No Good Advice

#1 this week: Jessie J - Domino

2012-01-22T11:25:00.003Z

'Domino' feels like a lazy and cynical record; thrown onto the deluxe 'platinum edition' of Who You Are as a bonus track, and released as Jessie J's second single in the US (a follow-up to 'Price Tag'), everything about it smacks of trend-chasing. Of course, a pop song can be lazy and cynical and still fantastic, but 'Domino' falls desperately flat for me. It doesn't help that it sounds an awful lot like a Katy Perry song (which, given the involvement of Teenage Dream mainstays Max Martin and Dr Luke, is unsurprising). As with Perry's recent party-pop songs of abandon - 'California Gurls', 'Teenage Dream', 'Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F)' - there's something oddly joyless and unconvincing about 'Domino'.

Apparently 'Domino' was partly inspired by Whitney Houston's immortal 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody'. That's a song that I absolutely adore, and there's something oddly depressing about hearing a professional songwriter like Jessie J describe it as "a happy song", as being "something uptempo [and] fun [that] everyone can sing along to", and claiming something like 'Domino' as being in the same spirit. It's not that 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' isn't happy, uptempo and fun. But there's a lot more to the song than that.

After the ecstatic release of the introduction, 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' is pared down to a soft, melancholy twinkle. "Clock strikes upon the hour, and the sun begins to fade" - a lyric which could indicate anticipation and excitement is instead an indication of encroaching depression. At the outset of the song, Houston is trying to "figure out how to chase my blues away". "I've done all right up to now, it's the light of the day that shows me how," she explains, "but when the night falls... my loneliness calls." Obviously, she's going out. But the solution to her unhappiness isn't just partying, dancing and hedonism, it's real love - "a love that burns hot enough to last". And that pay-off at the end of the chorus - she wants to dance with somebody, but not just anybody: "with somebody who loves me" - is as beautiful and perfect a pop moment as any I have ever heard. (How many contemporary songs about dancing in clubs dare to admit, as starkly as Houston does in her second verse, "I've been in love and lost my senses spinning through the town/sooner or later the feeling ends, and I wind up feeling down"?)

On paper, then, 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' is certainly not about feeling happy, or not in any direct way. At no point in the lyric does Houston say that she is feeling anything positive; she gives us no reason to think that she is dancing with somebody who loves her. Is it a sad song, then? Certainly. But that doesn't mean that it isn't also a happy song, because it absolutely is. Carving "sad" and "happy" songs apart into two mutually exclusive categories is a total misunderstanding of how pop music works. (And it's exactly the sort of misunderstanding that might lead to someone thinking that a song like 'Domino' could possibly be as powerful or meaningful as 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody'.) The production - twinkly and wistful on those verses, giving way to joyous explosions of synths on the chorus - makes the song about release, while Houston's assured and disinhibited vocal performance sounds irrepressibly hopeful; she sounds like she still believes in love, like the deliverance and happiness she seeks really are out there to be found. The song is, or can be, just about having fun, being happy, and dancing. But it positions that fun explicitly as an escape from darkness and misery; it draws attention, therefore, to the fragility and perhaps fleeting nature of that deliverance; and it yearns, hopes, and pleads that those moments of escape and joy be turned into something solid and lasting.

As for 'Domino': musically, it evolves from a guitar-led plod on the verses into a racing synth-rush-by-numbers on the chorus, before falling away again and repeating. While Houston's emotional language involved "the blues", "feeling down" and her "lonely heart", Jessie J opens proceedings here by declaring "I'm feelin' sexy and free/like glitter's raining on me", the lyric feeling as lazy as the performance and music are lifeless. "You spin me out of control," she sings, sounding utterly in control. "Dirty dancin' in the moonlight" is Toploader filtered through Kesha; there's an embarrassing couple of lyrics that sound a bit too much like songwriters glancing around at the objects around them in the studio for inspiration - "boomin' like a bass drum" is passable, but what on earth does "you strum me like a guitar" mean? And, of course, there's that title image, "take me down like I'm a domino", which is just an appalling simile on so many levels.

The lesson to learn from 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' might just be that the most convincingly happy songs are the ones which let sadness in as well. The biggest problem with 'Domino', really, is that it doesn't do this; the happiness in this song doesn't feel like it has been hard-won, or like it is to be contrasted with anything else, any unhappiness that is being blocked out, or left behind. As such, it feels less like euphoria, and more like unreflective cheeriness. That's all well and good, but it's not emotionally compelling or interesting in the slightest; it's a happiness that doesn't mean anything. And I could forgive all the clunky similes and lazily formulaic music in the world if this song connected emotionally, if it made me feel anything, if it made me care. But it doesn't.

RIP Etta James

2012-01-21T15:27:00.002Z

'The Wallflower (Roll With Me Henry)', 1955:

'At Last', 1960:

'I Just Want To Make Love To You', 1961:

'Tell Mama', 1967:

'I'd Rather Go Blind', 1967:

#1 this week: Flo Rida - Good Feeling

2012-01-14T15:43:00.004Z

So the first two number one singles of 2012 have been called 'Paradise' and 'Good Feeling'. That general theme of positivity aside, though, the two tracks have little in common; where Coldplay reached feebly and defeatedly for an elusive paradise, feeling good is Flo Rida's natural setting - he bounds about this bouncy, charged bit of house like an overexcited and irrepressible puppy. 'Good Feeling' is based closely upon the song 'Levels', a parallel hit single (it's currently at number 4 in the UK chart, while Flo Rida occupies the top spot) by Swedish house producer Avicii. Both songs revolve around a sample from Etta James' 1962 song 'Something's Got A Hold On Me'. It's hard to escape the sense that it's that sample - James' vocal transformed from a gospel-derived soul holler into an anonymous rave diva - that gives both tracks their force, 'Good Feeling' especially.

"Ohhhhh, sometimes I get a good feeling, yeah," declared Etta James back in 1962, a cappella, answered by a "yeah!" of backing vocals and a piano chord. "Aaaaaaaahhhhhh get a feeling that I never never never never had before, no noooo..." she elaborates. Of course, the feeling she was singing about was being in love, and the ecstatic vocal mannerisms she was using to sing about it were derived from the religious ecstasies of gospel. Pedants will note that singing "sometimes I get a good feeling" is somewhat in tension with claiming that it's a feeling one has "never had before"; this ambiguity, though, is actually kind of interesting given the ways the couplet has been sampled and re-contextualised. In James' original song, she's singing about a change that has come over her recently, so it makes sense to think that she's recently started having periodic "good feeling" episodes that feel quite unlike anything she felt before she started to fall in love. On 'Levels', though, that opening couplet is isolated as the track's only lyric, so it has no narrative context. On that track, the odd temporal ambiguity plays into the way the line evokes the druggy musical euphoria of rave music; it's a sheer, disembodied and de-contextualised emotionality, endlessly new but supposedly always repeatable.

Which brings me to 'Good Feeling', on which Flo Rida enters the picture, and - of course - spins the song so that the "good feeling" is, of course, the good feelings he experiences as a result of being Flo Rida, and being so totally amazing. When Flo Rida was last at number one (some time ago with 'Club Can't Handle Me') I noted how he seemed to be at odds with the spirit of the music surrounding him. It's true here, too, even if the sonics of 'Good Feeling' don't undermine and contradict him quite so obviously or emphatically. Flo Rida is all about "me, me, me" - he really does seem to be nothing but ego given human form - while the bounding house beats and soaring, sampled ecstasy of 'Good Feeling' scream inclusiveness and connectedness. There's actually something almost comical about the fact that Flo Rida is so determined to make this smiling, energetic and sunny music a celebration of his own particular self.

In fact, Flo Rida is on relatively good form here; he's a ridiculously limited and uninteresting rapper, with only one gear - reeling off absurd 'boasts' like a one-dimensional cartoon character. It's something he takes to characteristically absurd lengths on 'Good Feeling'. "I'll be the president one day," he declares; he can "walk on water"; he has "the heart of twenty men"; he closes his second and final verse with the incredible and hilarious claim "I'm Bill Gates - take a genius to understand me". 'Levels' is certainly better and more interesting to me than 'Good Feeling', which transforms the positivity and energy of rave into something far more shallow than it has to be; but I can't hate 'Good Feeling', which is throwaway and silly, but, at the end of the day, still pretty good fun.

(As an endnote - 'Good Feeling' also has the now-obligatory 'dubstep breakdown' towards the end of the track, which is not carried over from 'Levels'. It's a pretty fair representation of how dubstep is being used in a lot of pop at the moment - a go-to rhythm to break up the repetition of a four-to-the-floor house beat. It works pretty well here at keeping the track interesting, and the fact that it feels so incongruous and bolted-on kind of adds to the charm.)

Top 50 Albums 2011

2012-01-08T16:35:00.002Z

So I finally finished working my way through my top 100 tracks of last year. I've put a list of my favourite albums together, too, although - as usual - the tracks list feels like it matters a lot more to me, and it's certainly more of a representative sample of the music which excited me in 2011. For what it's worth, though, here are my top 50 albums of last year.

50. Beyoncé – 4

49. Colin Stetson – New History Warfare Vol 2: Judges

48. Zomby – Dedication

47. Radiohead – The King Of Limbs

46. Touché Amoré – Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me

45. Miranda Lambert – Four The Record

44. James Blake – James Blake

43. Indian – Guiltless

42. Egyptrixx – Bible Eyes

41. Various Artists – Back & Forth: A Hotflush Compilation

40. Various Artists – Hessle Audio: 116 & Rising

39. Various Artists – IOTDXI

38. Shabazz Palaces – Black Up

37. DJ Diamond – Flight Muzik

36. CocknBullKid – Adulthood

35. Tombs – Path Of Totality

34. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Belong

33. Africa Hitech – 93 Million Miles

32. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

31. Kuedo – Severant

30. Mastodon – The Hunter

29. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy

28. Young Montana? – Limerence

27. Kendrick Lamar – Section.80

26. Cher Lloyd – Sticks + Stones

25. The Field – Looping State Of Mind

24. Lowkey – Soundtrack to the Struggle

23. Blut Aus Nord – 777 Sect(s)/777 – The Desanctification

22. WU LYF – Go Tell Fire To The Mountain

21. Rustie – Glass Swords

20. The Roots – Undun

19. Nicola Roberts – Cinderella’s Eyes

18. Various Artists – Boy Better Know: Tropical 2

17. Wolves In The Throne Room – Celestial Lineage

16. Will Young - Echoes

15. SBTRKT – SBTRKT

14. Sub Rosa – No Help For The Mighty Ones

13. Britney Spears - Femme Fatale

12. tUnE-yArDs – W h o k i l l

11. Matana Roberts – Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens De Coleur Libres

10. Araabmusik – Electronic Dream

9. Adele – 21

8. Various Artists – Bangs & Works Vol 2: The Best Of Chicago Footwork

7. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints

6. Lil B – I’m Gay

5. Kate Bush – 50 Words For Snow

4. La Dispute – Wildlife

3. Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost

2. Katy B – On A Mission

1. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

I'm sure no one who has read what I've written about Let England Shake lately (both in my top tracks list and here) will be surprised to see that it made my number one, but it actually almost didn't - I agonised over the order of those top two albums, and I changed my mind several times. When I first heard PJ Harvey's latest, way back in February, it seemed like an obvious album of the year, but On A Mission really snuck up on me and gave Let England Shake more of a run for its money than I thought possible. Part of me wanted to make Katy B number one for symbolic reasons; it seemed a shame to make such a perfect, timely and vibrant pop album - and such a perfect reflection and realisation of what excited me the most about music in 2011 (i.e., the new levels of pop power and pervasiveness enjoyed by underground UK bass music) - come in second place to something as old-fashioned and worthy as a concept album by a 42-year-old rock veteran. On A Mission really was the perfect pop album for 2011, back-to-back brilliant songs informed both musically and lyrically by London club music. But at the end of the day, Let England Shake was just too perfectly realised, too endlessly fascinating and rewarding, too rich with layers of meaning and resonance, to be anywhere but number one. It has little to do with the musical landscape of 2011, but that's sort of the point - it feels genuinely, unsettlingly timeless, shifting its focus across the face of the earth and across the last hundred years or so of human history. It is at once breathtakingly ambitious and strikingly understated. I certainly don't think that timeless High Art with lofty aims should always win out over populist club music which seeks only to capture a single moment; and, arguably, On A Mission has just as many important and meaningful things to say to its listeners as Let England Shake. In a way, the albums are two sides of a coin, and both represent - at least in part - a confrontation with, and meditation upon, the culture of the country in which they were made. They were the two albums that meant the most to me over the last twelve months.

Finally, here are some 'honourable mentions' - some other albums of 2011 that I really liked, but which there just wasn't room for in the top 50. Some were particularly painful omissions, and some, which I heard towards the end of the year, might well have made the list if I had had a few more months to live with them.

Anti-G - Kentje'sz Beatsz
Balam Acab - Wander/Wonder
Clams Casino - Instrumental Mixtape
The Coathangers - Larceny and Old Lace
Disma - Towards The Megalith
Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Make A Scene
Elzhi - Elmatic
Falty DL - You Stand Uncertain
Grayceon - All We Destroy
Iceage - New Brigade
Nicolas Jaar - Space Is Only Noise
The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar
Kode9 & The Spaceape - Black Sun
Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes
Liturgy - Aesthethica
Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness
Frank Ocean - Nostalgia, Ultra
Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica
Panda Bear - Tomboy
Pianos Become The Teeth - The Lack Long After
Pistol Annies - Hell On Heels
The Saturdays - On Your Radar
Thundercat - The Golden Age Of Apocalypse
Thurz - L.A. Riot
Ulcerate - Destroyers Of All
Various Artists - Bazzerk: African Digital Dance
Various Artists - Harmonia: Family Album
Wiley - 100% Publishing
Yob - Atma

#1 this week: Coldplay - Paradise

2012-01-08T11:55:00.003Z

Coldplay are a bit of a puzzle. They are easily one of the biggest groups in the world and therefore, inevitably, one of the most frequently mocked and belittled. Personally, I've never liked Coldplay, but I find it hard to really hate them either. In fact, I really have no feelings about the band at all, to the point where it's taken them reaching number one in the singles chart - and my therefore being forced to write about them here - to get me to confront what I actually think about them. Overall, they just make no impression on me at all, one way or the other.

When the band first emerged in 2000, with their album Parachutes and its huge hit single 'Yellow', they obviously seemed like part of a then-dominant strain of vague and wishy-washy British guitar music. Their most obvious immediate antecedent was Travis, whose The Man Who had been the UK's biggest selling album the year before Parachutes. But that trend has long since died a death, and Coldplay have, commercially, gone from strength to strength; the sound they have arrived at doesn't really resemble anything but Coldplay. The closest and most common comparison is to Eno-era U2, but Coldplay are far more muted, lacking the bombastic intensity of Bono et al. The archetypal and defining Coldplay song (which is certainly not to say their best) is surely 'Clocks', a vast but oddly hollow echo chamber of colossal piano riffs and vague lyrics.

I think that my complete indifference to Coldplay actually captures something fundamental at the heart of the band's sound. To me, Coldplay's music sounds like music with all of the edges taken off, with everything that might be in any way abrasive or alienating to anyone carefully removed. Their sound feels like a science of omission, where what they never do is far more prominent and notable that what they do. This helps to explain why they are so popular, but also why they are so loathed - anyone who feels like music should be abrasive, should be rubbing someone up the wrong way, will find Coldplay to be the devil incarnate.

With 'Paradise', actually listening closely to it, I can't find much to actively fault. Most modern stadium rock sounds sort of ugly to me, but 'Paradise' never does; it has its genuinely pretty moments, particularly the first thirty seconds or so (it's what I imagine the intro to an M83-influenced Rihanna ballad would sound like, and nothing like "rock" at all).

It's in the lyrics, though, that the band really gives their hand away. Chris Martin's first verse runs: "when she was just a girl/she expected the world/but it flew away from her reach/so she ran away in her sleep/and dreamed of para, para, paradise ... every time she closed her eyes". This is a grey, blank and underwhelming radio-rock song all about how grey, blank and underwhelming life can be. It's about finding life, and the world, to be ultimately disappointing. Realising that, the song actually seems incredibly sad; it's like those flat, unconvincing stadium surges, those "woah-oah-oah" singalong moments, are trying to be transcendent, trying to lift the listener out of the disappointing dreariness of life. But the band sound too weary, and both lyric and performance give us no reason to believe that "paradise" is anything more than a dream. It's Coldplay's musical ethos projected onto the world at large, as though the world itself is just grey and boring, as though the best we can hope for is for something soft and pretty to reflect our disappointment back at us, to sing along and dream that there might be something better. 'Paradise' could be genuinely affecting if it could commit more firmly one way or the other, if the song could either make a better stab at transporting us to paradise or admit more explicitly that it can't. As it is, it's an oddly deflated and depressing listen, a feeble and half-hearted fist-pump of false happiness.

The way Chris Martin delivers that title - "para, para, paradise" - is telling in and of itself. I've seen it compared in a couple of places to Rihanna's "ella, ella, ella" on 'Umbrella', and Martin himself describes it as a "pop trick". But where Rihanna's repeated syllables come at the end of the word, confidently drawing out the song's title, Martin's come at the beginning, and sound more like an awkward stumble; where Rihanna sounds like she doesn't want to let go of the word, Martin sounds like he can't find his way into it. To me, that's Coldplay; aiming for huge and universal pop, but executing it somehow awkwardly and unconvincingly, seeming somehow uncomfortable with the transcendent magic of pop but doing their best impression of it anyway. 'Paradise' is a sad, awkward, hollow little song just telling us something we already know - that life can be shit, and that most of us wish it were less so - and tries to offer comfort by projecting that depressing non-insight into something as huge, soft and twinkly as the stars. On Coldplay's breakthrough single, Martin stared out at those stars and found nothing to say about them except that "they were all yellow". Eleven and a half years later, he's still got his eyes fixed skyward, looking for meaning in the stars, dreaming of some non-specific paradise. But there's still nothing up there.

Top 100 tracks 2011, part 5: 20-1

2012-01-06T21:24:00.000Z

100-81 | 80-61 | 60-41 | 40-21 | 20-1

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".

#1 this week: Military Wives with Gareth Malone - Wherever You Are

2012-01-01T13:13:00.004Z

"The social pressure to sign up was overwhelming. In the early days of the [First World] War, this was policed by thousands of young women who went around handing out white feathers to all young men out of uniform in a gesture that implied cowardice. The idea had been dreamed up by a retired admiral, who created the Order of the White Feather specifically for this purpose, and it was backed up by poster campaigns asking 'Is your "Best Boy" wearing khaki? If not, don't YOU THINK he should be? If he does not think that you and your country are worth fighting for - do you think he is WORTHY of you?'"
-Jon Savage, Teenage

"I was wanting to show the way history repeats itself, really, and so in some ways it doesn't matter what time it was, because this endless cycle goes on and on."
-PJ Harvey on Let England Shake, 2011

In February 2011, PJ Harvey released the tenth, and greatest, album of her twenty-year career in music, Let England Shake. The album is almost intimidatingly good, an endlessly fascinating and rewarding listen, with as many layers, meanings and resonances as any record I have ever heard. As such, any quick discussion of it is liable to involve misleading and reductive generalisation. It is an album that is about so much; first and foremost, though, it is a concept album about war.

