' and 'Lights On' in 2010, Katy B continued a winning streak of singles with March's Geeneus/Zinc co-production 'Broken Record'. It's the album's most emotionally vulnerable and weighed-down moment, a stylus looping over vinyl becoming an emotional trap in its central metaphor, its memorable opening lyric running "I would toss and turn at night with your voice in my head", Katy begging "please don't let me go" on the chorus. More crucially, it's a magnificent piece of music, totally different in style from both the weighty dubstep of 'Katy On A Mission' and the fleet-footed funky house of 'Lights On'. 'Broken Record' sounds almost like a more hard-edged late-90s William Orbit beat on its urgent, trancey verses, before giving way to a clattering 'Funky Drummer' sample for the cathartic release of the chorus; a spectacular bit of breakbeat garage, and yet another phenomenal record from a phenomenal pop artist.
14. Girls – Vomit
Girls frontman Christopher Owens was, notoriously, raised in a Christian cult. It's a fact that seems to loom over 'Vomit', from its title (drawn from a Bible passage, "as a dog returns to his vomit, so does a fool return to his folly") to the air of religiosity (as well as of Dark Side Of The Moon) conjured up by the organ and gospel choir of the track's closing section. Before that closing section is arrived at, Owens spends the song lost and lonely; he sounds like a hollow, ghostly presence, "looking for love", only briefly breaking out of the hopeless and circular trap of the song for a fuzzy and frustrated guitar solo.
Then the song starts to fill out, and build up in layers, and Owens issues a startling bald admission of incompleteness and dependence: "there's something that I get from myself, and there's something that you give to me/when I got one without the other, well, it's not enough ... I need your love". As though the admission had lightened the burden, the song opens out, lets some light in, and Owens sounds less tormented during that closing organ-and-gospel segment, as he repeatedly intones "come into my heart", delivering the line more like an invocation than an invitation. Owens apparently wrote the song about an old girlfriend, but its stark portrayal of neediness runs broader than that - he could be singing about drugs; he could be singing about God. 'Vomit', in any case, is a glorious song, and the high point of an extraordinarily good album; expertly constructed, perfectly executed, and brought vividly to life with warm, rich production. It's the sort of record that makes it seem like being this good is easy. The astonishing thing is that for Girls, you can believe that it actually might be.
13. Lady Gaga – Judas
Lady Gaga had a funny 2011. She certainly doesn't seem to have ended the year with quite the level of cultural importance she began it with; she's still one of the world's biggest pop stars, sure, but for the eighteen months or so between 'Bad Romance' and 'Born This Way' she seemed to be out there on her own, a weird and singular presence, a megastar without parallel. Her move away from electro-pop on singles like 'The Edge Of Glory' and 'Yoü And I' left her, rather than the rest of pop, looking less relevant. I've had a rocky relationship with Gaga as an artist - generally, I've wanted to be able to like her more than I actually have. I admire her earnestness and her theatricality, but her big early singles left me pretty cold. She talked the talk, but I wished - so to speak - that she would walk the walk, and make music that was more coherent, focussed and meaningful, especially with regard to the sociopolitical concerns she apparently cared so much about. With the Born This Way album, she did do that, but overall it was fairly ham-fisted, and I still didn't like that much of the music. So I like Gaga more now that I once did, but I also don't have the same sense of unrealised potential from her.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying: I have come to accept that I will never be a Lady Gaga fan, but that she can still occasionally turn out an amazing single when everything falls in its right place, and if she manages one song as good as 'Judas' on every album, then I'm happy. I never got 'Bad Romance', and 'Judas' is largely a shameless retread. But the latter song is executed with far more intensity and ferocity; where 'Bad Romance' felt oddly lifeless and emotionally blank, 'Judas' is raucous, rampant and ridiculous. Its electro-stomp beats hit hard, those squalling siren-synths forcing the listener to sit up and pay attention. As a song, it's so packed with hooks that the actual sugar-sweet chorus ("just a holy fool") is the least catchy moment, taking a back seat to Gaga's wordless wailing like a thrash-metal guitar on the bridge, her dead-eyed and dispassionate Eurodisco enunciations ("a king with no crown"), the hands-in-the-air slow section and its eruption back into the main song ("I cling to!"), a totally off-topic rap in which Gaga says "prostitute wench" and "ear condom", that epic post-chorus swell ("wooah-oh-oh-oh-oh"), and - of course - "Ju-dah! Ju-da-ah-ah, Ju-dah! Ga-gaaa!"
12. Jamie xx – Far Nearer
'Far Nearer' just says everything about why Jamie xx is such an exciting producer. Both anthemic and arty, it marries twinkly steel drums to funky-house breakbeats, equally perfect for the beach party and the night bus, deep and melancholy, warm and romantic. Seven minutes of bliss.
11. Adele – Rolling In The Deep
It's easy to forget, with overfamiliarity, just how weird 'Rolling In The Deep' really is, how difficult it was to make sense of on first listen. It's not a conventional soul song, it's not a conventional blues song, it's certainly not a conventional folk or country song, much as it incorporates elements of all of these things; it's just not a conventional song. In the context of the shiny and synthetic pop charts of 2011, co-opting the sounds of Greil Marcus' "old, weird America" was about of much as a sore thumb as anyone could have dreamed up. The way those influences get chewed up and spat out in this vicious, staccato stomp of a pop song renders them anything but retrogressive. The structure of the song is circular, but it never really feels like it's repeating itself - 'Rolling In The Deep' is all about slow-building momentum, as intense as it is hateful. That final verse, when the layers of the song fall away, an Adele is left emoting hard and fierce over nothing but that martial stomp of a drumbeat, surrounded by demonic gospel backing singers, is pure magic; it doesn't really sound like anything else.
One wonders, too, whether anyone who stereotyped Adele and 21 as the ultimate in polite background music could possibly have been listening to 'Rolling In The Deep'. It is anything but polite, one of the most seething and vitriolic mega-hits of this or any other year; it has the feel of an incantation, and a mood of almost terrifying savagery. Adele's darkly muttered "don't underestimate the things that I will do" over that minimal, brooding stomp in the first verse feels like a threat, all the more scary for its lack of specificity, and like one directed as much at the unwary listener as the ex-boyfriend who is the subject (or, rather, the object) of 21 as an album. With the cryptic "I have no story to be told/but I've heard one on you, and I'm gonna make your head burn", Adele seems willing to erase her whole identity, submerging her entire self into her vengeful hatred. "Think of me in the depths of your despair," she sneers, before suggesting "make a home down there". And the one moment where Adele softens just slightly, the one moment where she expresses something like regret rather than fury - her impassioned howl of "we could have had it all" into the chorus - she is immediately responded to by a blank background chant, performing an act of staggering emotional projection: "you're gonna wish you never had met me".
10. Example – Changed The Way You Kiss Me
A lot of contemporary in-the-club pop has been concerned with establishing a mood of irresistible inertia and momentum. 'Changed The Way You Kiss Me' appropriates the en vogue sound of club-pop - floaty trance synths, dark-and-dirty house beats, abrasive 'dubstep' bass - to turn the tables on that mood, to ask what happens if you try to resist that irresistible, forward-hurtling momentum rather than surrendering to it. Example's narrator is flung forward anyway, against his will; "please wind me back", he begs, longing for a retreat - "looking for a way back home, but I can't get back". And that titular image could be literal or a metaphor for just about anything - a general sense that things are out of one's control, warping and going awry, and a longing for a return to something simpler, and better, that is lost forever.
9. Beyoncé – 1+1
'1+1' is just about the polar opposite of 'Changed The Way You Kissed Me' and its terrifying, breakneck momentum; the music just hangs there, suspended in air. It creeps in on a waltz-time acoustic guitar riff, finding room for the odd piano chord, a bassline like liquid honey, and the twinklings of wind chimes. It's a couple of minutes in before we hear any drums, and even then they are impossibly subtle, just giving occasional taps and rolls for emphasis rather than driving the song forward. Around the same time, some string-section flourishes make an appearance, also doing no more than they need to. Eventually the song resolves itself into an all-too-perfect guitar solo, right out of some '80s late-night-radio soft rock. It's a hazy, soft-focus pop symphony.