Part of the album's success lies in the fact that it does not obscure, or shy away from, the brutal, physical reality of war. Death and violence are not abstractions here - they are uncomfortably real. One of the first things to notice about Harvey's descriptions of war are how frequently and repeatedly the natural world is evoked. The album is full of earth, dirt, and trees. On 'Our Glorious Country' the earth itself is "ploughed by tanks and feet"; deformed and orphaned children are the "fruit of our land". On 'The Words That Maketh Murder', "arms and legs were in the trees". The album dwells, as Harvey puts it herself, "in the dirt and in the dark places" where the reality of war takes place. For the most part, though, the music is anything but earthy; it has a light, airy touch, and Harvey's vocals are delivered in a high register. This contrast between the relative quietness, lightness and softness of the music and the gory, dirty details of the lyrics seems symbolic of another duality in Let England Shake: between the specific and the general, between visceral immediacy and a more sober and detached big-picture view. Part of the album's genius is the way that it collapses the two together, building a big picture out of small details, spelling out those details in ways that suggest wider symbolism and resonances.

The album's final lyrics, from the song 'The Colour Of The Earth' are a perfect illustration of this:

"If I was asked I'd tell
The colour of the earth that day
It was dull and browny red
The colour of blood, I'd say."

The lines play off the double meaning of the word earth, suggesting both an up-close focus on the dirt and soil and an all-encompassing view of the whole planet, echoing and exemplifying the way that the whole album uses descriptions of specific times and places to paint a symbolic picture of the whole of human history. As Harvey says in the quote above, it doesn't really matter what time and place she is talking about in any given song or lyric - she is describing an "endless cycle". On 'The Colour Of The Earth', Harvey's description of blood-soaked dirt turns into a metaphor for the whole of the world, stained with the blood of ages, recalling both Hegel's description of human history as a "slaughter bench" and Macbeth's hands that will not come clean. And those are the album's closing words, Harvey's best attempt to draw an overarching conclusion from all that has been seen, even with that qualifying "I'd say" still refusing to speak from the universal perspective. What is the colour of the earth, the colour of everything? Dull and browny red; the colour of blood.

The colour of blood? Glaring at us from the cover of 'Wherever You Are' is a stylised red poppy, the flower that has been used a symbol of death since ancient times because of its 'blood red' colour, although the flower is rather brighter and bolder than the "dull and browny red" colour of Harvey's all-too-real blood-soaked ground. The connection is there, though, and it is proudly draped across this single, alluding slyly to the brutal physical reality of war that we see in Let England Shake. That brutal physical reality is something that 'Wherever You Are' is mostly keen to obscure, or at least make abstract and stylised; but a bright red poppy turned into a corporate logo still contains symbolic resonances of the literal bloodshed of war, as well as of the poppies that grew from the blood-stained earth of Flanders in the First World War. The poppy does have other symbolic resonances, though; the flower contains morphine and codeine, and its seeds have been used as painkillers since Ancient Egyptian times. So there's another way of reading that red flower staining the placid green cover of 'Wherever You Are' - as a numbing, placatory opiate for the masses.

'Wherever You Are', for any readers that don't know, is performed by a choir of women formed as part of the recent BBC TV series The Choir: Military Wives; all of the women are the wives or girlfriends of British soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. The lyrics of the song are apparently drawn from love letters exchanged between the choir members and their partners, and set to music by Paul Mealor, a professor of composition at the University of Aberdeen most notable for composing the choral music for 2011's royal wedding.

I have expounded before about my distaste for popular culture that romanticises and celebrates the military. Frankly, it's more than a little disturbing that I should have to be confronted with the topic twice in little more than a year simply by writing about number one singles. Suffice to say that 'Wherever You Are' is a repulsively conservative piece of establishment propaganda. The role of the British Army is to inflict (and, if necessary, sustain) violence in order to further the economic and geopolitical interests of the British ruling class. As the quote that opened this post indicates, it has long been necessary for the establishment to use propaganda to turn this role in the popular imagination into something noble, impressive and courageous. Obviously, then, the nasty and violent details of the soldiers' "task" are euphemistically masked in lyrics like "I hold you in my dreams each night, until your task is done". Addressing a soldier as a "prince of peace" is beyond Orwellian in its mind-boggling and insulting doublethink. And when the Military Wives sing "may your courage never cease", they may as well be handing out white feathers.

So, yes, the poppy evokes the bloodied earth and also the numbing haze of opium. The ghastly sentimentalism of 'Wherever You Are' serves to glorify and excuse the horrific and inexcusable, while simultaneously papering over the ugly details of war, carefully avoiding the "dirt and dark places" of Let England Shake. These really are - to employ a word that PJ Harvey is not afraid to use, which glares mockingly out of that blood-red poppy, but which everything in 'Wherever You Are' is designed to sidestep around - the words that maketh murder.

Top 100 tracks 2011, part 4: 40-21

2011-12-31T11:18:00.005Z

100-81 | 80-61 | 60-41 | 40-21 | 20-1

40. Hackman – Close

Pure rave euphoria - skittish 2-step drums, buzzing bass, an addictive marimba (I think?!) riff, and a gorgeously aching and androgynous pitched-down vocal refrain. "I just want you close/where you can stay forever/you can be sure/that it will only get better", run the track's only lyrics - a plea for deliverance through intimacy and comfort.

39. Nicki Minaj – Super Bass

Nicki Minaj is a bit of a frustrating pop star. She's the first female rapper since Missy Elliott to ascend to superstar status; she's a ferociously brilliant MC with a keen pop instinct. She should be amazing. But she has a penchant for turning out dull, worthy middle-of-the-road singles like 'Right Through Me' and 'Fly' which contains nothing whatsoever of the bold and hyper-kinetic energy that makes her so spectacularly entertaining as a rapper. Most of her most arresting moments so far have been on feature verses rather than her own songs.

'Super Bass', though, is the perfect collision between Nicki the pop star and Nicki the mixtape-rapper. Her rough-around-the-edges personality - manifested mostly in the audible glee she takes in the sounds and shapes of language, constantly switching up into different voices - is in full evidence here on her rapped verses. "I mean, m-m-my my, you're like pelican fly!" she exhorts at one point, quickly clarifying (in a deep and throaty warble) "you're, like, slicker than the guy with the thing on his eye, ohh!" But the key to the record is its chorus, absolutely one of the year's best, a huge bubblegum thing; and when that perky first half of the hook drops away into that "boom-ba-boom-boom, boom-ba-boom-boom bass", it really will have your heartbeat running away, as promised.

The first time I heard 'Super Bass', I was pretty unimpressed. Then I found that chorus continuing to circle around in my head for days afterwards, and I started to realise there was something more going on than I had suspected. 'Super Bass' is populist pop in the truest sense - it's not design to bowl you over on first listen, but to live and breathe in the world, blasting from passing cars and radios until it works its way under your skin by osmosis. Shamelessly sugary but deceptively deep.

38. tUnE-yArDs – Gangsta

An unclassifiable and overwhelming art-pop riot. Like 'I Am The Walrus', 'Gangsta' bases one of its recurring melodic ideas on a sarcastic imitation of a police siren - and, actually, psychadelic-era Beatles isn't a bad comparison for the sheer barrage of production and arrangement ideas thrown at the listener. There's nothing here but vocals, a drum loop, a bass and a couple of saxophones; but tUnE-yArDs do everything imaginable with those elements, melodies and rhythms constantly stopping, starting and tripping over each other. Merrill Garbus blurted, violent "BANGBANGBANG" refrain slaps you in the face every time it comes in; the breakdown where the chorus vocal breaks up and cuts in and out from the left and right channels, imitating the effect of a loose earphone connection, speaks to Garbus' desire to disrupt and fuck with the listening experience at every turn. For all that, the "what's a boy to do" melody of the verse hits with all the nagging catchiness of a nursery rhyme. More ideas, and more fun, than one might think possible in four minutes.

37. Chase and Status feat. Liam Bailey – Blind Faith

Dubstep turned into huge, communal stadium-rave. That Loleatta Holloway steal ("sweet sensation!") presses classic 'Ride On Time' buttons; Nottingham soul singer Liam Bailey brings blissed-out world-weary vibes, singing like it's five in the morning and he's been raving all night; the arcing synth riffs on the chorus are as massive as those on 'Won't Get Fooled Again'. Not much else from the dubstep continuum, underground or mainstream, had such a claim on genuinely anthemic status as 'Blind Faith' this year. And it was a top five hit - good times, as if we needed to be reminded, for the bass music underground-gone-overground.

36. Adele – Someone Like You

"Sittin' here sad as hell, listenin' to Adele, I feel you baby." That's Andre 3000, delivering a guest verse on Drake's recent Take Care album. He elaborates; "someone like you - more like someone unlike you, or somethin' that's familiar, maybe." Which somehow manages to get somewhere near the heart of this song, 2011's biggest out-of-nowhere phenomenon, a piano-led pop ballad that already feels timeless. Stick with 'Someone Like You' as musical shorthand - sad as hell, listening to Adele - and Andre gets it intuitively. But when he tries to elaborate, he's vacillating all over the place. Someone like you, or someone unlike you? Someone new, or something that's familiar?

The big secret of 'Someone Like You' was that it pretended to be simple and crystal-clear while actually being anything but. Some part of Adele is clearly keen to position 'Someone Like You' as a moving-on song of acceptance - the arrangement of the music is stately and mature, the "never mind" of a chorus on which Adele wishes her ex-lover well, closing out 21 as a clear counterpoint to the vengeful "you're gonna wish you never had met me" explosions of 'Rolling In The Deep' which begin it. A "bittersweet", accepting song of closure for the album's tormented emotional arc.

On the other hand, the Adele of 'Someone Like You' hasn't really moved on that far from the "think of me in the depths of your despair" exhortations of 'Rolling In The Deep'. "I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited" is passive-aggressiveness incarnate; "I had hoped you'd see my face, and that you'd be reminded that for me, it isn't over" is practically sneered. If Adele has accepted anything here, then it is only that her addressee has moved on, and that she cannot - "for me, it isn't over". The blunt conclusion of the song, and of the album as a whole, is a mantra Adele actually attributes to her ex: "sometimes it lasts in love, and sometimes it hurts instead". This is the "light" that she doesn't want to let her addressee hide from, the truth that maturity means facing up to and accepting: it isn't over. So that "never mind" rings very hollow indeed, and her plan for moving on - "I'll find someone like you" - is a knowingly fucked-up one.

Or, as Andre 3000 would have it: sad as hell.

35. Burial – Street Halo

In the four years between his beyond-classic Untrue album and the release of 'Street Halo', the publicity-shy Burial had released just one track of original solo material ('Fostercare', for a 2009 Hyperdub compilation). In the fast-moving world of UK dance music, it's an absolute eternity since Burial's sound turned everything on its head, and Untrue has influenced so much music, both inside and outside of Burial's own musical sphere, that the comparison has become a cliché. When the 'Street Halo' single dropped in March, it was into a world where "Burial" was more a signifier of a certain sound than an active musical artist.

So hearing 'Street Halo', and remembering all over again just why Burial's two albums had seemed so important and brilliant, was a great moment. A four-to-the-floor nocturnal garage beat inhabited by ghostly vocal samples, drenched in spooky bass and ghostly crackles; it was spine-tingling stuff. Thanks to the single's two B-sides, 'NYC' and 'Stolen Dog', we actually got three fantastic new Burial tracks this year. I'll take as many as I can get.

34. Shy FX feat. Kano, Donae'o & Roses Gabor – Raver

I've talked a lot in this list about - for lack of a better label - UK bass music, a continuum that stretches all the way back to the reggae soundsystem culture started by second-generation Caribbean immigrants as early as the late 1960s. As a broad category, this type of music is enjoying a rare and triumphant surge of mainstream visibility and artistic creativity at the moment, and it has dominated this list more than anything else. And no other track this year summed up this moment better than 'Raver'.

The track starts out with a sample of Barrington Levy's 'Many Changes In Life' from 1980; Levy was a sixteen-year-old from Jamaica who became a big hit on the UK reggae scene. The throwback to classic reggae quickly mutates into jungle, while grime MC Kano shows up to eulogise the lineage of the UK scene, reminiscing about being in primary school when jungle hit in '94 and quoting liberally from classic MCs of the time. (Best moment: "I was on the football coach, my walkman on, like..." at which point Kano breaks into a syllable-perfect quotation from UK Apache's wordless chatting on Shy FX's jungle classic 'Original Nuttah', released when Kano was nine.) At the end the track switches up again into a Caribbean carnival vibe, all steel drums and joyous horns. Overall, it's an awesome sonic celebration of the all-inclusive diversity, eclecticism and creativity of the British music scene.

(And that's without mentioning its video, featuring cameos from literally countless people, building its own canon-slash-pantheon. Several of the 'Raver' extras have actually already featured in this list: Wiley, Yasmin, Wretch 32, Chase and Status. Also showing up are Benga and Skream, Pete Waterman, Annie Mac, Kele Le Roc, Tinchy Stryder, Mz Bratt, and plenty more.)

33. Kate Bush – Snowflake

Kate Bush's astonishing 50 Words For Snow album was dominated by songs whose concepts could seem quirky - even silly - when described on paper, but which are deadly serious and incredibly moving on record. Case in point - the ten-minute opening track, 'Snowflake', on which Bush's 13-year-old son Albert sings from the the perspective of a falling snowflake. Throughout the album, Bush explores the symbolism of snow, and 'Snowflake' reminds me of this Calvin and Hobbes strip: a single snowflake is utterly unique and exquisite, yet also tiny, fragile and impermanent. Over music almost impossibly hushed and subtle, Albert (who sounds quite similar to his mother in her younger days) describes the snowflake's journey from cloud to ground, alternating between half-sung whispers and a choirboy soprano; Kate interjects repeatedly with the song's refrain, addressing the snowflake: "the world is so loud; keep falling, I'll find you". Like a lot of Bush's best work, it's a parable rich and ambiguous enough that to pin a specific meaning on it seems unfair; and that, in the end, is what gives it such enduring power.

32. Kingdom – Hood By Air Theme

A late-2011 arrival, Kingdom's Dreama EP chalked up another classic release for one of my favourite producers of 2010, as well as for Night Slugs, one of my favourite dance labels of 2010. Kingdom and Night Slugs both had a quieter year this year, but Dreama more than makes up for it; picking a favourite track wasn't easy, but in the end it had to be the closer, 'Hood By Air Theme'. Most of the track is just an icy, minimalist rhythm, twinkling synths and thudding bass shrouded in choral vocals - dark, uneasy, menacing. (And what about that title, 'Hood By Air Theme' - the darkness and menace of the urban streets as viewed from some spectral presence above?) Then, for little more than a minute at the end of the track, Kingdom slips another element into the mix - a snippet of Madonna from 'Like A Prayer', making the listener suddenly realise where those warped and processed choirs came from, while a pitch-shifted queen of pop intones "I hear you call my name", the lyric turned into something dark and threatening. A masterpiece.

31. M83 – Midnight City

What's the best bit of 'Midnight City'? I'm tempted to say that it's the very beginning, the first time that central riff that serves as the song's refrain kicks in. I'm also tempted to say that it's near the track's end, when that unexpected but all-too-perfect saxophone solo kicks in. But really, the only true answer is "all of it", because 'Midnight City' hits as a four-minute whole or not at all. With Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, Anthony Gonzalez pushed M83's sound even further from the abstract, ambient shoegaze of the group's early work and even further into the realms of massive, unashamedly nostalgic stadium-pop. 'Midnight City' is about the sheer thrill of sound, turned in on itself as a static loop - it doesn't really build, it doesn't really jump dynamically from one part of the song to the next, it just is. The lyrics are about being in the city at night ("look at the horizon glow", "the city is my church, it wraps me in its blinding twilight"), but the sounds do all the work - you can hear and feel those bright lights, that darkness, the energy and romance of an idealised youth, the excitement of unknown and unimagined possibility.

30. Britney Spears – Hold It Against Me

Britney Spears was the first mainstream pop star to appropriate the sonic signifiers of dubstep, way back on 2007's prescient (and incredible) Blackout album. Now that those sounds have moved further into the mainstream, Spears isn't about to distance herself from them; of all the brilliant things about 'Hold It Against Me' (and there were plenty) that growling, blaring thirty seconds or so - snarling subbass, multiple warped, stuttering, de-centred Britneys dancing around the sidelines, sneering "now" with all the urgency of a robotic Johnny Rotten - was perhaps the most heart-stoppingly thrilling of all. A whole track that sounded like that would have been good enough for me, but its a testament to the generosity of great pop music that 'Hold It Against Me' deploys that segment as a brief interlude from an already-amazing pop song - one which steals its central lyrical pun from '70s country-pop duo the Bellamy Brothers, and which finds Spears cranking the logic of contemporary club-pop up to levels of almost parody-like absurdity while maintaining absolute, steely commitment, not to mention giving a knowing throwback reference to her old trademark vocal affectations on "hay-zay". Spectacular.

29. PJ Harvey – Written On The Forehead

Like 'Raver', 'Written On The Forehead' makes prominent use of a sampled Jamaican reggae song (in this case, Niney The Observer's 'Blood And Fire' from 1970). And, in this case too - especially in the context of an album called Let England Shake - the sample feels like a symbol of multicultural, urban Britain. The song, though, is not directly set in the UK; Harvey's lyrics about urban destruction (including that strikingly vivid opening couplet "people throwing dinars at the belly dancers/in a sad circus by a trench of burning oil") are apparently drawn from first-hand descriptions of life in occupied Iraq.

But one of the unsettling and brilliant things about Let England Shake is the way that it seems to collapse places and times together, blurring edges and distinctions, teasing out connections - so that the generalisations being made about the album when it was first released (that it is about England, that it is about the First World War) made less and less sense the closer you looked at its details. Niney The Observer's apocalyptic exhortations were originally about the social and economic chaos of Jamaica in the early 1970s - just eight years after the island became fully independent from British rule - fuelled by inequality and disaffection amongst the urban poor. So the evocations of England, Jamaica, Iraq, and the strand of urban British music that evolved from reggae in the UK's own economically chaotic 1970s intertwine in strange and complicated ways. And when Harvey sings:

"I talked to an old man by the generator
He was standing on the gravel by the fetid river
He turned to me, and then surveyed the scene
Said, 'war is here, in our beloved city'"

...and a sampled Jamaican chorus replies, "let it burn, let it burn" - that fetid river could just as easily be the Thames as the Tigris, the river that was "glistening like gold hastily sold" back on 'The Last Living Rose', the record seeming eerily prophetic of the summer of 2011, when England really did shake, and really did burn.

28. Rustie – Ultra Thizz

Pure, unbridled euphoria. After the pop-goes-dubstep of 'Hold It Against Me', the dubstep-goes-pop of 'Ultra Thizz' works in a pretty similar way. Here, though, the bass does surprisingly little of the work - it's all about the floaty, transportative synth melodies, those huge, clattering drums, those snatches of euphoric chipmunk vocal samples. It's huge, glorious and gorgeous.

27. Nicola Roberts – Yo-Yo

'Yo-Yo' ultimately revealed itself to be the best track on a wonderful and consistent album. The central metaphor is a pretty hackneyed one, and the just-be-straight-with-me plea to a hot-and-cold romantic partner is hardly a new theme in pop. But Roberts absolutely inhabits it, creating a mood of genuinely depressive frustration; the song alternates between dejected, flattened verses and a biting chorus. A lot of singers who tackle this sort "will it be a yes or no" theme make it sound either like they assume it will be a yes, or like they will be fine if it's a no. Roberts doesn't at all. It all comes to a head in the song's cathartic (but not cathartic enough from its protagonist's point of view) middle eight, a steady and intense build on which Roberts lifts herself a little way out of her depressive malaise to spit venom through gritted teeth in an extraordinary falsetto, before - with a defeated cry of "I can't let go" (for me, it isn't over?) - she collapses back into that chorus.