All of which is to ignore the song's most obvious, prominent, and central sound - I'm not sure when I last heard a pop record on which the lead vocal was so front-and-centre, so clearly designed to do so much of the work. (No, not even 'Someone Like You'.) And Beyoncé lives up to the arrangement with the vocal performance of a lifetime, a raw, gritty, octave-spanning masterpiece. Labelling a song a 'vocal showcase' sounds like a criticism, but '1+1' feels like it's been designed to bring out everything amazing about Beyoncé's voice; she roars and growls where she needs to, she coos softly when appropriate. Showcasing technical brilliance is a bad thing when it's done at the expense of an emotional connection, but the Beyoncé of '1+1' knows exactly what technical mastery is for. This is no modern R&B ballad - this is soul, in the truest and deepest sense, and every syllable Beyoncé sings is a reminder of just why we call it soul.
Like 'Rolling In The Deep', '1+1' is also a very weird record (its weirdness perhaps best communicated in those arresting, octave-jumping shrieks that Beyoncé leaps into as a disconcerting punctuation to each line of the song's verses). It's all the more strange because it doesn't reach for the familiar tropes that modern pop uses to signal weirdness (i.e., alien electronic beats and vocal processing); rather, it takes everything familiar about pop and heightens it, from that soft-focus backing track to those Sam Cooke-cribbing Tin Pan Alley lyrics, casting the familiar in a new light as though to expose just how extreme and startling a love ballad can really be.
8. Jacques Greene – Another Girl
"You got me feelin' like a..." That's the unfinished clause that loops over and over itself during the most dramatic passage of 'Another Girl'; the track's greatest and most spine-tingling moment comes when that build finally releases, and the sentence finally completes itself - with a beautiful, wordless coo. At least, that's what I thought while I was listening to 'Another Girl' all year. It was only when I gave a listen to the sample's original source, Ciara's 'Deuces', that I realised Ciara is actually singing "you got me feelin' like a fool". On 'Another Girl', though, that 'f' is barely audible, and actually gets clipped off when the phrase is repeatedly looped: "ooh-hoo-oo-wooooh". Which actually says a lot about how tracks like 'Another Girl' work; vocal fragments are appropriated, taken out of a context where they function as part of a narrative, and re-deployed as sonic trigger buttons where sounds are more important than meanings. That ambiguous, stretched-out syllable can mean whatever you want it to mean - euphoria, melancholy, love, regret, or all at once.
7. EMA – Marked
"I almost threw up on the spot"; "I wish I had another hole to get it out". Given these sort of visceral and disgusted body-horror lyrics, you might expect 'Marked' to sound like the inwardly-directed rage of Nirvana or PJ Harvey circa 1993. What you might not expect is something so quiet, so gentle, so softly-whispered as this.
"I wish, sometimes, just so I could explain things..." Erika M. Anderson muses, "I wish that every time he touched me left a mark." That last uncomfortable phrase forms the central refrain of 'Marked', and gives it its title. While the song is certainly partly about physical abuse ("I fell down in the dark/don't you start"), its emotional terrain - and emotional power - run broader than that, and its title works on different levels. Anderson is "marked" emotionally and wishes - "just so I could explain things" - for physical marks to make her inner pain seem concrete and real, something that can be made intersubjectively intelligible to other people. It's about a frustrated wish to open up, to let light in on dark and private things, to be seen, recognised and understood. And so to that "I wish I had another hole to get it out" (the album's lyric booklet appends this lyric with a parenthesised "trepanation"); that longing to "get it out" means a longing both to be rid of something and to be able to communicate it, get it out into the open, and it is telling that only the language of physical expulsion will do.
The breathtaking arc of the music mirrors something of this structure - the song starts out in close-up, intimate darkness, Anderson's voice a croaking whisper, the audible squeaks and creaks of her acoustic guitar making the song feel uncomfortably exposed. More than two and a half minutes in, and more than halfway through the song, a soft, fluid and melodious organ enters proceedings, and it sounds like light suddenly pouring in. For the second half of the song, Anderson's vocals are multi-tracked, less raw and exposed, less cracked. She's emoting as softly and quietly as ever, though, still whispering, not exploding. When she finally, exhausted at the song's end, declares "if there was a way to get it out, I wanna get it out", she reminds us that she still hasn't gotten it out, that performing this song is not "a way to get it out", but a longing for a catharsis that never comes.
6. DJ Rashad & DJ Manny – R House
I absolutely love Chicago footwork. When it comes to the global dance village, I'm always drawn to idiosyncratic local mutations of electronica. I really enjoy South African Shangaan electro, Scandinavian skweee, Angolan kuduro, and Dutch bubblin'. But none of these strains hits me quite like footwork, which to my ears is some of the most radical and exciting music being made on the planet right now.
'R House' kicks off with a sample of the iconic Chuck Roberts vocal that graced two Chicago house classics, Rhythm Control's 1987 'My House' and Mr Fingers' 1988 'Can You Feel It'. This monologue is one of the most recognisable reference points imaginable for reverent Chicago house heads - it's a self-mythologising, pseudo-religious ode to the power of house music. 'R House' leads off with some looped snatches from odd bits of Roberts' speech, before suddenly snapping into a thunderous and shocking avalanche of pummelling, staccato, warped single-syllable samples, as violent and raw as classic Chicago house was soulful and deep.
And there's the thing - I don't think I've ever heard any track that's so punk, so sonically aggressive with its disorientating shock tactics, while at the same time placing itself so proudly and reverently within a tradition. When Roberts said "this is our house", it was as opposed to it being "my house" - house is everyone's, a "universal language spoken and understood by all", erasing all differences and bringing humanity together. Here, though, it's "our house" as opposed to your house, that vocal turned back against the very purists who venerate it so much - "this is our house," it almost sneers, and, by implication, our Chicago. Footwork is a direct descendent of Chicago house, and 'R House' claims the genre's right to that lineage, even as it gleefully obliterates Roberts' iconic speech, shattering it into a million pieces until that voice is simply barking "this! this! this! this! this!" like an ecstatic and over-enthusiastic reblog on tumblr. A thing of absolute beauty.
5. Adele – Set Fire To The Rain
'Rolling In The Deep' and 'Someone Like You' mark (respectively) the aggressive and passive-aggressive bookends of 21, opening the record in a roar of vengeful anger and ending it on a sour note of unresolved, despondent non-closure. But the album's greatest moment is its heart and centrepiece, 'Set Fire To The Rain'. The song is bigger, more layered, and more dramatic than anything else on the record, a classic breakup-betrayal ballad, epic and elemental in scope. Adele begins the song falling through darkness, before being caught and "saved" by the song's addressee; in a perfect couplet, she turns this love and comfort into something threatening: "my knees were far to weak/to stand in your arms without falling to your feet". There's a particular sadness in "all the games you play, you would always win", especially given how often, on the aggressive and defensive second-guessing and one-upmanship throughout 21, Adele still appears to be trying to play those games. But that darkly muttered line leads us straight into the explosive chorus, Adele setting fire to the rain; fire and rain, cleansing, purifying, freeing. That huge and beautiful chorus is her best stab at genuine openness, vulnerability and freedom.
4. PJ Harvey – The Words That Maketh Murder
PJ Harvey spent about two years researching and writing the lyrics for Let England Shake before giving any thought whatsoever to the music. That level of craft and care suggests an artist who knows a lot about the importance and power of language. Hence 'The Words That Maketh Murder'. The song focusses in, with visceral and physical intensity, on the horrific details of war and violence - "soldiers fall like lumps of meat"; "arms and legs were in the trees"; "flies swarming everyone"; "flesh quivering in the heat". She's got a name for all of this horror - murder, a word not often invoked in relation to war, and a gesture of naming which in itself reveals the power of language to reveal or to obscure the brutal reality which the song confronts. Harvey's main concern, though, is with the words which, as though in an act of magic, have summoned this brutality into the world. I'm reminded of Mai Khalil's chorus of "the words that tell me nothing" on Lowkey's 'Dear England', and of WU LYF's "we killed a man by telling him things he didn't understand". Words have the power to define, shape, and alter the world.