26. The Saturdays – Notorious

Where on earth did this come from? Circa May 2011, 'Notorious' was not at all what one would have expected a new Saturdays single to sound like. The song married the warped and de-centred vocal manipulations of Britney's Blackout and Femme Fatale to the song-structure experiments of Xenomania's work for Girls Aloud, while retaining the straight-faced ridiculousness of both. Figuring out how it even worked was a challenge - where exactly was the chorus? The hook-packed bridge between the first verse and the second verse might be one (or even two), but it floats in the air unmoored, free of the beat. It's like somebody took the elements of the track apart, 'Born Slippy'-style, in some listener-teasing act of sonic deconstruction, before finally throwing all the layers on top of each other at the end of the song. It's nice to see somebody make an effort, as Rochelle Wiseman points out in the first verse - even, or especially, if they make it seem as effortless as this. Or, as Vanessa White rather more succinctly puts it a couple of lines later: "I la-la-love this track."

25. tUnE-yArDs – Bizness

"If I represent the one that did this to you, then cut away the parts that represent the things that scar you." That's Merrill Garbus' striking opening couplet on 'Bizness', delivered over a slowly-building cacophony of her own sampled and layered coos and chirrups. She spends the song begging, and pleading, for something - love? acceptance? - from someone, starting with that plea to be seen for what she is, not as something symbolic or loaded. After making the stakes clear on the chorus ("don't take my life away"), she spends the second verse trying even harder to attain union, closeness - "press your fingers down under my skin", she begs; "I'll bleed if you ask me". The moment that the whole song turns on is next: "that's when he said no". And on that no, a single syllable negating and dismissing all of the desperation which has animated Garbus through the whole song, a syllable which she stretches out into a ten-second howl, the song's tension finally splits open, and a couple of saxophones suddenly burst into the mix (recalling not only the sax solo at the end of 'Midnight City', but also PJ Harvey's saxophone on 'The Last Living Rose', also summoned into being by a sharp negation).

Garbus' vocal performance throughout is astonishing - in her lead vocal on those opening sections, she starts each line with harsh, blaring, deep-throated extended syllables, before resolving the line into a lilting, soft coo; it's unnerving, creating the impression that she is trying to hold back something explosive, and she continues to switch uneasily and jerkily back and forth between the two voices. By the track's cacophonous end, though, she's not holding anything back anymore, and those saxophones have transformed the track's layered, slow-burning tension into something huge and disinhibited. Utterly unclassifiable, 'Bizness' was something really opaque and very special.

24. Nicole Scherzinger – Right There

No, not the version featuring 50 Cent. Obviously.

Although even without 50 getting in the way of good pop, there isn't really a single good lyric from 'Right There' that I can pull out and quote. The song is - unavoidably, and pretty unambiguously - about sex. Scherzinger only really departs from her up-close focus on the details of sex in order to make some decidedly non-feminist declarations of possessiveness about the object of her affection ("never gonna let no girl steal him from me, never gonna let no girl get that close") - because, of course, he is so good at sex. As a feminist with a marked distaste for the ugly power dynamics often enshrined in heterosexist pop, and as someone usually totally disinterested in sex as a topic for pop when tackled as narrowly as this, there's plenty for me to be both bored and irritated by here.

So why is still my 24th favourite song of the year? Because, somehow, the sheer sound of this thing wins me around; that chiming, 'Dear Prudence' psychadelic guitar figure that introduces the song and sidles back to tie it up at the end, the warm, soft, layered shoegaze-electro rush of the whole thing. Because, thanks to those impeccable sonics, 'Right There' is that relatively rare R&B hit that manages to make sex sound like it is about physical intimacy and mutual pleasure (rather than power and exploitation). Because it's rare that mainstream pop songs this blatantly about sex manage to convincingly take female subjectivity as seriously as this. And because of that chorus ("come here baby, ey, be my baby, ey, be my baby - oh, oh, oh") which lodged itself into my brain perhaps more firmly than any other melodic phrase of the past twelve months, and which I never, ever got tired of.

23. Lowkey feat. Mai Khalil – Dear England

The political system in Britain at the moment is both depressing and terrifying. The country's foremost political rapper, militant activist Lowkey, turns out the most interesting moment of his sprawling Soundtrack to the Struggle album on this, the one song on which he turns his attention specifically to his home country - it's as though even Lowkey, usually an eloquent and self-assured rhetorician, doesn't really know what to say. On each of his verses, he starts out slow, methodical and deliberate, but then breaks into a breathless double-time flow with an avalanche of ideas, as though overcome, unable to spell things out as simply as he had intended. Ideas come tumbling - "when privilege is threatened, the fear reigns supreme"; "master morality is normalised"; "this is a system consumed by consumption". Like PJ Harvey on Let England Shake, Lowkey can't make sense of his homeland without connecting it to the wider world ("a policeman can kill a black man where he found him, a soldier can kill an Afghan in the mountains"; "bombs over Libya, but not this area"). He catalogues a litany of evils - looters and their families evicted from council houses, violent cuts in public services, police killing with impunity. For all his steely resolve, he can't draw any solid conclusions, and there's an air of helpless panic about his performance despite himself: "just relax, as we slip into fascism".

But then there's the other side of the equation - guest vocalist Mai Khalil. The track really feels like a duet, a conversation, despite - perhaps because of - the fact that Khalil says so little. She offsets Lowkey's verbose panic; she represents the limits of language and expression, easing the listener into the slow, doomy track with a gorgeous, melancholy and wordless introduction. Her only words on the song are those that she sings on its chorus, "give me the words that tell me nothing" - where there could have been a slogan, there is a deliberate blank; where there could have been an easy and reductive answer, there is no answer at all.

22. Kendrick Lamar – ADHD

"Smokin' on that good, know it's me soon as they smell it/you can chill, I'm the one who get it, not the one who sell it." That's Wiz Khalifa, right at the beginning of 2011, on the "G-Mix" of his smash hit 'Black and Yellow'; and in those last twelve words, he summed up a shift in emphasis that has gradually been taking place in hip-hop over the last few years. Not that long ago, it used to be the norm for MCs to rap about selling drugs; now, they're all taking them. Hip-hop has changed from music ostensibly made by, and for, drug dealers (hard-edged and cold, wired and paranoid) to music ostensibly - and far more credibly - made by, and for, drug users (slow, layered and dreamy).

Kendrick Lamar's 'ADHD' is the definitive anthem for this trend, an unbelievably hazy and druggy examination of "a generation sippin' cough syrup like it's water". The hook just finds him rattling off a list of his drug intake (but after each item in the list, is he saying "fuck that" or "fuck thought"?). It's a storytelling song set at a house party, which we are thrown into with a pretty vivid and arresting image: "man, I swear my nigga trippin' off that shit again/pick him up, then I sit him in/cold water, then I order someone to bring him Vicodin/all to take the pain away, from the feeling that he feel today". But overall, the narrative of the song isn't easy to follow - it's made to feel as hazy and blurry as Kendrick is presumably experiencing it.

The song centres around an encounter with a girl who informs Kendrick that their generation are "crack babies, because we born in the '80s - the ADHD crazy". The cryptic claim is set up as a big reveal at the end of the song, and it rings true as the sort of druggy wisdom that might seem like the answer to everything in the late-night chemical haze that the song evokes, before dissolving into nothing in the cold light of day. And that's the feeling that 'ADHD' captures - big, important thoughts and conclusions are hinted at but never really arrived at, everything in the universe seems about to click into place but never does, a generation self-medicating to avoid having to face solid truths. Fuck thought indeed.

21. DJ MC – Y Fall

Chicago footwork remains one the world's most weird, warped and wonderful musical avenues. It's a genre I love dearly, although it isn't always one whose power is best communicated in individual tracks; for me, it works cumulatively, creating a bewildering and mind-altering effect probably best realised on Planet Mu's lovingly curated, and highly recommended, two volumes of Bangs and Works, 51 tracks across two compilation CDs.

Even in the 26-track sprawl of November's Bangs and Works Vol. 2, though, 'Y Fall' distinguishes itself. It's still nominally dance music, although it's literally impossible to imagine anybody dancing to it. It's almost as impossible to describe what it sounds like - an evil, brooding and irregular pulse, scatter-shots of chaotic drums, snatches of Wu-Tang-esque martial arts movie dialogue, a detached voice singing the title. The track is minimalism itself, and it's relatively easy to break it down to a few sonic elements; but it is far more than the sum of its parts, possessing a weirdly muted air of menace, an ambience not really like anything else I have ever heard.

Top 100 tracks 2011, part 3: 60-41

2011-12-25T15:28:00.005Z

100-81 | 80-61 | 60-41 | 40-21 | 20-1

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.

(video)

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.

#1 this week: Little Mix - Cannonball

2011-12-25T11:56:00.002Z

I thought The X Factor was actually better than usual this year. The most striking thing to me was that the final four acts - Misha B, Amelia Lily, Marcus Collins and eventual winners Little Mix - were all people who I could actually imagine being potentially great contemporary pop artists. For me, that's unprecedented. My tentative theory on the matter is that, with audience figures and voting numbers substantially down, this series has belonged far more to actual fans of pop music and pop culture, and far less to the Saturday-night crossover audience.

That Little Mix won the competition is certainly a symbolic victory for pop as such - they are colourful, vibrant and youthful, basically the polar opposite of last year's winner, Matt Cardle. The only successful groups to come out of The X Factor so far have been boybands JLS and One Direction (and, I suppose, now-defunct operatic quartet G4, who did manage three platinum albums after coming second in the first series). Little Mix are not only the first group ever to win the competition, they are the first girl group to finish higher than fifth place. And they are already positioning themselves as perhaps the most ideological and symbolic British pop group since the Spice Girls. Aged 18-20, they have talked about wanting to be seen as positive role models for young girls. They have refused to be presented in an objectifying way; they want to symbolise love and friendship between girls ("no boys for us," insists Perrie Edwards). Now they are the first all-female group to be number one in the UK since Girls Aloud over three years ago. I absolutely love them. They have the potential to be one of the best and most exciting pop groups in the world; in every respect other than their own, original music - which doesn't exist yet - they already are.

Which brings me, I suppose, to 'Cannonball'. The Damien Rice cover, which had been set in place as the winner's single for whichever artist ended up winning, is very much not Little Mix's kind of song. Through the course of the X Factor, they performed songs by current pop superstars like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Rihanna, and also by legends of US urban music like En Vogue and Salt-N-Pepa. The only time they ever seemed slightly out of their comfort zone was doing Motown; any music made before the late-'80s golden age of house and hip-hop is somewhat outside of their continuum. Ballads were thin on the ground; when Little Mix did perform them, they were contemporary soul ballads by artists like Alicia Keys.

Giving them this, a plodding acoustic ballad by an Irish folk singer, then, seems like a marriage made in pop hell. 'Cannonball' as a song - to my ears - is plodding, dull, melodically uninteresting and lyrically vacuous. It commits all the worst sins of the post-'Wonderwall' glut of navel-gazing landfill-indie dirges that plagued the late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s. So I love Little Mix, but I hate 'Cannonball', and in evaluating this record, it's ultimately the latter impulse that wins out.

I do have enough goodwill towards Little Mix that they get me to enjoy the song more than most artists could. For the first half of the song, the arrangement serves them well - we start out with Jade Thirwell singing entirely a cappella, and for a while the arrangement stays minimal and muted. Until the beginning of the second verse, there is no percussion at all; when it arrives, it's just a subtle heartbeat pulse in the background. If the whole record sounded like this, I'd probably actually like it. Obviously, though, it doesn't: a weak, synthetic version of power-ballad enormity eventually kicks in, complete with incongruous of-the-moment trance riffs bubbling around the edges. There's a staggeringly ineffective quiet-then-loud key-change moment. But the whole thing has an oddly muted air around it; it's like the music knows what sort of stadium-pop moves it's supposed to be pulling, but is almost too weary to commit to it fully.

As for Little Mix themselves, they do fine with what they are given. But watching their second performance of the song on the X Factor final, after they have just been crowned winners, is telling. Clearly bewildered and emotional, Jade Thirwell has trouble getting through her opening a cappella with a straight face, just about cracking up with nervous laughter when she gets to her final line, "hard to say what's going on". Perrie Edwards is next, powering her way professionally through her part, before breaking on that final line, into a quipped, spoken-word interjection in some affected Australian-Cockney hybrid accent - "what's goin' on?" The rest of the band burst out into relieved peals of laughter. That performance captures the group's personality far more closely than their studio recording of 'Cannonball' does - they are unable to take the song's grandiose and empty melodrama seriously, and when the song is juxtaposed with their own heightened emotions, it is revealed to be inadequate and ridiculous. It's also a moment that a solo singer could never have pulled off - it is all about the interaction between the members of the group, Edwards clearly offering a punchline in response to Thirwell's wavering performance, the rest of the band clearly grateful that the ludicrous solemnity of the song has been disrupted.

All of which says something about why Little Mix are plainly the best X Factor winners ever - this is exactly the kind of song that X Factor winners sing, and the fact that they are so spectacularly unsuited to it highlights exactly what sets them apart from their predecessors. Now that this whole "winner's single" business is out of the way, I look forward to seeing Little Mix get started on their pop career proper, and get on with being this decade's answer to Girls Aloud. No pressure or anything.

Top 100 tracks 2011, part 2: 80-61

2011-12-20T20:31:00.005Z

100-81 | 80-61 | 60-41 | 40-21 | 20-1

80. Young Montana? – Sacré Cool

Coventry's Young Montana? is surely one of the UK's most overlooked and underrated new producers. 'Sacré Cool' is an absolutely blissed-out beat, full of swooning, soulful vocal loops, and as jam-packed with ideas and seamless interruptions as classic Prefuse 73 or even the Avalanches. At one point, Skip James' 1931 'Devil Got My Woman' even makes an appearance. 'Sacré Cool' is an overjoyed, sunny bounce.

79. SubRosa - The Inheritance

In theory, Salt Lake City's SubRosa make sludgy doom metal. But their music is far prettier and more transcendent than those labels would suggest, largely thanks to frontwoman Rebecca Vernon's melodic vocals and the post-rock violins provided by Sarah Pendleton and Kim Pack. The last minute or so of 'The Inheritance' is just eerie, music-box twinkling. But there's plenty of apocalyptic darkness in the slow-burning six-minute rumble that precedes it, which perfectly fits the end-is-nigh exhortations of Vernon's lyrics: "this genocide rivals Dachau in its endless march of victims," she intones on the chorus, eventually spelling out just who the enemy is - "they say the meek shall inherit the earth/but all I see are the helpless, crushed by the wheel of man ... you see, in this world, money kills". The closing refrain runs "we're in the shadow of a dying world", and this heart-stopping epic really sounds like a soundtrack to capitalist Armageddon.

78. DJ Fresh feat. Sian Evans – Louder

The build-a-better-world positivity of 'Louder' is more or less the polar opposite of the defeated, pessimistic noise of 'The Inheritance'; "we're powerfully changing the world, we're reclaiming our unity", Sian Evans belts in earnest, as though shimmering summer dance anthems could make a better world just by saying so. Meanwhile, dubstep's first number one single showed that halfstepping breakbeats and blaring subbass didn't have to chose between brooding in subterranean darkness and exploding in noisy aggression.

77. Matana Roberts – Libation For Mr Brown: Bid ‘Em In...

Matana Roberts' COIN COIN Chapter One: Gens de coleur libres is an avant garde jazz record and an intense hour-long exploration of slavery in the United States. On 'Libation For Mr Brown: Bid 'Em In...' Roberts actually more or less retreats from jazz itself, going back to the very roots of African-American musical culture - it's a (mostly a capella) call-and-response field holler. The song is about auctioning slaves, and it cuts right to the brutal quick of what slavery really means, of what it is to treat human beings as objects that can be bought and owned. Roberts starts out from the perspective of the white auctioneer trying to sell a young girl ("examine her teeth if you got a mind") before suddenly switching into the first-person, and "bid 'em in" becomes "bid me in" ("you can beat me, you can slice me," she sings). It's absolutely harrowing.

And then, after about seven minutes, Roberts suddenly starts inviting musical instruments into the track - "mister bass", she commands, and in sidles an upright bassline. Around the late '50s and early '60s, there was a lot of political rhetoric around "free jazz" - the idea that the avant garde freedom of the music could symbolise the political freedoms that African Americans were fighting for. 'Libation For Mr Brown' brings that idea utterly to life, building from the sort of work song sung in the fields by slaves before gradually blossoming into colour, illustrating the genealogy of jazz itself, the music eventually rendering itself free.

76. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Belong

Fuzzy Smashing Pumpkins guitars; delicate, soaring harmonies; a blurry, sad romance for awkward misfits. "We just don't belong in their eyes, in the sun"; it's a simple enough sentiment, and hardly a new one for downcast indie pop. But the POBPAH's earnestness, their absolute commitment to this sort of dejected teenage melancholia, should be enough to win around anyone with half a heart. This is the sound of dejection, depression and dislocation, and of finding some small comfort in the fact that someone else feels the same.

75. Balistiq Beats feat. Jamakabi – Concrete Jungle (Yardman Riddim)

Balistiq Beats' 'Yardman Riddim' was one of 2011's great grime instrumentals. That's if you can even really call it grime; it's a relatively slow, rough-hewn, funky bit of unclassifiable dubby reggae. The track's nonchalant bass-and-horns brooding was evidently - and understandably - irresistible to plenty of MCs, and numerous different takes on 'Yardman Riddim' were issued through the course of the year. My personal favourite is Jamakabi's 'Concrete Jungle'; a deadly serious and hard-nosed meditation on urban deprivation that finds time to reference both Osama bin Laden and Dirty Harry.

74. Lone – All Those Weird Things

A warped, bewildering five minutes of unhinged housey euphoria from Manchester-based producer Matt Cutler, aka Lone. 'All Those Weird Things' is simultaneously gleeful and queasy, like the disorientating sugar rush of too many sweets at once.

73. Lil B – Illusions Of Grandeur

Lil B was a law unto himself in 2011, sort of redefining what it means to be a musical artist in an era where music is effectively free. He continued to be almost incomprehensibly prolific, constantly uploading music to YouTube and dropping more mixtapes than anyone could keep track of. His highest-profile release this year was also his masterpiece, I'm Gay; but the uneven, inconsistent sprawl beyond it, in mixtapes like Angels Exodus, Illusions of Grandeur and BasedGodVelli, contained a wealth of fascinating, frustrating and perplexing material.

When Lil B is at his best, he's utterly unique and singularly compelling. Take this, the title track from Illusions of Grandeur. Over a sample of Imogen Heap, of all things, he goes into criminology-storytelling mode; the song's about two friends sucked into a life of crime together, one described as "a product of the environment", the other "a nerd - got picked on and went berserk". B is barely even rapping; his words sometimes don't even rhyme. His flow is fascinating - meandering but somehow deliberate, as if he's making it up on the spot but still feels that every word has to be perfectly chosen and placed. He speaks in ellipses and fragments, and hits on some inexplicably affecting turns of phrase ("one bottle of alcohol, two people with bad thoughts"; "at the age to feel no pain, we robbin' brainless"). He sounds like he might be holding back tears throughout most of the track, and cracks a little when he gets to "maybe I ain't mainstream/I cry, 'cause I want the world/I'm scared that these niggas... would celebrate my death". It's genuinely gripping, and I still can't tell quite what to make of it.

(Special mention should also be made of the fact that, towards the track's end, Lil B claims that Illusions of Grandeur is "the most prolific mixtape to ever come out in hip-hop," which I still find hilarious every single time.)