And there's something genuinely scary and uncanny about 'The Words That Maketh Murder', like the ground is constantly shifting under the song's feet. That opening gasp of "I've seen and done things I want to forget"; the way the entry of Harvey and Parrish's horns abruptly transforms the airy, autoharp-assisted incantation of the beginning into a scorching Beefheart-blues stomp; that crucial, equivocal couplet "this was something else again/I fear I cannot explain", language coming up against impossible barriers. And, of course, that Eddie Cochran quotation at the song's close - "what if I take my problem to the United Nations?"
That reference, and all of its layers, is a perfect example of the brilliance of Let England Shake. Cochran, one of the legendary figures of American rock'n'roll in the late 1950s, died in a road accident at the age of 21 - in Wiltshire, of all places, a prime example of how all roads on Let England Shake lead back to England. He was nineteen when he recorded and released 'Summertime Blues', a classic rant about teenage frustration and disenfranchisement in '50s America, which included the jokey announcement "I'm gonna take my problem to the United Nations!" The U.N. was fairly new when Cochran sang about it; Harvey's appropriation reminds us of all the history that has passed since then, as well as that which came before - the setting up of the League of Nations in the aftermath of the First World War, and the League's replacement by the United Nations after the Second. When Cochran announces his intention to solicit help from the U.N., it's obviously a joke, playing off the fact that his problems (mainly with his parents and his summer job) are not of much concern to politicians and diplomats. (Cochran goes to his congressman for help, and is told "I'd like to help you son, but you're too young to vote"; how many of those who died in the two world wars were Cochran's age or younger?) The horrors described in 'The Words That Maketh Murder' are, conversely, exactly the kind of problem the United Nations was set up to deal with; so the fact that the line rings as just as much of a joke, albeit a much blacker one, in this context, is telling indeed.
3. EMA – California
We've heard a lot from California in this list so far. Frank Ocean was appropriating the Eagles' damning take on the state itself as a hedonistic prison back on 'American Wedding'; over the past twelve months, the state has also given us Lil B and Kreayshawn's oddball hip-hop, Trash Talk's furious hardcore punk, Rebecca Black's plastic party pop, Kendrick Lamar's socially-conscious underclass rap, and Girls' classicist, romantic pop-rock. On 'California', Erika M. Andersson - born in South Dakota, but relocated to the Golden State for some years now - takes aim at the place, opening this song with "fuck California, you made me boring". Over a slow, stately drone - thudding, echoey drums, wailing violins and walls of feedback - Anderson intones a stream-of-consciousness series of images and ideas. "I bled all my blood out, but these red pants, they don't show that"; "schizophrenia rules the brain, aliens coming to take you away"; "what's it like to be small-town and gay?"; "quick hit to the face, soft blow to the mouth on Christmas morning"; "you corrupted us all with your sexuality, tried to tell me love was free". It's heartbreaking and beautiful without ever quite coalescing into a coherent narrative, like Anderson trying to process and make sense of a whole life all at once in a series of elliptical asides. Just as with 'The Words That Maketh Murder', the most striking line is actually a quotation from the 1950s: "I'm just twenty-two, and I don't mind dyin'", originally spat out casually and at high-speed by Bo Diddley on 'Who Do You Love?', here drawled out slowly, starkly and sadly.
2. Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris – We Found Love
When I first wrote about 'We Found Love', I called it "disarmingly reductive". And it is - Calvin Harris' bright and twinkly electro-house marries euphoria and melancholy, balances light and darkness, while Rihanna's endlessly repeated vocal hook finds both love in hopelessness and hopelessness in love. There are not many elements at play, but they are more than sufficient for three-and-a-half enchanting minutes of perfect pop, six weeks at number one, and Rihanna's biggest and best hit since 'Umbrella'.
1. Lil B – I Hate Myself
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with hip-hop. Viewed through a certain lens, the story of the genre's development is one of the most romantic and beautiful in music history. An all-encompassing culture built out of nothing by impoverished, disenfranchised and marginalised kids in the Bronx of the '70s, hip-hop turned instruments of consumption (vinyl records and turntables) into instruments of creation by people given no outlet for creativity. A musical language, built as means of folk expression for marginalised and ghettoised urban youths in different corners of the United States, managed to become perhaps the single most important and influential cultural achievement of the late 20th and early 21st century.
If hip-hop is fundamentally the music of the disempowered, it is perhaps equally fundamentally about achieving empowerment. And so there's something inherently defensive and combative about the music, a constant need to prove oneself the best, to admit no failures and no weaknesses, to creatively transform everything into one-upmanship, every circumstance and identity into a way of marking oneself out as better than any competitors. As something encoded into the DNA of the music, it's a defensiveness born out of a lack of privilege, internalised classism and racism, collective self-hatred. In practice, it often ends up reproducing some ugly, hateful and conservative modes of thinking - misogyny, homophobia, glorification of material success. Remember 42-year-old multimillionaire Jay-Z on 'Otis' - "not bad, huh, for some immigrants?" That material gain is his only tenable source of self-worth, still his only defiant defence against a country that still makes him feel like he doesn't belong there. Even the most socially conscious rappers tend to carry this baggage around with them, even if it only comes out in the ferocious complexity of their delivery, the taut, defensive 'hardness' of their music; there's a reason why technical ability continues to hold such importance in hip-hop, so long after the gentrified rock tradition stopped worrying about it. Whether it's toughness, material success, authenticity, technical skill or intelligence, something about the internal logic of hip-hop includes a compulsion to find something you can use as a weapon, to insulate yourself from criticism, to deflate the attacks of an imagined interlocutor. The default addressee of a rap lyric is a phantom competitor or critic; this device has become so normalised that listeners probably don't often stop and realise how odd, and how sad, it actually is.
When Lil B released an album called I'm Gay, then, he was certainly aiming to confront homophobia and general bigotry within hip-hop culture. But the album struck deeper, at the buried and fucked-up roots of that bigotry. It was a deconstruction of hip-hop: what happens, the album seemed to ask, if you take that defensive hardness, that pathological need for self-aggrandisement, out of rap music? Lil B's beats are soft, expansive, and dreamy, rather than hard and terse. His vocal style is absolutely fascinating; it deliberately breaks all the rules of rap delivery, wandering all over the beat rather than locking tightly into it, often not even rhyming. Half the time he sounds as though he is just thinking out loud, working out his thoughts in real time; as a result, he is often self-contradictory, often imperfect, often messy. But that very gesture was the most powerful musical gesture of 2011 for me: enacting an openness and vulnerability in hip-hop that went all the way down, encoded in every aspect of the music, shaking the genre down to its very core.
All of which might help to explain why 'I Hate Myself' was the most affecting thing I heard all year. It's a direct confrontation with all of the above, with the self-hatred that cuts to the core of hip-hop. It's about being taught that you are worthless and trying to work out how to build a sustainable sense of self-worth, one that isn't built on belittling and hating others to insulate yourself against your self-hatred. Over a slow and dreamy sample from 'Iris', the angst-rock megahit by the Goo Goo Dolls, Lil B opens with the disarming, deadpan "I see myself in the mirror, but I don't see nothin'". He observes racism, classism and misogyny all around him in the world, just sounding sad, not able to draw any real conclusions. Then he says something jaw-dropping, the key line of the song, the album, and, for me, the year: "I hate myself for being taught the rules of the hood, which don't matter".
One of the fascinating things about hip-hop, for me, is that its bigotries and contradictions, its shallowness and hatefulness, are not really its own: they are those of the world at large, rendered explicit and often taken to their horribly logical conclusions. So confronting, and reacting to, these things, leads Lil B to conclusions that resonate beyond hip-hop culture, in his best stab at moving past his self-hatred at the song's emotional conclusion:
"I'm ready to give up my old thoughts
I'm 'a move past what I saw
I'm 'a do what I want and be happy
I'm not gon' rob or kill to survive
Everything I seen was a lie
I'm not ready to die
I love myself."
It's a beautiful moment of pure and naive insight, that more or less speaks for itself. The symbolic rejection of hate and violence as a means to survival and self-worth, the inversion of Notorious B.I.G.'s nihilistic and staggeringly self-hating Ready To Die, the rejection, in fact, of all the baggage and darkness and dirt piled upon the human soul, the song's key realisation that "everything I seen was a lie", and that final conclusion - however tentative, however provisional - "I love myself".
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