72. Yasmin – Finish Line

'Finish Line' starts out all ethereal and floaty, beatless synths humming around Yasmin's solemn vocal. Then, out of nowhere, a (presumably) sampled male voices declares "finish line!" and a hard, bassy breakbeat rudely bursts into proceedings. It's a brilliant and striking opening, and almost feels like a metaphor for how London bass music inserted itself firmly into the DNA of pop this year. It's a calm, mature breakup song ("was I hard to love?" Yasmin memorably enquires, "'cause I just can't seem to find enough"), and the perfect marriage between Yasmin's subtle songwriting and Labrinth's pitch-perfect production.

71. Ms Dynamite – Neva Soft

Just one of the brilliant side effects of British urban bass music's new levels of pop presence has been a return to relevance and stardom for 30-year-old Ms Dynamite. I absolutely loved her early singles, but despite winning the Mercury Music Prize, début album A Little Deeper felt a bit patchy and compromised to me. Soon, she had a baby and disappeared; other than a half-hearted (by her own admission) follow-up album in 2005, her pop career seemed over, a disappointing case of unfulfilled potential. Now, though, her moment has decidedly come again - and after 'Wile Out', 'What You Talkin' About', 'Lights On' and 'Neva Soft', her second life in pop is arguably far stronger than her first. Produced by Labrinth (him again), 'Neva Soft' stutters into life with a fierce and fuzzy flurry of guitars before flipping completely into an awesome, minimal beat of creepy bass and skittering drumbeats. Ms Dynamite alternates between croaky, patois-inflected chatting and her full, forceful, powerful singing voice. Another great single from a great talent, presumably paving the way for a full-length in 2012, ten years on from that Mercury Prize win. I can't wait.

70. Britney Spears – Till The World Ends

Recent club-obsessed chartpop has been very preoccupied with momentum and inertia, partying framed as something unending and unstoppable; this often goes so far as to articulate itself into some sort of hedonistic orientation towards apocalypse, as though only total destruction could put a stop to the manic energy of the club. See Jay Sean's '2012 (It Ain't The End)', Pitbull's 'Give Me Everything' ("we might not get tomorrow"), and - of course - 'Till The World Ends'. This song, though, blows 99% of contemporary club-pop out of the water, amping up and exaggerating its technicolour electro energy, turning everything up to eleven. It all centres, of course, around that awesome, wordless refrain, bolted onto some of the most thunderous electro-house beats around. One of Femme Fatale's most straightforward moments, 'Till The World Ends' might actually sound as much like the end of the world as SubRosa's 'The Inheritance' did - huge, bewildering and undeniable.

69. Adele – Rolling In The Deep (Jamie xx remix)

Jamie xx reworks Adele's mega-hit, leaving her a cappella relatively untouched on the verses, using the space in the background to perform his own gradual build, claps and thumps and steel drums. When the release comes on the hook, though, the listener is blindsided as the action shifts from the background to the foreground, and Adele's voice itself is suddenly pitched down and chopped up into interjecting fragments. A perfect deconstruction of an already-brilliant pop record.

68. Rebecca Black – Friday

How anybody who understands anything about pop music could think 'Friday' is anything but brilliant is really beyond me. The best pop is usually slightly off-kilter, says odd things, articulates the obvious, mundane or hackneyed in surprising new ways. And Rebecca Black, 13 when she recorded 'Friday', whose parents paid thousands of dollars to Ark Music to produce the song and video, pulls it off in a way that no established pop star possibly could have. She's not a great singer, by any means, and her untutored, half-spoken Californian enunciations fit the song perfectly. The lyrical gems are near-constant - "gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal" is the point which basically sealed the deal for me on first listen; "gotta make my mind up, which seat can I take?" is equally brilliant. If you actually care whether Black and her songwriters are taking themselves seriously or not on lyrics like "yesterday was Thursday/today it is Friday ... tomorrow is Saturday/and Sunday comes afterward", then you don't get pop music. It's certainly ridiculous, like basically all of the best pop music; Adam Ant's "ridicule is nothing to be scared of" is absolutely pop's golden rule. The point of 'Friday' is obvious - as Black puts it herself, "fun, fun, think about fun". If you feel the need to spend your time and energy hating this, of all the things in the world, then I'm afraid the joke is on you.

67. Lykke Li – Love Out Of Lust

The clear standout from Wounded Rhymes, 'Love Out Of Lust' is a slow, doomy epic, making like Joy Division circa 'Atmosphere'; it's also a genuinely affecting love song, about the ability of love to take the singer beyond herself, the promise that we can transcend our limitations through connections with other people. "We will live longer than I will/we will be better than I was" is the song's central refrain, while the paradoxical mixture of triumphalism and sadness in the music keeps the listener from getting a clear handle on whether Li really believes these promises or not.

66. Falty DL – Make It Difficult

Falty DL was one of the most consistently brilliant and fascinating dance producers of 2011 for me. Picking favourites from his 2011 tracks isn't easy, but summer single 'Make It Difficult' is absolute magic - with incongruous vocal samples rubbing up against each other, floaty, euphoric synths, skittering hardkore breakbeats, Falty DL pulls off his usual trick of just throwing more ideas and sounds together in one place than most producers would dare to, and making the whole thing sound totally seamless and right. Listening to Falty DL, every second sounds like those transitional points in a DJ mix where two tracks overlap and bleed into each other. ('Jack Your Job', the single's B-side, is also fantastic.)

65. Frank Ocean – Swim Good

On 'Love Out Of Lust', we heard Lykke Li singing about becoming more than herself through union with another; the welcoming 'we' that is bigger than the 'I'. On 'Swim Good', a heartbroken Frank Ocean flips the metaphor with one of 2011's most ambiguous and enduring images: "I'm about to drive to the ocean/I'm a' try to swim from something bigger than me". He's driving, waiting for the road to "run out", wearing a black suit "like I'm ready for a funeral". And the atmosphere of the track is perfectly funeral, a severe, taut thing, all church organs, solemn pianos, and slow, thunderous drums. When he finally explodes "I'm goin' off - don't try stopping me/I'm goin' off - don't try saving..." the suicidal resignation of the song is unmistakable.

64. Pangaea – Hex

One of bass music's most awe-inspiring records in 2011. 'Hex' opens like a relatively typical, if pretty brilliant, bit of post-dubstep rave. After about a minute and a half intro, though, the track pulls out its secret weapon - a frantically cut-up and incomprehensible ragga vocal that sounds totally jarring, bewildering and incredible. Just before the track reaches the three-minute mark, it mutates again, with sombre, dramatic strings appearing in the background, an almost ridiculous counterpoint the gabbling mania going on in the foreground. This is breakbeat science and rough-hewn, retro-futurist jungle at its most magical.

63. Liturgy – Returner

Or - what if black metal was about light, rather than darkness? Liturgy caused quite a stir in the underground metal community this year with their 'transcendental black metal', taking the basic components of the genre (relentless blastbeats, shredding tremolo-picked guitars, muffled-shriek vocals) and creating something completely different in mood - something soaring, majestic, positive. Perhaps most offensively of all to black metal traditionalists, Liturgy actually make the music sound clean. The explosive math-rock riffs of 'Returner' mark Liturgy's most successful moment, and the best articulation of their genuinely unique, transportative rock music.

62. Jay-Z & Kanye West – Otis

Watch The Throne wasn't a great album; it was a great collection of beats with Jay-Z and Kanye West on total autopilot over the top. And you got what you would probably expect from Jay and Kanye on autopilot - they were sometimes just adequate, sometimes actively off-putting, sometimes inspiring.

'Otis' was the one moment when the two rappers both clicked perfectly with a fantastic instrumental to generate absolute hip-hop gold. It's basically all about conspicuous consumption, wealthy people showing off their wealth and status, which is a pretty out-of-touch move to make in recession-stricken America, with a popular opinion of the mega-rich more negative than it has been at any other time in recent memory. But, like 'Friday', 'Otis' is just wilfully ridiculous, the two rappers playfully bouncing off each other over a (presumably very expensive) Otis Redding sample, just having fun with the sheer assonance of language. Jay's hilarious opening gambit is "I invented swag"; he goes on to boast that he is "photoshoot fresh, lookin' like wealth, I'm 'bout to call the paparazzi on myself". Kanye responds to Jay's "I got five passports, I'm never going to jail" with a rather presumptuous "I made 'Jesus Walks', I'm never going to hell", before moving on to the much-quoted "sophisticated ignorance, write my curses in cursive" and the absolutely hilarious polysyllabic assonance of "I get it custom, you a customer, you ain't accustomed to goin' through customs, you ain't been nowhere, hah?"

The point of it all, though, is inadvertently made clear by Jay-Z when he comments, "not bad, huh, for some immigrants? Build ya' fences, we diggin' tunnels - can't you see, we gettin' money up under you?" It's less than a century and a half since the end of slavery in the US, not a terribly long time in historical terms; Jay and Kanye still think of themselves as immigrants, still think of their material success as something subversive. And I'm reminded of the potted and complex lineage that leads from Matana Roberts' slave songs, through Otis Redding and to 'Otis'.

61. Nicola Roberts – Beat Of My Drum

Nicola Roberts' role in Girls Aloud often called for her to deliver the quiet, small, vulnerable moments. So one of the most striking things about her first solo single is how bold, authoritative and hard-edged she sounds; "graduation, take a bow/see how strong you made me now" she snarls in the first verse, and the chorus is an out-and-out order: "dance to the beat of my drum!" And you will; this Diplo-produced gem is pop perfection itself, a cauldron of popping, swirling noise, underpinned by hard-as-diamond martial drumbeats, while the dynamics of Nicola's delivery - icy, quickfire verses, a sneering bridge into that explosive cheerleader chorus - work the listener with the deftness of a veteran.

Top 100 tracks 2011, part 1: 100-81

2011-12-19T23:59:00.006Z

100-81 | 80-61 | 60-41 | 40-21 | 20-1

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.

(snippet only)

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.

#1 this week: Olly Murs - Dance With Me Tonight

2011-12-18T10:56:00.002Z

It opens with a syncopated drumbeat, like foot-stomps and clapping. "Ladies and gentlemen," announces an unidentified (American, male) voice, "we got a special treat for you tonight." A jaunty upright bass enters proceedings. "I'm gonna call my friend Olly up here," the voice continues, "to sing for you ladies. Olly! Let's go man!" His friend Olly sidles onto the track alongside a perky horn section, to announce: "my name is Olly, nice to meet you, can I tell you baby/lookin' 'round, there's a whole lot of pretty ladies/but not like you, you shine so bright!" We are thirty seconds into 'Dance With Me Tonight', and the reasons to loathe it are already myriad.

I've written about Olly Murs before, and expounded at some length about how much I dislike him as a pop star. After somehow turning out the pretty-much-brilliant 'Heart Skips A Beat' earlier this year, he's obviously - and unsurprisingly - going back to business as usual now. 'Dance With Me Tonight' is a take on pre-soul African-American pop, all doo-wop backing vocals and Jackie Wilson-esque rhythm and blues. Obviously, though, this is all rhythm and no blues; it's utterly soulless, shooting for explosive joy without any sense of sadness around the edges to make that joy meaningful, trying to sound like disinhibited release without giving the impression that the singer has ever had to repress anything in his life. The musical language Olly Murs is appropriating here developed as an expression of the frustrations and aspirations of a marginalised people, and that fact matters; it's what gives power, meaning and context to the sense of ecstatic, defiant release coded into it. And there's nothing more galling than hearing that musical language be appropriated by privileged people as a cheap short-cut to the energy of 'coolness' and 'fun' embodied in the music. That goes for the smug, self-satisfied funkiness of artists like Jamiroquai and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers; and it goes for Olly Murs and 'Dance With Me Tonight'.

This isn't an academic point; it's something that, to me at least, is totally perceptible in the music itself. The mood Murs projects throughout is completely smug and self-assured; there isn't a hint of vulnerability, sadness or urgency - nothing is really at stake. Which isn't exactly the best frame for the lyrical content of the song - as the title suggests, it's about Murs propositioning someone for a dance. "I won't give up without a fight," he sings, and that line might come across a bit less coercive and bullying if the singer himself projected any sense of vulnerability or fear of rejection. But Murs never sounds anything less than completely sure of himself, going so far as to announce, when reminiscing about his first glimpse of his addressee, "I knew right then you'd be mine". To me, the whole thing is repulsively sleazy and offensive, and all the more so because we are clearly not meant to code it as such.

As far as I'm concerned, then, there's absolutely nothing of value here, nothing remotely interesting, rewarding or gripping about this record. It's the sound of a smug, privileged and dislikeable singer revelling in his own smugness and privilege, and assuming that we'll all like him. When I write about number one singles here, I try to be as charitable as I can; I try to take every record seriously on its own terms. It was far, far more of a struggle to engage with 'Dance With Me Tonight' in this way than usual, and no matter how hard I try, there's no redeeming feature, nothing to connect with. This is hollow, empty, nothing music, and it's my absolute conviction that pop music should be, and very often is, far more than that.

#1 this week: The X Factor Finalists feat. JLS & One Direction - Wishing On A Star

2011-12-11T16:05:00.000Z

Another year, another X Factor charity single at number one. This is the fourth of its kind, and the third which I have written about here. The show's cultural capital is decidedly on the wane this series; with a mostly-new judging panel, viewing figures, voting numbers, and advertising revenue are apparently down. For the first time since the first series in 2004, the winner's single will not be released to coincide with the Christmas Number One battle; and, notably here, the producers have seen fit to rope former contestants JLS and One Direction in for this charity single, the current series' finalists presumably not representing enough of a draw on their own.

'Wishing On A Star' was originally recorded by LA soul band Rose Royce for their second album, 1977's Rose Royce II: In Full Bloom. The group was one of the first to sign to Whitfield Records, founded by legendary progressive-soul genius Norman Whitfield after his acrimonious break from Motown in 1973. 'Wishing On A Star' in its original incarnation was, of course, produced by Whitfield and naturally sounds beautiful; lead vocalist Gwen Dickey's delivery is flawless, pining with aching lost-love melancholy over Whitfield's sparse background of pianos, strings, minimal percussion, and occasional ripples of funk guitar. It's a formula that was repeated successfully on their next big single, 'Love Don't Live Here Anymore' (this time augmented with some odd, futuristic-sounding synth noises). Both songs were top 3 hits in the UK in 1978, but were nowhere near as successful in the US, where it took New York urban dance-pop outfit the Cover Girls to finally make 'Wishing On A Star' a hit in 1992.

Since then, the track has become a bit of a standard. Jay-Z got Gwen Dickey to reprise the song's hook on his 1998 single of the same name, based around an extensive sample of the Whitfield-produced original; Beyoncé has also covered it. In fact, the X Factor version isn't even the first version of 'Wishing On A Star' of its month, with British soul stalwart Seal having released a version as a single one week previously. (For what it's worth, Seal's version - produced by Trevor Horn - is fine enough, and sensibly cleaves pretty close to the ambience of the original.) All of which makes the song an unsurprising choice as material for an X Factor charity single, as does its central and titular image, vague and wishy-washy enough to suit the purposes of the charity ballad ('stars' have long since been a go-to image for emptily contemplative pop, from 'Yellow' to 'Written In The Stars' - although that isn't a brush I would tar the Rose Royce original with).

How much is there to say about this, then? The backing track actually sounds nice enough, and it probably says something about the healthy state of British pop at the moment that even a by-numbers charity ballad can be backed up by a vaguely trip-hop-indebted (if awkward) breakbeat and a relatively spacious and pretty arrangement. If I'm going to listen to musically conservative, soft-focus wallpaper - and if I'm listening to an X Factor charity single, that's presumably what I'm in for - I would rather it sound this clean and airy, and actually acknowledge the existence of black music, than the muddy, deracinated sonic slop that we are usually served on singles like this.

Having said that, this is obviously still a bit of a mess, as is usually the case with charity singles which try to shoehorn countless lead vocalists onto a single track. I'm not a big fan of 'Do They Know It's Christmas?', the originator of this trend; but one thing that Geldof and Ure got right, which virtually none of those following them ever have, was to craft a dynamic song with lots of different parts to it. Because the song shifts constantly, we can have different vocalists jumping in on every other line without it sounding awkward and forced, and everyone involved can inhabit their own part of the song without inviting direct comparison with anybody else (most notoriously, of course, Bono's wracked and earnest "thank God it's them instead of you"). From the crushing 7-minute endurance test of 'We Are The World' onward, a different standard has been set: give a revolving cast of vocalists a repetitive and circular melody to contend with, so that the listener is asked to listen to a litany of different singers delivering the same melodic phrases over and over again, while no singer is given room to do anything with the song, and everyone involved is trying their best to 'put their own stamp' onto it. Ballad singing, in particular, generally requires a skilled and subtle vocal performance, and a singer who knows when to cut loose and when to hold back (and is generally better served by less of the former and more of the latter). The whole concept of revolving-cast charity ballads like this seems almost custom-designed to prevent this from happening, and to more or less ensure a disrupted, messy, unsatisfying listen. Which is exactly, unsurprisingly, what happens here.

All of which, one might think, is more or less academic; the song is at number one, it has earned some money for charity and given a boost to the media profile of The X Factor as a brand, and of the performers on the track. This is, perhaps, all that it was ever intended to do. But it is, at the end of the day, still a pop record; it seems fair enough to judge it as one, and as a pop record it is weak - the most you can praise it for is that it isn't anywhere near as terrible as it could have been. The arrangement starts out subtle and quiet, and gradually builds over the course of the thing. Exiled contestant Frankie Cocozza, who has been swiftly excised from the video and radio versions of the track, shows up halfway through the second verse on the actual single version, sounding lost and confused, to sing "I didn't mean to hurt you, but I know/in the game of love you reap what you sow" in a hazy, Doherty-esque mumble, almost as though apologising for allowing himself to be spun as some sort of disgusting comedy-relief parody of a rock'n'roll misogynist. As the song progresses, the song gets bigger, and - predictably - the singers start to depart more and more from the melodic constraints of the song, using it as a platform to show off their vocals (for what it's worth, Craig Colton and Sophie Habibis are probably the worst offenders on this score). In general, throughout, absolutely no one manages to connect with the quiet but gut-wrenching heartbreak that the song actually demands; but it's hard to blame them when they've only been given isolated lines to deliver. Finally, we get the inevitable key change into a massive choir; but here, it's a choir comprised by two X Factor-generated boybands, JLS and One Direction. Any listener who was somehow managing to connect with the emotional content of the song is surely stopped in their tracks by Oritsé Williams from JLS yelling "JLS! 1D!" and ushering in the final, pointless thirty seconds or so of the song, on which JLS and One Direction do very little other than justify their inclusion in the video and on the single sleeve credits.

At its heart, 'Wishing On A Star' is a lonely song - the overwhelming mood of the original, from Gwen Dickey's gorgeously sad vocal to Norman Whitfield's spacious, delicate sonic backdrop, is one of isolation and of absence. (In that sense it's probably not a coincidence that the group and producer's attempt to replicate its feel ended up being called 'Love Don't Live Here Anymore', and making such prominent use of the word vacancy, the ideal word to capture 'Wishing On A Star''s mood of melancholy emptiness.) This rendition, ending up as an overcrowded and overblown mess, home to too much emotionally blank vocal showboating, ends up losing - despite its best efforts - most of what makes the song a good one.

#1 this week: Professor Green feat. Emeli Sandé - Read All About It

2011-11-05T16:41:00.004Z

In 2008, Professor Green's father committed suicide. Last year, on the closing track of his début album Alive Till I'm Dead, the Hackney MC spoke about the situation, only to face public accusations from his stepmother that he was "cashing in" on his father's death. Now, on 'Read All About It', Pro Green has responded by issuing a 'Cleaning Out My Closet'-style airing of family business, and taken it to the top of the charts. (Professor Green talked to Radio 1 about the background to the record, here.)

'Read All About It' feels to me like the sort of record it'd be easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to, one way or another. On the one hand, it's easy to be impressed by the song's serious and earnest dealings with intense, difficult, and very real issues of the sort not addressed particularly often in chart-topping pop music. On the other, it'd be equally easy to dismiss the song as dull and hectoring - it's certainly not a lot of fun to listen to.

For me, the truth lies somewhere in between. Musically, 'Read All About It' ticks all the rap-power-ballad boxes: soaring strings; massive, martial drums; huge chorus, complete with a wordless, earwormy "oh-oh-OH" coda. The mood is one of intense, chest-beating grandiosity; despite the obvious 'Cleanin' Out My Closet' comparison, the mood is far more akin to Eminem's more recent 'Not Afraid' (Emeli Sandé even sings "I'm not afraid" on the hook). It fits the redemptive model we've already seen Brit rappers take to the top of the charts, in 'Written In The Stars' and, more recently, 'No Regrets'. Except, of course, that unlike those songs, Professor Green actually does have things to say; about his stepmother ("making it harder for me to see my father was the only thing you ever did for me"), his relationship with his father ("last thing I ever said to you was I hated you"), and the strain of living in the public eye ("my life just became yours to read and interpret"). Songs that sound like this usually turn out, on closer inspection, to be fairly empty, full of vague and vacuous cliché, making a lot of noise about nothing particularly coherent. The best thing about 'Read All About It' is that this actually isn't the case, that Professor Green is talking about specific, concrete things, rather than aiming for universality through well-worn platitudes and tropes.

For me, this is close to being a good record - I want to like it more than I do. The music is on such a bombastic autopilot, so constructed out of power-ballad sonic clichés; just a hint of subtlety, something interesting or distinctive going on in the backing track, would have made a world of difference, but it just isn't there. And bombastic grandiosity isn't really the best medium for this song's message. Lyrically, Professor Green is obviously in earnest, and what he is saying in the song is clearly important to him; but if you know the story behind the song before you hear it, there aren't really any lyrics to make you sit up and take notice. In other words, what he's saying is more interesting than how he says it, or any of the specific things he says about it. For a number one record so intensely personal and emotionally raw, there's a surprising lack of bite or disruption about it.

I can't really say that I enjoy 'Read All About It'; but it would be tremendously mean-spirited to actually object to it. The po-faced seriousness of records like 'Written In The Stars' irritates me no end, not because I don't think pop songs should be serious, but because the seriousness of these songs so often seems a matter of style more than substance - they want to sound serious without actually having anything serious to say. On that score, 'Read All About It' is worth a thousand vacuous, faux-inspirational rap-ballads like 'No Regrets'. I don't think it would have taken much - an interesting musical idea, a couple of genuinely gripping or unexpected lines - to make it connect with me a lot more than it did.

#1 this week: Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris - We Found Love

2011-10-15T11:38:00.002+01:00

In April 2009, Calvin Harris had a UK number one with a song that now looks strikingly prescient. 'I'm Not Alone' was part of a brace of early 2009 hits that re-purposed chart music around electronic dance sounds; while 2008 had seen number one hits for artists like Kid Rock, Coldplay, Kings of Leon and the Ting Tings, 2009 saw guitars virtually excised from the charts. Three key producers, and their imitators, defined the sound of UK mainstream music during 2009: RedOne, who crafted Lady Gaga's trashy, electroclash hedonism; Fraser T. Smith, who broke Tinchy Stryder to the mainstream with a sound like grime inverted, all soft, floaty, synthetic strings; and, of course, David Guetta, whose stadium-sized house ploughed a furrow somewhere between the two, simultaneously trashy and transcendent, hard and soft. Harris' 'I'm Not Alone' centred around one feature in particular - a massive trance riff - which sounded oddly out-of-time in early 2009, but which has since become an inescapable feature of chart music (to the point of Chris Brown more or less ripping off the 'I'm Not Alone' riff for 'Yeah 3x' last year).

While the pop world was suddenly running off into an apparently endless Gaga/Guetta party, Rihanna was, of course, having a pretty horrible 2009, which she ended with the release of her fourth album, Rated R. Overall, it was a dark and cathartic record, incorporating doomy ballads, rock and dubstep; it was strikingly out of step with the light, frothy rave sounds that had come to dominate pop. As if to compensate, and to catch up with the zeitgeist (and the fun), Rihanna followed up Rated R with the colourful party-pop of Loud; the record made her into one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, comfortably doubling the global sales of its predecessor and spawning a series of hits. Her 2011 has felt like something of a victory lap. Now, for the third consecutive November, she's preparing to release a new album, Talk That Talk, for which 'We Found Love' is the lead single.

For it, she's crossed paths with Calvin Harris, who has scored a couple of number 2 hits already in 2011 (the Kelis-assisted 'Bounce' and 'Feel So Close', which just missed out on the top spot thanks to this and this respectively). And I'm driven back to April 2009, and 'I'm Not Alone', the last time Calvin Harris was at number one; its stadium-sized trance riff makes the record sound a lot like a lot of songs that have been released since, but its mood is fundamentally different from most of the party-pop that has dominated 2009-11. It is dance music that is not about dancing, not about the party and the club; it reverberates with a transcendent melancholia, a deep sense of loneliness. The same is true of 'We Found Love' - it is simpler, and better, than just about any of Rihanna's recent singles; it blows her recent attempts at elecropop - the thumping, soulless 'Only Girl (In The World)', the gimmicky, attention-grabbing 'S&M' - out of the water entirely.

As a song, 'We Found Love' is disarmingly reductive. Rihanna's vocal melody is minimal and circular, dominated mostly by a single melodic phrase; Calvin Harris, on production duties, is more active, turning out a dynamic bit of Balearic house, complete with big, intense, distorted-synth builds he's already employed on 'Bounce'. Nevertheless, Rihanna is still the star of the show; her voice is like an icy, spectral presence, occupying soaring Donna Summer-esque heights. The lyric, like the vocal, is minimal but perfectly-measured, revolving around the declaration of the chorus: "we found love in a hopeless place". Hope in hopelessness, beauty amidst desolation, euphoria mixed with sadness - this is what so much of the best pop music embodies. 'We Found Love' works as a straight love song; but around the edges of the song, it is hard to escape the implication that the love in question has been lost as well as found. A lot of pop choruses are written in the present or future tense, but 'We Found Love' is firmly oriented towards the past; the song's other key lyric, outside of that chorus, is Rihanna's philosophical sigh of "I've gotta let it go".

I haven't lived with the song for very long, so I've got plenty of time to change my mind. But right now, to me, 'We Found Love' feels the best Rihanna single for quite some time - since 'Russian Roulette', or perhaps even the towering 'Umbrella' itself. With its past-tense orientation, an inversion of the anticipatory euphoria of 'I Gotta Feeling' or 'Dynamite', the song might even be a subtle comedown after the frantic hedonism of 2009-11 in-the-club pop. It is certainly, on its own terms, a wonderful pop record and one of the very best number ones of 2011.

#1 this week: Sac Noel - Loca People

2011-10-09T12:02:00.003+01:00

With so much of current pop absorbing sounds from European house and techno, it's only natural that the UK charts every so often still have room for the occasional anonymous big-room summer tune from the continent. The sort of hard-house beats employed by 'Loca People' are being approximated by the very zeitgeist-y likes of LFMAO, but the track actually feels pretty detached from the general climate of the charts - it sounds like exactly the sort of track that would have been a hit around the late '90s or so.

There's definitely an air of novelty about 'Loca People'. The track itself is a perfectly serviceable bit of house-by-numbers (that might not sound like much of a compliment, but I don't have anything against house-by-numbers, and the backing track on its own would, in all honesty, be more fun to listen to than most of the current top 20). But there's no way that this track would have attracted anybody's attention as an instrumental - what makes it a hit is the vocal part, apparently delivered by a Dutch barmaid called Esthera Sanita. It's a spoken-word monologue about as packed with hooks as a spoken-word monologue over house beats can be - her hypnotic intonations of "all day, all night" and "viva la fiesta, viva los DJs"; that a cappella bit where she calls up her friend Johnny ("Johnny, la gente esta muy loca!"); and, of course, her percussive declaration "what the fuck!"

So, this is a pretty straightforward record, about which there is not that much to say; it's clearly designed as a summery big-room novelty dance record, and it does the job admirably, partly by not being too heavy-handed, by not attempting to do too much beyond the minimum necessary to get people dancing and give them a few simple vocal catchphrases to latch onto. It's simple stuff, far from lifechanging, and other records have pursued this template with more interesting and memorable results. But after four number ones in a row that have been pretty rubbish (or worse), and especially after seeing the likes of 'No Regrets' and 'Stay Awake' get themselves into a bit of a mess by trying too hard to pull too many tricks at once, it's pretty refreshing to hear a record that isn't intended as anything more than throwaway fun. Pop music can be an awful lot more than this, and it can sometimes be an awful lot more than this without really meaning to be - which is often where it is most interesting. In short, while there's not much to 'Loca People', that ends up meaning that there's not much to dislike about it.

#1 this week: Dappy - No Regrets

2011-09-30T13:37:00.000+01:00

'No Regrets' is one of those pop songs that works by playing off the public perception of the artists behind it; the listener is supposed to bring with them a pre-existing idea of Dappy. In case anyone reading this doesn't know who Dappy is, he is a member of British urban pop group N-Dubz (alongside his cousin, and new X Factor judge, Tulisa Contostavlos). The general public's perception of Dappy is dominated by what might euphemistically be called 'controversy' - repeated trouble with the law over things like drug use, assault and death threats. With the group on hiatus "for the foreseeable future", Dappy is launching a solo career. 'No Regrets' stands as precisely the shrewd/cynical move - man-in-the-mirror emoting; a big, redemptive choir-and-key-change chorus; Dappy moving on and looking to the future.

'No Regrets' wilfully fudges and blurs a lot of issues, and as such it's a bit of a conceptual mess. There are a few strands going on. On the one hand, we get self-deprecating Dappy, admitting his past failings and looking to change - "I messed my life up", "I'm no longer looking at a reflection that I admire", and so on. On the other hand, we have the far less contrite Dappy of the song's title, victoriously blurting out "I'm just being me!" as a triumphant choir kicks in behind him, and even crooning an emptily self-validating passage from Oasis' 'Whatever' ("I'm freeeeee to be whatever I..."). These two apparently contradictory lines of thought are clumsily stitched together by a third theme, that of triumph over adversity - so we get Dappy musing about being "victimised by the public" but holding his head up proudly anyway, boasting that he has "the heart of a winner". So his own fuck-ups and the criticism he has received are both turned into grist for his egotistical mill, both just obstacles to be overcome. It's a pretty common trope in urban music, a clever sleight-of-hand that allows self-deprecation to co-exist comfortably with self-aggrandisement. It can be compelling, but only when the tensions and contradictions involved are palpable in the music, rather than being casually papered over and studiously ignored, like they are here.

What's irksome about 'No Regrets' is probably crystallised most strongly in a line that Dappy drops early in the song: "you're looking at a changed man - Chris Brown". The line is galling for obvious reasons, but it's unfortunately quite apt. Chris Brown is a person who has done atrocious things, and has done very little to indicate that he has 'changed' other than - and this is crucial - unconvincingly spinning and positioning himself as 'changed' to the media, while releasing mind-bogglingly point-missing records like Chipmunk collaboration 'Champion' in which he tries to frame himself as a victim. (Jay Smooth is good on this, as usual.) This is pretty much the model that Dappy is following here, but needless to say, it rings incredibly hollow. The emotional mood of 'No Regrets' should be - and wants to be - one of humility and perspective, but neither are anywhere to be found. Dappy's admitting his failings here without being sorry for them, trying to have his cake and eat it and hoping no one notices; he's playing a careful game here that feels like it has far more to do with marketing than genuine emotional expression.

(As an aside, for what it's worth, the Chris Brown line is also a good representation of the record because it's one of a series of embarrassing hashtag-rap similes that pepper Dappy's lyrics. Other offenders include "back to the future - Marty McFly", "I'm flyer than the birds - Richard Branson" and "I'll blow the bloody doors off - Michael Caine".)

I actually have quite a soft spot for N-Dubz. Some of their records - especially recently - have been bland; but they have more often been, even when deeply flawed, at least compelling, and they have definitely managed the odd moment of brilliance (début single 'You Better Not Waste My Time', ridiculous pop breakthrough 'I Need You'). Dappy could be compelling with N-Dubz precisely because he seemed so unreflective and disinhibited, like an overgrown child with no impulse control whatsoever; but this persona only worked, when it did, because Dappy's was not the only voice, but was reigned in and countered by his bandmates on records that felt more like hectic squabbles than monologues. Dappy as a hyperkinetic cartoon antihero has worn thin, and he does need to change his on-record persona if he's going to make a decent solo single. But this self-consciousness, this transparently calculated attempt to ingratiate himself to a pop audience, is ill-fitting at best. Dappy has certainly retained his undeniable pop instincts - 'No Regrets' is, if nothing else, catchy. But its forced faux-maturity is excruciatingly ham-fisted and transparently insincere.

#1 this week: One Direction - What Makes You Beautiful

2011-09-25T10:22:00.001+01:00

I might as well get the musical analysis out of the way first. 'What Makes You Beautiful' is a punchy bit of vaguely rock-oriented kidpop; the sneaky little guitar figure that leads into the song is reminiscent of 'Summer Nights' from Grease, while the thing as a whole recalls the shouty 2000s poprock peddled by artists like Kelly Clarkson, McFly and Pink. It is catchy in a way that will either thrill or grate, employing a whole barrage of "whoa-oh-OH"s and "na-nana-na"s. This is decidedly, defiantly, POP, not a club in sight, not the merest hint of urban London creeping into the music. The song does what it is trying to do, musically, well enough; if you are happy enough with what it is trying to do, if you do not demand subtlety in your pop songs, there is plenty to enjoy about the track. I suspect the song's insistently bubbly sugar-rush would probably wear thin after a certain number of listens, even if you are the kind of listener who gets a kick out it - I haven't listened to it enough times to know for sure.

Nor do I wish to, mainly because of the song's lyrics, which are maddening to such a degree that bracketing them off in order to write that opening paragraph - trying to hear the song in abstraction from its 'message', such as it is - was a bit of a struggle. Conveniently enough, the song boils its own long story short in its titular refrain at the end of the chorus - "you don't know you're beautiful/that's what makes you beautiful".

This tells you more or less everything you need to know. One Direction, from that weird many-voices-as-one perspective of the boyband, spend the song expressing their love/lust/affection (delete as the preference of the listener dictates, presumably) towards an Other who is described as "insecure" and "shy", smiling awkwardly at the ground. She doesn't know that she's beautiful. But, One Direction tell her, that's what makes her beautiful.

As an important aside, nothing in the song says explicitly that the addressee is a 'she'; but sadly, on pain of serious naivety, we have to admit that this is obviously what the song's writers and singers intend us to assume. By the band's own reckoning, roughly "ninety-nine per cent" of their fans are teenage girls. The imagined listener is not supposed to identify themselves with the perspective the song is sung from; they are supposed to imagine themselves as the song's addressee.

That being said, what message does the record send? To pose the question of the song's title, what makes you beautiful? You are beautiful, the song seems to say, because you are insecure, shy and awkward. You are beautiful because you are weak and passive; you are beautiful because you lack power, and because you depend upon me to validate you by telling you that you are beautiful. The song seems to be trying to convince its addressee that she is beautiful, but it gives the game away in that titular admission at the end of the chorus. If you don't know you're beautiful, and that's what makes you beautiful, then what would render you beautiful no longer? The obvious answer is: knowing, or believing, that you are beautiful, whether One Direction tell you that you are or not. Or even finding self-worth and confidence in something other than 'beauty', being self-assured and confident for reasons that does not depend upon the way you 'appear' to yourself or anyone else. Confidence, self-esteem, self-respect - it's impossible to escape the implication that, for this song, these things are paradigmatically unattractive, and that you are appealing precisely insofar as you lack them, and depend upon external validation for any sense of self-worth. These ideas are, sadly, not uncommon. But they are reprehensible, and they are rarely spelled out so baldly as they are in 'What Makes You Beautiful'.

Absolutely nothing in the song goes beyond this; there isn't a shred of emotional insight, or real feeling. It's nothing but the hollow reproduction of a horrible cultural trope, the straight male perspective the song is sung from being as much of a hollow, constructed chimera as the imaginary girl that it is sung to. There isn't a real person anywhere in this song. What this basically amounts to, then, is a fetishisation of weakness and insecurity, mass-marketed at teenage girls. In other words, it's an insult to its intended audience and, in fact, to everybody. In a very real sense, I think that this is a fair representation of pop music at its very, very worst, enshrining everything that is often frustrating about pop while containing absolutely none of what is vital and compelling about it.

#1 this week: Pixie Lott - All About Tonight

2011-09-17T15:22:00.005+01:00

"I'mma make you feel so good tonight, 'cause we might not get tomorrow," promised Pitbull on 'Give Me Everything'; "all that counts is here and now," declared the Wanted dramatically on 'Glad You Came'. A couple of examples - just off the top of my head, from the last few months of UK number ones - of current party-pop's obsession with the immediacy of the moment. And here's Pixie Lott with a song called 'All About Tonight'. The song actually scans as an appropriation of current pop tropes in the service of a much more traditional pop milieu – the club song is transmuted here into an ‘I Will Survive’-style break-up song. The partying is thus framed in terms of leaving behind, and moving past, the emotional wreckage of a failed relationship – “I’m so over you”, “I threw all your drama away”, and so on.

One of the striking things about most recent club-pop is the complete excision of love and relationships, at least in any form that might exist beyond the one night stand. That’s what “it’s all about tonight” tends to mean in these songs. So it’s interesting to see this record letting the rest of life in through the back door. The reason why it’s necessary to say that tonight is all that counts is because there is something outside of the immediate moment that the singer is trying to shut out. The chorus even sees fit to remind its audience that “we’ve been working all week” and explain that “tomorrow doesn’t matter when you’re moving your feet” – which is a significantly more modest claim than “we might not get tomorrow”. We even get an echo of Lady Gaga’s definitive club-versus-world anthem in Lott’s throwaway “they got the music so loud, so I won’t hear the phone if you call!” That line, and the Gaga comparison, are telling. Where ‘Telephone’ reacts with visceral horror to the external world unexpectedly invading the night out, Pixie Lott is casually confident that it can’t – but this is because her stakes are lower. ‘All About Tonight’ is not a futile attempt to obliterate the rest of the world by sinking into the immediacy of the hedonistic moment; it’s just an attempt to take a temporary break. Pixie Lott knows all too well that the working week, and those missed calls on her phone, will be waiting for her just outside the edges of this record.

So, ultimately, the song fails, because it’s not all about tonight – the presence of the week of work that preceded the weekend, and the phone calls from the outside world, are allowed to define Pixie’s party. But the song itself seeks to steamroller all of this, to make the titular phrase true – in the world of ‘All About Tonight’, from its cheery synthetic buzz to Lott’s permanently-grinning vocal performance, all of that external stuff might as well not even be there, and she might as well not even be singing about it. Which I suppose is just to say that this is an emotionally shallow record, and not in an interesting way, either. It is also, like its predecessor in the number one slot, a very sober-sounding song. The song tells us what a lot of fun it is having, and contrasts its fun with some non-fun things which are not allowed to impinge upon its fun. What it doesn’t do is make any of it sound, or feel, like much fun, which is the curse of the unsuccessful party song – when you aim so low, you really need to at least hit the target.

#1 this week: Example - Stay Awake

2011-09-11T11:31:00.004+01:00

"In another moment down went Alice after it [the rabbit], never once considering how she was to get out again. The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well."
-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, 1865

"Lookin' for a way back home, but I can't get back."
-Example, 'Changed The Way You Kiss Me', 2011

I've been writing about UK number ones here for a couple of years now, and one theme has forced itself on me over and over again - The Club. The dominant mood of current chart music has, for a while now, been one of wilfully blinkered hedonism; darkness has been largely excised from contemporary club-pop, and the world outside the club - with all of its responsibilities and consequences - has been shut out, in favour of an obsessively myopic focus on right here, right now. The party, the club, the night out. Just dance - it'll be okay. And then we'll do it again.

Naturally enough, there's been an air of artificially-induced mania about all of this. The issue of drugs has been something of an elephant in the room; alcohol aside, drugs have rarely - if ever - been mentioned in this club-centric chart-pop. But they have been strongly suggested by the strikingly uniform sonic palette of these records, plying a particularly floaty, head-swimming form of trance. Just as early rave music in the UK gradually edged away from euphoria - becoming increasingly off-kilter and warped, eventually morphing into Darkcore around '92 - it feels like the inevitable crash is overdue, and I've been wondering for a while now if we will see it enacted in the charts.

Well, 'Stay Awake' - superficially, at least - is exactly that record. "It's about a generation of kids taking too much drugs," Example has said. It's about what happens when people, on a massive scale, are living according to the logic of club-pop, living only for the immediate moment, with no guiding principle outside of short-term hedonism.

Somehow, despite all of that, the song defies the odds and manages to feel uninteresting and unimportant. "If we don't kill ourselves, we'll be the leaders of a messed-up generation," the song opens, later worrying "did we take it too far? Did we chase the rabbit into Wonderland?" But the music is light, airy, throwaway; the stakes aren't made to feel anywhere near as urgent as they probably should. Crucially, the music feels sober - despite the first-person plural, the record doesn't convincingly speak from within the perspective of self-destruction, souring hedonism. It feels like Example is concerned to avoid either judging the people he is talking about from outside, or fully embodying and enacting the encroaching darkness he is timidly warning against. As such, we get the worst of both worlds, a sober, light-of-day public service video more concerned with ingratiating itself with its intended audience than teaching them anything.

The ironic thing is that Example has already made a number one single that did a far better job of what 'Stay Awake' is shooting for. 'Changed The Way You Kiss Me' felt the way 'Stay Awake' should have - trapped, terrified, the singer as victim of a terrible and irresistible momentum. Which is to say, perhaps, two things: firstly, that discerning what a pop song 'says' is not a simple matter of reading the lyric sheet; and, secondly, and consequently, pop songs sometimes do a far better job of 'saying' things when they are not explicitly trying to say them. 'Changed The Way You Kiss Me' is, explicitly, about a love affair going wrong; but the layers of meaning communicated by its violently lurching rhythms and its generalised air of panic and loss of control can run broader, and deeper, than that. 'Stay Awake' is just the reverse - it says less than it means and wants to.

Simply as a pop song, it is good but not great; while undeniably catchy, it lacks any sense of dynamic, never does anything unexpected. It has no depths or layers, nothing to particularly compel the listener. It's the sort of pop song that hums along pleasantly enough in the background, containing nothing to make you want to turn it off, but nothing to make you want to play it again, either. The song's concept deserves a better setting than this.

"It was all very well to say 'Drink Me', but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. 'No, I'll look first,' she said, 'and see whether it's marked "poison"'."
-Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

#1 this week: Olly Murs feat. Rizzle Kicks - Heart Skips A Beat

2011-09-04T09:24:00.003+01:00

The last time Olly Murs was at number one, a year ago, 'Please Don't Let Me Go' ended on a bit of artificial vinyl crackle - a signifier of authenticity, a gesture towards grit and dirt in the face of a chart filled with sonically sterilised digital party-trance. (After all, it's pretty difficult to imagine, say, 'The Time (Dirty Bit)' ending in such a way.) Like Bruno Mars' mock-ups of old single sleeves, it's an attempt at associative disguise, making a record which mostly exists as a piece of digital information seem like it could be imagined as a physical object. A year on, 'Heart Skips A Beat' opens with the crackle of vinyl. Here, though, it's the quiet, tinny sound of a record skipping, followed by a scratched-in breakbeat - this is vinyl under a different signification, as a DJ tool, as a source for sampling. A different alternative to Euro/American party-pop has emerged in the twelve months since 'Please Don't Let Me Go' - the new face of authenticity-contra-artificiality in the British charts is, loosely, British urban bass music, a diaspora which traces its roots back to the reggae soundsystems of '70s and '80s Britain, imported from Jamaica (much as Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc brought the soundsystem to the Bronx in 1973 and invented hip-hop). 'Heart Skips A Beat' can connect at least some of these dots, and give Olly Murs a different sort of secondhand authenticity to appropriate than he did the first time around.

Full disclosure - I really, really hate Olly Murs. When I wrote about 'Please Don't Let Me Go' I called him "the opposite of a pop star", and said that he made me feel "instinctively and intuitively repelled". Most of my complaints about Murs were to do with his persona and marketing, and I hated the record because it felt inseparable from those things, just a vehicle for his smug, self-satisfied blokey privilege. So I was genuinely shocked when I found myself liking 'Heart Skips A Beat'. And I really do like it, quite a bit. I'm able to like it because it feels like it has absolutely nothing to do with Olly Murs - he himself calls it a "curveball" which is "nothing like [the rest of] the album"; it's apparently the only song on his second album which Murs doesn't have a co-writing credit for. It feels like one of those free-floating pop songs that could have been anyone's; even the vocal has a detached anonymity to it. So the Olly Murs persona still irritates me as much as it ever did, and I feel pretty confident that his musical output will continue to do the same. But this is one of the brilliant things about following pop music: anybody, literally anybody, is capable of making at least one great single.

Since 'Please Don't Let Me Go' we've had a couple of other faux-reggae songs at number one ('Price Tag' and 'The Lazy Song', if you're keeping score). 'Heart Skips A Beat' sounds way better than any of these because it issues a different take on its source material. Rather than forced-grin, jam-band sunniness, the track is minor key, framed by a subtle melancholic chill, and takes its sonics from the spacious studio manipulations of dub and the sampled-breakbeats feel of early-'90s reggae-pop. In feel, it reminds me more of 'Dub Be Good To Me' or Ace Of Base than anything else. On top of that, it's just a strong, well-written pop song, smart enough to let the mood and the production do the real work. I often think that a good bridge is the key to a great pop song, that glue between the verses and the chorus that makes the whole thing scan, and flow, as a whole, and it's the bridge here ("put another record on...") that sticks in my head the most.

The only real pothole is the contribution of Rizzle Kicks; in theory, a guest rap verse is a good way to break the song up, but Rizzle Kicks totally screw up the mood of the thing, electing to act like this is actually just a regular Olly Murs single. Their part of the song feels like it's beamed in from another, worse, record - on the plus side, it only lasts for about fifteen seconds, so I can't gripe too much. If I could stomach Pitbull on 'On The Floor', I can deal with this.

#1 this week: Wretch 32 feat. Josh Kumra - Don't Go

2011-08-28T13:43:00.003+01:00

Following number one singles, we don't always meet with pop stars at their best, or even at their most interesting or memorable. Tottenham rapper Wretch 32 has been carving out a name for himself for a few years on the vague meeting point between the usually separate worlds of grime and UK rap. In 2011 he has become the latest British MC to become a chart star, with a series of hit singles. First came the clattering, squealing sonics of 'Traktor', number 5 in January; then the preposterously catchy, Stone Roses-sampling Example collaboration 'Unorthodox', number 2 in April. There would have been more to say about either than there is about 'Don't Go' - in time-honoured tradition, the third single is the ballad, the love song.

This doesn't automatically make the record less good, obviously; and it's certainly not - or at least not only - a cynical move on Wretch 32's part. From what I can gather, this sort of quiet, ruminative style is closer to his heart than the harder-edged sounds of his earlier hits - it seems pretty obvious, in fact, that 'Don't Go' finds Wretch more in his comfort zone, and that this is closer to the type of record he would ideally want to be making. Unfortunately, that doesn't automatically make it better, either.

The best thing about 'Don't Go' is the production, the backing track - basically everything left over if you strip the lead vocals away. It's beautifully simple and minimal - a basic, melodic chord progression on bass, a looped, wordless vocal sample, and a heartbeat-staccato drum. That's pretty much it, and it's more than enough to anchor the song; it's also enough to ensure that the track sounds attractive, even intriguing, on a casual listen. But it all dissolves on closer scrutiny. Josh Kumra, who sings the chorus, oversells and overemotes, crooning platitudes without real feeling. Wretch's quiet, laid-back flow suits the track better. But his lyrics are similarly banal, rarely going beyond tedious greeting-card sentiments. The most memorable image, the lines where Wretch most successfully hits upon something that feels concrete and solid, comes in the first verse - "it's like you're always with me on the road/phone in my hand while I listen to you moan/and everybody in the car wants to try and get involved". It's telling, and a little disappointing, that this is also the only point in the song where there is really a hint of conflict, of messiness, of complication. Because, as a love song, 'Don't Go' isn't trying to paint a picture of strife and complexity, nor even wide-eyed, overwhelming infatuation - rather, as the simple, quiet music suggests, it's about the everyday, very human experience of being in love with another person. To put it mildly, this is much more difficult difficult for pop songs to get right. As Paul McCartney noted in Wings' 'Silly Love Songs', love is all-important when you're "in it". But making compelling art about it is difficult, and 'Don't Go' leans, for the most part, on stock sentiment and familiar, socially-mediated categories to express something personal. The song itself isn't constructed with the subtle care that that backing track was; as a result, it's mostly pretty, but rings very hollow.

RIP Nick Ashford

2011-08-23T16:54:00.002+01:00

RIP Jerry Leiber

2011-08-23T16:47:00.004+01:00

Elvis Presley - Hound Dog:

The Coasters - Yakety Yak:

Ben E. King - Spanish Harlem:

Ben E. King - Stand By Me:

#1 this week: Nero - Promises

2011-08-21T10:00:00.004+01:00

Just a few weeks after the first ever dubstep number one, we have a second. These are interesting times for the genre, and a decisive split in the world of UK bass music has emerged around it recently; as scene commentator Martin Clark pointed out in his 2010 end-of-year column for Pitchfork, "there's been an amicable divorce between those artists who make 'dubstep' and those who believed in its spirit of bass, experimentation, and reduced boundaries". So on the one hand, we have a cluster of artists making populist dubstep, distilling, emphasising and exaggerating the genre's most accessible elements (see Chase and Status, Rusko, Skrillex, Modestep, etc). On the other hand, we have a scene that it is perhaps most convenient to call a 'post-dubstep diaspora', a sprawling legion of disparate producers, trying to move experimental UK bass music forwards by absorbing the influence of everything from UK funky house to Chicago footwork to the woozy, instrumental hip-hop of Brainfeeder (see labels like Night Slugs, Hessle Audio, 502, etc). In 2011, these two worlds seem to have nothing to do with one another.

Nero, of course, fall into the former camp. Knowing that I had to write a post about Nero this week, I've been trying to work out exactly how I feel about this populist dubstep. I'm caught between two poles. I am a bit of a fanatic for the continuum of experimental bass-and-breakbeats music that dubstep originated from, and there's a certain sense of disappointment that what now passes for 'dubstep' feels so severed from that continuum. Unlike a lot of people, though - and fairly obviously, since I'm writing a blog about number one singles - I don't have any problem at all with populism, and I certainly don't feel that the music I love has to be experimental or arty in order to be worthwhile. I love pop music, and the moments in UK dance music that are perhaps most exciting to me are the moments of crossover populism - early breakbeat rave, 2-step, and funky house.

But dubstep's current 'pop' moment doesn't really feel like any of those moments; it feels more like the late-'90s 'big beat' zeitgeist which coalesced around the likes of the Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers. The relationship with underground dance culture feels the same in both cases - there may be genealogical links, but ultimately the scenes feel severed, and the likes of 'Breathe' and 'Block Rockin' Beats' making number one don't feel like crossover moments for UK bass music proper. Like big beat, contemporary dubstep crosses over by borrowing structures and dynamics from rock and pop, using sonics designed for stadium/festival-filling grandiosity; accordingly, the crossover in both cases can amount to a crossover not just to the pop charts, but also to the 'rockist' world of authentic, album-oriented music. Both styles have a pop impulse, comfortable with formula, unconcerned with experimentation or progressiveness (unless equating progressiveness with sounding more like rock); both styles are capable of producing moments of absolute pop magic, and also capable of descending into tiresome, formulaic tedium.

As for 'Promises' itself, I think it's great. It's a big, shiny pop song, delivered by Nero's in-house vocalist Alana Watson. Sonically, given that this is 'dubstep', we get the expected big, wobbly bassline, and the build-and-drop moments of release; but the borrowed sounds of trance and eurohouse give a good balance between airy-and-light and hard-and-dark. The switch-up in rhythm between the more four-to-the-floor house beats that the song begins with and the 'dubstep' rhythm that it drops into for the hook is exactly the sort of populist trick I've been talking about here - it's not clever or original, but it sounds good, and it works at keeping the track interesting. There's a chance that we'll see this pop-dubstep formula done to death in the immediate future, and I'm cautious about investing any enthusiasm in the trend, for reasons that are probably pretty obvious by now. (Chase and Status - I loved their hit 'Blind Faith', with Liam Bailey, but I saw some of their live show on the BBC coverage of T In The Park and found it borderline unwatchable in its over-the-top one-dimensional sonic aggression.) But a formula, well-executed, makes for a great pop single, and 'Promises' is certainly that.

#1 this week: Cher Lloyd - Swagger Jagger

2011-08-08T11:36:00.005+01:00

It's worth revisiting Cher Lloyd's initial audition for last year's X Factor. Then just 16, Lloyd is clearly frantic with nerves; but her performance has the quality of an invocation about it, some sort of pseudo-magical rite, a channelling of energies. When she comes in over the beat, it feels early - she doesn't even allow the conventional four-beat set up to count her in, furiously spitting out Keri Hilson's "dime divas, give it to me!" ad lib before the main melody begins. It feels sudden, unexpected, disruptive. And then, immediately, there's that transformation, that invocation - "hopped up out the bed, turned my swag on". The performance is obviously brilliant, and filled with powerful inflections and details - the sheer force of "round my hooood", the on-a-dime attitude flip from "I look good" to "I get money". But nothing beats Lloyd's delivery on the Carly Simon-quoting passage: "if you be hatin', just be mad at yourself/I bet you think this song is about you, don't you?/yeah, but this ain't about you". She's utterly in earnest, and the wry, knowing paradox of 'You're So Vain' is fully ironed out here - this song really isn't about anybody other than the singer herself.

This sort of transformation, from ordinary person to magnetic star, with the power of song itself as a transforming force, is a standard part of reality show cliché, and a narrative that the X Factor is keen to sell us. But Cher Lloyd's performance differs radically from the standard narrative. It is not in any sense an attempt to ingratiate; Lloyd's transformation is emphatically not dependent upon external approval, nor does it seek to solicit such approval. Quite the opposite - it stands as a declaration of independence and self-sufficiency. The message is, in short - I don't care what you think about me. It is openly confrontational.

Lloyd's choice of audition song was significant for a number of reasons. 'Turn My Swag On' is a late-2008/early-2009 single by Soulja Boy, a fascinatingly symbolic figure himself - with the success of his 2007 debut single, 'Crank That (Soulja Boy)', he became a poster boy for 'ringtone rap' at the height of Nas' 'Hip-Hop Is Dead' sloganeering, and in the centre of a nasty and difficult generation gap in US hip-hop that is still resolving itself, slowly and with difficulty, in 2011. Soulja Boy was presumed to be a one-hit wonder, but he has managed to carve out a successful ongoing career; he is emblematic, perhaps more than any other rapper, of a new set of values which is gradually supplanting the old in US hip-hop, a more-or-less complete aesthetic rejection of old-school boom-bap beats and technically complex lyrics. Soulja Boy was born in 1990, and Cher Lloyd in 1993; they are both part of an emergent generation of urban musicians; a good way of telling what side of this symbolic generational divide any given rapper stands is probably whether or not they are willing to take Soulja Boy seriously.

For her audition, Cher Lloyd performed a Keri Hilson 'remix' of 'Turn My Swag On', on which R&B singer Hilson does exactly what Lloyd had been doing from her Worcestershire home - improvises her own lyrics over an appropriated hip-hop beat. The Keri Hilson version of 'Turn My Swag On' is only quasi-legal, and has not been officially released. After Lloyd's performance, a version of 'Turn My Swag On' patched together by an obscure Atlanta hip-hop producer, Greg Street, which mixed a few different versions of the track and included part of the Keri Hilson version alongside Soulja Boy's original, reached number 17 in the UK charts. It was the only version available for legal download which featured Keri Hilson. So Cher Lloyd's choice of audition song did not even exist within the world of popular-music-as-commodity. In the corporate, Saturday-teatime entertainment world of the X Factor, this counts as some kind of invasion from outside pop music itself. American hip-hop and R&B music signifies 'mainstream' in lazy thinking; but actually, Cher Lloyd and her audition song summon this music as a kind of paradoxical pop/not-pop, a music that seems to exist largely outside of mainstream distribution networks, in semi-official 'remixes', freestyles and mixtapes. Hence the derisive term 'ringtone rap' which was being thrown around at Soulja Boy and his ilk around 2007 - it seems to get at the hard-to-shake notion that this music exists in digital space, designed to sound good through mobile phones or tinny laptop speakers. (As an anecdotal aside, having spent some time working in secondary schools over the last couple of years, it's my experience that the British teenagers who are most intensely interested in music are interested in this music - American hip-hop and R&B, and its British analogues, including grime.)

Two important concepts run through from 'Turn My Swag On' into Cher Lloyd's debut single, 'Swagger Jagger'. The first is the obvious one, "swag(ger)", an increasingly common trope of urban music. 'Swag' or 'swagger' means something like self-belief or self-regard, interpenetrating with demeanour and style. The other is the figure of the 'hater'. It's very easy to see what both of these concepts might have to do with a lack of privilege. In Lloyd's audition performance, her swagger is something that must be actively turned on, summoned up as if through magical invocation by the music itself, a reclaiming of a sense of self-worth that has been denied one. For all the exhortations about "getting money", Keri Hilson's 'Turn My Swag On' eventually arrives at a conclusion that Cher Lloyd didn't get to in her truncated version - "swag ain't somethin' you can wear on your neck/you can buy a chain, but you can't buy respect". Meanwhile, for those on the receiving end of hatred and vilification, the concept of the 'hater' is an endlessly useful rhetorical gesture. If you hate me, this gesture says, then it's because you are a hater - in other words, it's because of what you are, not because of what I am. Thus is the self-loathing of the underprivileged displaced through a grammatical manoeuvre - I am not the hated, it is you who are a hater. This sense of taking back power, of summoning a sense of self-worth, of rhetorically dismissing those who would tell you that you are worthless, is an enormous part - perhaps, in fact, the single most decisive part - of this music's appeal for much of its audience. This is the animating spirit of the music, and both 'Turn My Swag On' and 'Swagger Jagger' are permeated absolutely to the core with this spirit.

And so to Cher Lloyd's lack of privilege, a pretty important thing to understand if we are to unpick the significance of 'Swagger Jagger'. The Guardian has called the single "white girl rap", but whiteness is a tricky category, and an artificial construction designed to distinguish between those with and without racial privilege - there was a time, for instance, when Irish and Jewish people in the United States were not considered 'white'. Lloyd is, in fact, of Romani ancestry - a group which, some studies have claimed, experience more racism in the UK today than any other. Lloyd is also frequently on the receiving end of some disturbing class-based hatred; scan through any internet comments thread about her and ugly classist slurs like 'chav', 'chavvy' and 'pikey' (the last of which combines class connotations with racist, anti-Romani undertones) are never far away, and articles disturbingly mention "suggestions" that her parents may be, or have been, benefits claimants - as though this were something shameful in and of itself. To this matrix of interpenetrative prejudice we might as well add misogyny and ageism. In pop music, there are, after all, few figures derided and mocked more routinely than the teenage girl, whose tastes in music are repeatedly presented as shallow and hormonal in nature. The two recent pop stars who have been on the receiving end of more irrational vitriol than any other are probably 14-year-old Rebecca Black and 17-year-old Justin Bieber (the latter is stereotyped as being music for teenage girls, an association which tends to be stressed by his detractors, as though that in itself were a reason enough not to take Bieber seriously). Blur's Alex James has been quoted as characterising with pride the band's turn away from mainstream pop, and embracing of more noisy art-rock elements, as a rejection of the "screaming 15-year-old girls" who supposedly made up the first few rows of their shows during the height of Britpop. This is the typical voice of the serious male music fan: teenage girls are not wanted in music.

Given all of this, it is not surprising, even if it is still depressing, that Cher Lloyd and 'Swagger Jagger' have been on the receiving end of so much hate and nastiness. Like Rebecca Black and Justin Bieber, 'Swagger Jagger' has already become a snide shorthand in some quarters for 'obviously shit'. The song's YouTube video has accrued a lot more 'dislikes' than 'likes' (at the time of writing, the ratio is about 2:1). Of course, a lot of people probably do genuinely dislike the song; but it's pretty obvious that 'Swagger Jagger' hasn't become such an object of scorn just because people think that it's a bad record. For any given song in the top 40, there will be plenty of people who don't like it; but people don't flock to YouTube to click the 'dislike' button. It's not remotely notable or interesting that there are people who dislike 'Swagger Jagger' - what's striking is how strongly people feel compelled to enact how much they dislike it. Cher Lloyd is an easy target, and the gleeful, snide savaging of her and 'Swagger Jagger' has the structure of bullying, a safety-in-numbers attack in which ugly misogyny, ageism, classism and racism are never far away; the urge to attack Cher Lloyd is the defensive urge to reaffirm one's alignment with a dominant group by pouring scorn on an outsider. Lloyd herself is canny enough to realise that the 'divisive' nature of the record has more to do with her than the record itself.

I'd be remiss if I didn't at least take note of the fact that 'Swagger Jagger' has been number one during a politically and historically significant week in the UK, with civil disorder and rioting taking place in London and other major cities. It has already been noted on this blog that we are living through tense, turbulent times, soundtracked in our pop charts - for the most part - by materialistic, escapist, socially blinkered party music. The rioting has drawn parallels between 2011 and 1981; but is 'Swagger Jagger' more 'Ghost Town' or more Duran Duran, a reflection of confrontation and disaffection or a high-gloss celebration of capitalism and hedonism? It's tempting, and not too difficult, to identify the song with the latter category. Lloyd's roars of "get on the floor!", and the song's musical affinity with post-Black Eyed Peas ravepop, certainly aligns it with the current 'in-the-club' zeitgeist. (Surely this is the only time in history that two consecutive number one singles have featured lyrics about counting money.)

But this is only half of the story. 'Swagger Jagger' is infinitely more confrontational and provocative than anything that has occupied the number one spot for some time. As I've already argued, its musical DNA - the language of 'swagger' and 'haters' - contains a confrontational stance, and an underprivileged perspective, within it by implication. One thing that 'Swagger Jagger' achieves is an act of reclamation, turning this pop from a music passively consumed by working-class teenage girls into a music made by them. The music mirrors this - the music of 'Swagger Jagger' is not the spacey, druggy swoon favoured by most recent club-pop, a sonic smoothing out of harsh edges, the sound of unity rather than division. Rather, the beats are hard, brash and defiant - as of course, is Lloyd's vocal performance, rapping her verses in a harsh, provocative bark. The Jekyll-and-Hyde switch-up between the verses and the chorus is an ingenuous touch; the abrasive verses seem designed to provoke and goad Lloyd's 'haters' into an outrage, before dropping away into a soft, melodic nursery-rhyme of a chorus, chiding the listener for getting so worked up. The record pre-empts, and thereby wilfully intensifies, its own negative reception. Personally, I think it's fantastic.

Oh, and that title? There are layers of delicious irony. 'Swagger jacker' is urban slang for one who scores points by trading off the swagger of someone else - it is frequently applied to rappers accused of stealing lyrics, and of more generally imitating the musical or aesthetic 'style' of someone else. Some of the early hatred directed at Cher Lloyd was centred around an incident at X Factor bootcamp on which she appeared to claim credit for writing a rap she had, in fact, lifted from a Swizz Beats song. For a figure like Lloyd, so routinely (and meaninglessly) framed as inauthentic and 'fake', as appropriating an aesthetic and a culture which she somehow has no right to, it is a hilariously provocative phrase to employ. And that decidedly English twist on the phrase, 'Swagger Jagger', can't help but evoke a certain Knight of the Realm - a white, middle class English boy who formed a band at the age of 18, and who provoked outrage and hysteria in the 1960s through a shameless imitation of black American music, and an affected, swaggering arrogance not so far from Cher Lloyd's own. Draw your own conclusions from the compare-and-contrast exercise invited by the titling of 'Swagger Jagger' - suffice to say that virtually everything vital in pop has sounded to many like an irritating novelty at first, and that the distance between 'Swagger Jagger' and its namesake, a paradigm of old-fashioned rockist authenticity, might not be as great as one would think.

#1 this week: JLS feat. Dev - She Makes Me Wanna

2011-08-03T10:40:00.003+01:00

"It's nothing," says Dev exactly two minutes and forty-three seconds into 'She Makes Me Wanna'. It strikes me as the song's definitive line, summing up the whole record in two words. "It's nothing" - despite the sheer enormousness of this song, despite the thunderous sledgehammer synth riffs pounding themselves into your ear, despite the employment of every gratuitous kitchen-sink trick in producer RedOne's sonic arsenal, it's nothing, and in a double sense. "It's nothing" means something like "aw shucks, it's no trouble" - despite all of the sonic shock and awe, 'She Makes Me Wanna' still feels lazily thrown together, almost audaciously so, a patchwork of now-pop signifiers, a low-effort assembly-line product. (Needless to say, this is neither inherently a good thing or a bad thing.) But I take the phrase more literally as well - it's really nothing, an ephemeral, empty trifle, Dev's declaration a surprisingly honest moment of absolute negation, pulling the carpet out from under 'She Makes Me Wanna', making wilfully explicit the absolute hollowness of the record. It's almost Brechtian.

Like most RedOne productions, 'She Makes Me Wanna' leans heavily on a huge and insistent hook, which everything else on the record is built to revolve around. Another standard RedOne trick is the non-verbal vocal hook; a chorus of "la la las" or "whooooaaaahs" is a good radio-pleasing move. In this case, the elliptical title of 'She Makes Me Wanna' remains incomplete - "she makes me wanna oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!" JLS chorus at us. So that's another negation, another bit of yawning-chasm emptiness, of black-hole negative space. 'She Makes Me Wanna' what, exactly? I think of Tricky's 'Makes Me Wanna Die'; I think of Lacan's insistence that desire is a relation to an absence rather than an object, and can't help but hear JLS' "oh-oh-oh-oh-oh" as a desperate articulation of that absence; they can't name the object of their desire because - well - it's nothing. These desires being directed towards no specific end feel like the motivating force behind so much club-centric now-pop, which is why the party can never end, why the drive to party can never be resolved.

And of course this is another 'club' song, a recycling and re-combination of tropes from recent pop in yet another shiny new package. You've got the "direct me to the floor/and turn it up some more" couplet, and a "London to Jamaica, LA to Africa" bit straight out of RedOne's last UK number one - er, 'On The Floor'. There's the "it's Dev... and JLS" identifier at the beginning of the track, that familiar wash of synths, that build into headrush-trance release in the first "London to Jamaica" chorus, those robotic echoes - "she is my guide (guide)" - and trigger-sample "oh!"s pinging about in the background of the chorus.

All of which is why Dev's verse is the most interesting thing here. You could describe it as a "rap", but only by stretching the term to breaking point; virtually nothing that she says comes even close to rhyming; she just intones a deliberately preposterous series of images and phrases ("flying over buildings", "counting all our monies", "dancing in ice rinks"). Dev is from California ("look where I come from", she observes lazily at one point) and this performance feels in keeping with certain trends emerging in Californian hip-hop at the moment, notably the rapping-not-rapping of Lil B and the bratty-girl sneer of his associate Kreayshawn and her White Girl Mob group - all united in some common project of debunking, deconstructing and undermining hip-hop itself, whether by pushing its tropes into the realm of absurd self-parody, rapping in a deliberately sloppy, technically 'bad' fashion, or even - as in Lil B's more serious moments, and of course Dev doesn't do this here - explicitly and earnestly questioning and criticising the assumptions embedded in hip-hop culture. And there's something of a thrill in hearing this sort of ill-defined underground postmodernism attach itself to such a carefully constructed pop blockbuster as 'She Makes Me Wanna', a touch of knowing distance that threatens to undermine the whole exercise, pulling back the curtain to reveal nothing but sound and fury, signifying - well, nothing.

RIP Amy Winehouse

2011-07-23T17:54:00.003+01:00

Amy Winehouse has died. She was an incredible singer and a brilliant songwriter, and Back To Black is easily one of the best albums of the last five years. I hoped there would be a follow-up, but most of all I hoped she'd be okay. This is very sad.

#1 this week: The Wanted - Glad You Came

2011-07-22T17:06:00.002+01:00

'Glad You Came' opens with Max George singing in empty space, over a piano chord progression. It sounds something like Coldplay; it sounds something like James Blake. Which reminds me that I compared the Wanted's last number one single to Hot Chip, and makes me realise just how English they sound. It takes about twenty seconds for the song to turn into a melodica-driven trance-fest, complete with a Kings of Leon-esque chorus of backing vocals. Throughout the song, the Wanted - with the exception of Tamil-Irish member Siva Kaneswaran - sing with a pronounced Englishness, vowels straight out of Bolton or Gloucestershire.

The other big British boyband of current times, JLS, make for an interesting point of comparison - JLS' next single, 'She Makes Me Wanna', is - like 'Glad You Came' - an obvious attempt at a summer hit, and an obvious play on current trancey, club-dominated pop trends. But 'She Makes Me Wanna' sounds enormous, shiny and American. For British pop, America has so often meant glitter, glamour and an unattainable confidence and 'cool'; affected 'Britishness' has often meant being self-deprecating, self-consciously provincial, awkward. 'She Makes Me Wanna' is party pop for the jet set, "London to Jamaica, LA to Africa"; 'Glad You Came' sounds more like the sort of 18-30 trip to Magaluf which inspired Blur's 'Girls and Boys' (and therefore, indirectly, Britpop as a crossover phenomenon). It's telling that what JLS appropriated from 'On The Floor' is its "London to Ibiza" lyrical globetrotting; the Wanted went for that Damon Albarn staple, the melodica.

As for the song itself - it occupies the same 'living-in-the-moment' thematic ground as 'Give Me Everything' ("all that counts is here and now" being perhaps the key lyric); the production feels tacky and cheap, while the song itself is a series of easy but effective melodic hooks; the lyrics, clumsy throughout, run the gamut from merely banal to staggeringly bad. 'Glad You Came' is a lazy record, bits of current trends thrown together without much apparent thought. But its very awkwardness is what gives it a sort of charm; the band's vocal performances, imperfect and not obviously autotuned, sound less manipulative and cynical than something like 'Don't Wanna Go Home'. It's not really a good record, but I can't really bring myself to hate 'Glad You Came', which sets its aspirations fairly low and ends up more likeable through how barely it manages to meet them.

#1 this week: DJ Fresh feat. Sian Evans - Louder

2011-07-16T11:04:00.003+01:00

The first dubstep number one single, 'Louder' pulls a lot of the same tricks of crossover chart dance tracks past. It is inescapably 'summery', not a description dubstep has often been saddled with. But the combination of the light, airy trance synths with a dark, brooding dubstep rhythm section is near-irresistible; the video, featuring skaters pulling tricks, is ideal - there's a sense of gravity-defiance about the track, a struggle between weight and weightlessness, between floaty rave ambience and earthy sub-bass force. DJ Fresh's last hit single, last year's 'Gold Dust', featured people going nuts with skipping ropes in the video, a similarly ideal match for that track's skittery, sunny playfulness. 'Louder' is more about momentum.

Momentum again - but 'Louder' musically captures the sense of irresistible inertia that Jason Derülo was more hamfistedly grappling for on 'Don't Wanna Go Home'. Sian Evans of Kosheen plays the faceless rave diva on the vocals, and gives voice to this momentum in a play on Daft Punk - "it's gonna get louder/we're gonna get stronger/we're gonna feel better". Like early rave, though, 'Louder' turns partying into a political act, rather than empty hedonism, as though the music promised some better world. "Changes we're making for the better"; "we're building a dream that we've always had clear in our sights"; then, eventually: "we're powerfully changing the world/we're reclaiming our unity/they can't divide/they push us around/but we're tearing it down/and we're having the time of our lives".

Vague and non-specific? Well, yes; but there's something refreshing about hearing that second-summer-of-love sense of utopian communality in a chart-topping dance single in 2011, a sense that "it's gonna get louder/we're gonna feel better" might mean something more than "we're gonna get drunker". Changing the world; fighting for unity; tearing down edifices erected by some unspecified enemy - could you make a case that, of all the number one singles of the last couple of years, 'Louder' is actually closest in spirit to 'Killing In The Name'?

Probably not. The first dubstep number one is timely, anyway, and it's telling that it doesn't really feel like some momentous mainstream breakthrough for an underground culture. The diaspora around UK urban bass music has flowered over the last few years into a musical universe of astonishing power, diversity and influence. The charts are flooded with an interconnected network of homegrown popstars who have grown out of the scene, including the entire current top 4 in the singles chart (DJ Fresh, Loick Essien, Ed Sheeran and Example - see also Katy B, Wretch32, Chipmunk, Tinie Tempah, Tinchy Stryder, N-Dubz, Chase and Status, etc). It's not all good (Ed Sheeran is dreadful, and musically has barely any connection to 'urban' music whatsoever), and these artists hardly have any coherent 'sound' in common. But this is a musical culture in the UK which stretches back at least as far as Soul II Soul, which feels like this country's equivalent to American hip-hop/R&B, and it finally feels like it has taken centre stage in our mainstream pop music (while the underground, I might add, remains in rude health). As a result, I'd say that British pop is more vibrant and interesting than it has been in some time.

#1 this week: Jason Derülo - Don't Wanna Go Home

2011-07-02T15:51:00.003+01:00

'Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)' is a traditional Jamaican folk song, in the mento style which predates, and feeds into, ska and reggae. Harry Belafonte had a worldwide hit with it in 1956, setting in motion a craze for Calypso music. Oddly, the song has been re-purposed twice in recent American urban pop - Bangladesh snatching a bit of it to construct his instrumental for Lil Wayne's 'Six Foot Seven Foot', and providing the chorus for Jason Derülo's lastest single 'Don't Wanna Go Home'.

The original song is sung from the perspective of dock workers finishing the end of a long night shift, hence the weary tone and the refrain of "daylight come, and me wan' go home". Derülo, of course, flips the source material on its head. Rather than working through the night, he's been partying through the night. Daylight comes, and he doesn't want to go home. A longing for rest after work becomes an endless, insatiable longing for more and more play. More club-pop, and the party continues to be endless and unendable ("don't stop, keep it moving" - 'On The Floor', "and it goes on and on and on" - 'Dynamite', "...and then we'll do it again" - 'I Gotta Feeling'); what 'Don't Wanna Go Home' is about, more than anything - like so much of current 'in-the-club' pop - is inertia and momentum. Not a new theme, of course; with his "one o'clock, two o'lock, three o'clock" bit, Derülo actually connects his inversion of 'Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)' to that other pop craze of the mid-fifties (although even Bill Haley was only rocking "till the broad daylight"). The acid test for these songs will be whether they can make this death-drive hedonism seem compelling or not; does Derülo make the party seem any less of a chore than loading bananas onto a boat all night?

In short, not really. There's a brief bit in the chorus (Derülo's forceful, Dexy's-channelling "burn it down!") where the singer comes alive for a couple of bars, but apart from that, Derülo sounds detached and workmanlike throughout where the song requires a certain level of unhinged mania in order to be convincing. The lyrics are laughably formulaic; Derülo has a blonde passing out in his lap (cringe), "the club is jumping", "we gon' tear the club up", and the rather embarrassing couplet "we drink the whole bottle, but it ain't over, over/everybody jumping on the sofa, sofa". The song's backing beat is lifted from Robin S' 1993 rave classic 'Show Me Love', which raises some interesting comparisons. The Korg pulse that 'Don't Wanna Go Home' lifts from 'Show Me Love' is supposed to be a shorthand for club music, but Robin S didn't need to sing about being at a rave - 'Show Me Love' is about, well, love, about devotion, about wanting something stable and lasting rather than "one night affairs" (in marked contrast to 'Give Me Everything', which we saw asking for complete devotion in the form of a one night affair). And I suppose this hits the nail squarely on the head of why a lot of this recent rave-pop leaves me so cold. These songs try so hard to tell you how you're supposed to code the music. But you can't just write your preferred reaction to a song into the lyrics and make it true. Derülo is at pains to create a picture of the party - jumping on the sofas, dancing on the bar. But the songs which people have partied and raved the hardest to (e.g., 'Show Me Love') haven't needed to say these things.

If you're in the club, I guess you don't need to be told that you're in the club, which is why 'Show Me Love' actually feels like way more of a "club" record than 'Don't Wanna Go Home' does, the latter song feeling more like an escapist myth for people not at a club - maybe people too young to go clubbing, but also, just maybe, people at work - loading figurative crates of bananas onto a figurative boat, kept company by the radio. Maybe that's the difference, as well, between club music made in (and for) prosperous and optimistic times ('Show Me Love' again) and club music made in (and for) the times we are living through right now. In early-70s Britain, the pop charts were full of the likes of Slade, Wizzard and Gary Glitter, soundtracking economic collapse (power cuts and three day weeks) with gleefully empty plastic party rock. (And I typed those last two words without even thinking about LMFAO.) Eventually, we got the anger of punk, the melancholy of disco, the darkness of synthpop.

Exactly how much longer pop music is planning on spending in the club, I'm not sure. 'Don't Wanna Go Home', however, is enough to have me feeling like Belafonte's exhausted dock worker. I want to go home.

#1 this week: Example - Changed The Way You Kiss Me

2011-06-19T10:22:00.003+01:00

'Changed The Way You Kiss Me' is an interesting one in the context of recent number one singles - bridging the gap between 'Party Rock Anthem' and 'Someone Like You', demonstrating - in case we needed reminding - that thunderous dance beats and uneasy melancholy aren't foreign countries in pop, and that you can make a club record without it being about the club. The song is characterised by the familiar sound of recent chart pop - trance, basically. But this record doesn't feel shallow - its emotional landscape isn't as paper thin as that of 'Party Rock Anthem' or 'Give Me Everything'. The song is about a relationship going wrong, in a way that remains fairly unspecified; Example is decidedly not in control of the situation, doesn't really understand it himself. "You're scaring me, and I don't like where we're going" he mutters to his Other; he's "looking for a way back home, but I can't get back". All of which lends the dark, propulsive beats backing him up a sense of sinister momentum - the track has the same dynamic between floaty, hands-in-the-air synths and hard, grimy beats which has become standard practice for the new breed of rave-pop. But the big 'drop' doesn't just work as a cue to dance - it feels like Example's reluctant narrator being is being flung violently forward, trapped in a situation he can't extricate himself from. The track brilliantly translates the natural build-and-release dynamic of dance music into the emotional language of pop, so that the release is no release at all, and the music is turned disorientating and threatening, rather than celebratory. A perfectly brilliant rave-pop single, then, and a deserving number one.

RIP Roy Skelton

2011-06-08T18:40:00.004+01:00

#1 this week: Pitbull feat. Ne-Yo, Afrojack & Nayer - Give Me Everything

2011-05-29T15:15:00.003+01:00

Yet more Ibiza headrush pop. I predicted a while ago that this sort of fare might be on its way out. This was pretty stupid of me; pop trends don't tend to neatly burn out and disappear like that; they hang around, and get phased out and supplanted, very gradually. 'Give Me Everything' feels like a totally cynical embodiment of the current zeitgeist, a by-numbers bit of "in the club/party/on the floor" sexual hedonism. The ingredients are all there: 'I Got A Feeling' hands-in-the-air build, 'drop' into a four-to-the-floor Eurohouse beat encircled by serpentine synthlines, a general air of heightened mania. As far as these things go, it's executed relatively well. Pitbull, obviously, says some idiotic things, and his inelegant grunting on the verses is pretty out of step with the music. But he does better on the 'Dynamite'-copping bridge, actually connected with the throb of the beat and contributing one of the song's melodic earworms ("I might drink a little more than I should"). Ne-Yo comes on like a big-lunged rave diva with his massive chorus, which anchors the whole thing. His back-and-forth with Nayer is also a well-worked moment; overall, this thing is a better construction than 'Party Rock Anthem', its elements better integrated into a dynamic whole.

I've written about this kind of song so many times, I'm liable to repeat myself. In place of a considered essay, then, here's a collection of thoughts:

Party like it's the end of the world
It's hard to read the song's titular phrase as anything other than a plea for sex, but its implications in the mood of the song are certainly wider than that. "We might not get tomorrow," both Ne-Yo and Pitbull warn; so the song feels like an invitation to just give everything, to surrender "all of you" to the immediate moment. That's a recurring theme in these recent 'in the club' songs - a wilful blinkeredness to the world beyond the horizons of the club and the night out, an insistence that we live like this is all there is. I recently heard 'Give Me Everything' on the radio back-to-back with Jay Sean's '2012 (It's Not The End)', and was struck by the coincidence - invoking apocalyptic urgency as an excuse to party like there's no tomorrow.

No future for you
It's a well-worn idea that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was at least part fuelled by a fear of nuclear apocalypse - the idea being that people were pretty keen to satisfy their urges in as immediate and uncomplicated way as possible since, as Ne-Yo sings here, "for all we know, we might not get tomorrow". What's interesting about the co-opting of this idea by the current crop of party pop is that, musically, songs like 'Give Me Everything' are tapping into the mood of rave music, an optimistic and future-oriented music that coincided with the end of the Cold War, with the lifting of the constant threat of Armageddon, and which peddled a completely different - and, importantly, largely non-sexual - sort of hedonism. The rave of the late '80s promised that there would be a future, and the immediate thrill of sexuality was muted in favour of an en masse, drug-fuelled sense of pseudo-political community. The rave-pop that dominates today's charts is quite the opposite, its hedonism more shallow, more narcissistic, more wilfully narrow in its horizons, its overall mood one of heightened mania that refuses to resolve itself into anything.

Born to survive
Of course, one of the people who kick-started this whole 'in the club' business, Lady Gaga - who, at the time of writing, is just sit to storm in at the top of the album charts, opposite 'Give Me Everything' in the singles - has done something pretty interesting on this score. Since the wider world came knocking at the club door on 'Telephone', she's let it come flooding in, and made a party-pop album about homophobia, identity politics, religion and death.

Me, not working hard?
And there's a connection I didn't see before - Lady Gaga's telephone and that of Bruno Mars; she sings "you can call if you want, but there's no one home, and you're not gonna reach my telephone"; he declares "don't feel like pickin' up the phone, so leave a message at the tone". For all that 'The Lazy Song' feels like it might be positioned against shiny plastic rave-pop like 'Give Me Everything' - slovenliness versus slickness, staying home versus going out, weed versus pills, langour versus adrenaline, Jamaican guitars versus Ibizan synths - the two actually have plenty in common. Both promote a self-serving, narcissistic hedonism, both reject the complex pressures and duties of the outside world in order to live in the sheer physicality of the moment.

Pitbull rhymes 'Kodak' with 'Kodak' in the first two lines of this song
Now that's product placement for you.

#1 this week: Bruno Mars - The Lazy Song

2011-05-19T20:46:00.002+01:00

So, Bruno Mars, we meet again. Bruno Mars scores his third consecutive UK solo number one with his third UK solo single; as such, I've already ranted - at some length - twice before about how much I loathe his records. Frankly, it's getting old, and I can't really be bothered to do it again. So I'll try to keep this relatively brief. But I make no promises.

Anyway, 'The Lazy Song' is Mars' worst offence to date. It is a song, as the title suggests, about being lazy; it is, quite literally, a song about doing nothing. I'd like to be able to read its popularity, in this second coming of Thatcherism in the UK, as a subversive denial of work to rank alongside Wham!'s immortal 1982 debut 'Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)'. In reality, as a soundtrack to lethargy, 'The Lazy Song' isn't even as good as Afroman's 'Because I Got High'. Seriously.

First off, I know that this song is supposed to be funny. It's not funny at all, though; it's a smug, irritating piece of shit. For some reason, Bruno Mars feels the need to come across like a passive-aggressive macho stereotype even when he's singing about lazing around all day. If you don't wince when he brags (yes, brags) about watching TV with his hands in his pants, he'll do you one better with the jaw-dropping "tomorrow I'll wake up, do some P90X/meet a really nice girl, have some really nice sex/she's gonna scream out 'this is great'". It actually sounds even worse on record than it looks on paper, unbelievably. "I said it 'cause I can!" he snaps at some imaginary critic, as though someone was actually trying to police him, as if anyone was liable to be horrified by his intention to spend the day watching TV in his pants.

On the contrary. "I said it 'cause I can" - that hits the nail on the head, really. 'The Lazy Song' is the sound of total self-satisfaction, of a person thinking that they are absolutely brilliant for absolutely no reason whatsoever. He can say it. Can you imagine people reacting in the same way to, say, Madonna singing a song about watching TV with her hand in her pants, boasting about how she wasn't planning on combing her hair? For that matter, would Bruno Mars' song have had the same impact had his lazy day involved watering the plants, a spot of knitting and the Times crossword? Obviously, 'The Lazy Song' "succeeds" by playing out a particular archetype of masculinity, which is why Mars, even while he's singing about how lazy he is, has to tell us about his plans to engage in some muscle training and some heterosexual sex (at which, he hastens to add, he is obviously brilliant). Therein lies the passive-aggressiveness. He even sings "in my castle, I'm the freakin' man," for fuck's sake.

In a word, then, this is just the sound of privilege, and I honestly can't imagine anything less compelling or interesting for a pop song to be about than this. And that's without even mentioning the music. It's reggae, obviously. With whistling. It's hideous. There's a thesis to be written about how the political/religious fire and brimstone of reggae became musical code for smug, middle class students sitting around doing nothing; even cuddly Rastafarian crossover king Bob Marley was muttering things like "I feel like bombing a church" back in 1974, which is a far cry from the plans Bruno Mars is outlining on 'The Lazy Song'. The last bit of pop-reggae we saw at number one was 'Price Tag' (featuring former Bruno Mars co-conspirator B.o.B.), another bit of forced down-to-earth anti-glamour propaganda. So this sort of weaselly, jam-band smirkiness might be the natural musical antithesis to the continuing thunderous artificiality of "the club", those plastic Ibiza beats and processed vocals that have been running the charts lately. The club is wearing a bit thin for me, but I'll take it over this unmitigated crap every day of the week.

RIP John Walker

2011-05-10T06:42:00.002+01:00

RIP Poly Styrene

2011-04-27T06:36:00.005+01:00

Heartbreaking to lose Poly Styrene of X Ray Spex just six months or so after Ari Up; easily two of the boldest and most original figures in the first wave of UK punk - hell, two of the most important rock singers of all time - gone far too young.

#1 this week: LMFAO - Party Rock Anthem

2011-04-19T10:34:00.002+01:00

That '90s Ibiza rush continues; the party rolls on. Last time we met LMFAO at number one, they were shouting "party! party! party! party!" over the top of David Guetta's 'Gettin' Over You'. Ten months later, 'Party Rock Anthem' continues this thematic preoccupation, rivalling Andrew WK for its blinkered focus on PARTYING no matter what.

The crux of 'Party Rock Anthem' is its skyscraper-massive chorus. "Everybody just have a good time!" it hectors; coercive, much? It's a point I've made so often about contemporary party-song culture that it hardly bears repeating, but there's often an insistence on partying and fun on these records that borders on bullying and aggressive, the song grabbing you and shaking you by the throat until you submit, and begin partying. The whole conceit of the video for 'Party Rock Anthem' riffs on this very premise - the world grinds to a halt when the single is released because everybody in the planet just dances to it all day, every day.

The construction of 'Party Rock Anthem' is familiar to the point of almost coming across like a parody of recent pop - soaring, hands-in-the-air chorus, hard electro-house beats in between. It's an effective formula, and this record actually executes it pretty brilliantly. That wilfully stupid chorus is, admittedly, amazing. The main problem with 'Party Rock Anthem' is actually more or less the same as the problem I had with 'Gettin' Over You' - it's just too busy, too rammed full of incongruous bits and pieces. I think if you wiped all of the vocals off of this record apart from the chorus, I'd be more able to appreciate the things that it does well, i.e. sounding good, being danceable, and so on. In other words, I kind of wish this worked more like a dance record than a pop song - and even the stupidest of dance records actually needs to be constructed in a deceptively subtle way in order to be effective.

As it is, 'Party Rock Anthem' kind of plays like an exhausting, channel-hopping, ADD sugar rush. Those fiendish electro-house beats get staggeringly idiotic rap verses pasted over the top of them, complete with the occasional disturbing lapse into casual misogyny. ("I'm running through these hoes like Drano", has to take the figurative cake on that score. And while I'm at it, the casual misogyny is, if anything, more disturbing for its casualness than for its misogyny - the throwaway nature of lines like this, with no sense at all that they might disrupt the celebratory and inclusive mood of the music, as if objectifying women - like drinking and dancing - is just what you do at the "party".) Those beats work much better in the parts of the song where they're allowed to breathe on their own, and do their own talking. When somebody called Lauren Bennett shows up towards the end and starts singing some whole new bit ("get up, get down, put your hands up to the sound"), I just feel like I don't know what this song is doing anymore.

I know, I know - I sound old, complaining about too much going on a pop song. I do absolutely love pop songs with a lot going on; it's not like me to be demanding that things be toned down or simplified. One of the things I love about pop music is that sense of gratuitousness - the inclusion of stuff that doesn't "need" to be there at all, the very opposite of elegant simplicity. But 'Party Rock Anthem' just feels like a case of throwing everything at the wall and not that much of it sticking. There's a great record here somewhere, underneath all the crap bolted on top of it. "Don't be mad/hatin' is bad" warns Redfoo. Fair enough; this song is as catchy as all hell, and I'm not remotely 'mad' at anybody dancing around and having fun to it. I'm also not going to hate on this sort of wilfully stupid, sledgehammer-insistent party anthem just on principle. If it works, it works. But this is exactly what records like 'Party Rock Anthem' want - to beat you into submission, to make you feel like a miserly curmudgeon for not going along with the fun. A fair enough aim, but for me this record just isn't quite good enough to pull it off. A miserly curmudgeon I shall remain.

#1 this week: Jennifer Lopez feat. Pitbull - On The Floor

2011-04-10T12:40:00.002+01:00

It's called 'On The Floor', Pitbull is involved; you go into this record knowing what you're in for, and, sure enough, in Lopez' first couple of lines she manages to say "party people" twice, and - obviously "in the cluuuub". To say that 'On The Floor' is reminiscent of J-Lo's 1999 hit 'Waiting For Tonight' is less an accusation that Lopez is recycling past triumphs, and more an acknowledgement that she's been around long enough that she was appropriating trance the first time around. On paper and in theory, 'On The Floor' is pretty generic and predictable; but in execution, it's brilliant, a magisterial and irresistible party anthem.

I might as well get my gripes out of the way first, and they can pretty much be summed up in one word, which starts with 'Pit' and ends in 'bull'. He doesn't contribute enough to the song to ruin it as such, but his presence adds nothing, unless you like your transcendent disco perfection to be periodically interrupted by some the smug snarling of some self-satisfied goon. Not to mention some hopelessly inept rapping. He says "I'm like Inception, I play with your brain". He says something about Donkey Kong. He says "my name ain't Keith, but I see why you sweat me." It's awkward and terrible; how this man has recently become such a fixture of the charts is beyond me. Even, say, Flo Rida has charm and grace compared to Pitbull. He is a musical monster. I want him out of my charts.

Ignore Pitbull, though, and 'On The Floor' really is fantastic. Producer RedOne avoids the monolithic stadium synth riffs that characterise a lot of recent trance-pop hits, instead snatching a bit of mournful melodica from Kaoma's French/Brazilian 1989 hit 'Lambada'. The snatch of 'Lambada' functions as a buried-memory trigger, a sort of party hauntology that lends the song a slight edge of wistful, nostalgic sadness. The dynamic of the record, moving between the harsher, harder beats of the verses and the airy, hands-in-the-air transcendence of the chorus, is simple but works perfectly, and Lopez is a stately, assured presence throughout.

There's something wonderfully clean about 'On The Floor'. Jennifer Lopez is 41 years old, and her attitude towards partying here ("we never quit, we never rest on the floor") is like that of a veteran, utterly in love with music and dancing. The song feels like the work of someone who has actually been to clubs, and the "floor" that she inhabits here feels like a real, rather than idealised or mythical, party. The thrill comes from music ("let the rhythm change your world on the floor"), rather than from sex, drugs or darkness, and Lopez lets her own vocal and personality sink into the music and serve it, becoming a part of it, making 'On The Floor' an affirmation of communal celebration rather than of her own stardom. (This, incidentally, is why Pitbull is at such cross-purposes with the rest of the record, disrupting the shimmering sonic haze with his gruff, self-serving bark.) "If I ain't wrong, we'll probably die on the floor," sings Lopez. But that's not because of some self-destructive death drive - at 41, she's too old to romanticise that sort of rock'n'roll burnout fantasy. She'll die on the floor because she's never going to stop dancing, because this is a sustainable sort of joy.

#1 this week: Nicole Scherzinger - Don't Hold Your Breath

2011-03-26T17:17:00.004Z

Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger has spent some years now as a brilliant, but criminally underrated, pop star. The Dolls were always far more complicated and interesting than they got credit for, and it was largely thanks to Nicole - her calculated and subtle vocal performances and measured presence were crucial to making early singles like 'Don't Cha' and 'Beep' as perfect as they were. Like Robyn, Scherzinger's persona tends to exist at the meeting point between superhuman invincibility and melancholic fragility; her first two singles from her new Killer Love album, 'Poison' and 'Don't Hold Your Breath' have taken one side of the equation each, the understated sadness of her new single providing the counter to 'Poison''s unstoppable, steamrollering swagger.

'Poison' felt like more of an event than this, but it's 'Don't Hold Your Breath' that gets Scherzinger her first solo number one. It's just a refreshingly brilliant and simple pop song, perfectly constructed and backed up by some swooning, wholesome Euro-house that sounds more like early-2000s Kylie than the queasily maniacal, Guetta-indebted "club" music that dominated 2010 pop. Like 'Poison', 'Don't Hold Your Breath' relies heavily on its brilliant chorus, but once you get past that there's actually plenty more to the song - the quiet, meditative verses, the gorgeous, cathartic middle eight. It's a simple song, but it takes real skill to make something so simple work so well, and Scherzinger's vocal performance, as usual, adds more to the song than one is liable to appreciate - she inhabits the song with a mixture of world-weary sadness and reflective, mature self-assurance that make its fairly stock lyrics seem utterly believable and real.

And the song makes an interesting contrast from 'Someone Like You', which preceded 'Don't Hold Your Breath' in the number one slot and looks likely to follow it as well. Both Adele and Nicole are addressing an ex who has hurt them badly; both pointedly and ambiguously refer to their addressee as "friend" (Adele's "old friend" actually echoes Nicole on 'Don't Cha'). 22-year-old Adele inhabits some stately, adult music, and tries to act the bigger person, but is still painfully fixated on her missing Other; 32-year-old Nicole floats airily and gently around plastic pop beats and synthetic strings, holding up her head and actually leaving the past behind.

#1 this week: Adele - Someone Like You

2011-02-21T11:44:00.004Z

I haven't heard anyone else saying this, and I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure that 'Someone Like You' is the first song to top the UK singles chart without actually being a single. Sure, the song is planned as the next single from Adele's album 21. But since individual tracks from albums can be legally downloaded on their own, without being released as singles, they can also chart. There's no 'Someone Like You' single, yet; there's no 'Someone Like You' single art. (Edit: there is some single art now, with 'Someone Like You' in its third week at the top and showing no signs of slipping.)

In fact, the only real piece of promotion this not-yet-single has so far received, and the only thing that it needed to be catapulted to the top of the charts, was a spectacular performance at last week's BRIT Awards. It's a testament to the power of the song, and of Adele's performance, which saw her breaking into real tears, a la Sinéad O'Connor or Janelle Monáe. And it really is a striking number one in 2011, about as far removed from 2010's Guetta/Peas/RedOne-indebted avalanche of hedonistic, dirty trance as you can possibly get. It's a pared-down ballad, just Adele's voice over a simple and unobtrusive piano; it's a proper, grown-up breakup song, in the vein of Blood On The Tracks or Rumours or The Visitors. Musically, and emotionally, 'Someone Like You' is unlike any number one for quite some time.

This isn't some 'Bad Romance'; Adele is not intoxicated on some poisonous Other, some 'Beautiful Monster', or the unfeeling demon of 'Grenade'. She understates, rather than oversells, her pain; the situation feels - and is - real, not mythic. Where Bruno Mars' recent hokum feels like manipulative stock sentiment, 'Someone Like You' communicates concrete suffering.

As the song opens, we are in familiar pop territory - the ex, that Adele is not over, has found happiness with someone else. It's 'The Winner Takes It All' - happiness is elsewhere, the singer is shut out from it, trying her best to deal with it, confront it. She outlines the situation, concluding "guess she gave you things I didn't give to you," before turning a bit of a surprising accusation upon her addressee - "old friend, why are you so shy? It ain't like you to hold back, or hide from the light". She's facing up to the uncomfortable truth - that life is unfair, that there are winners and losers, that her addressee is happy and that she is not. She is facing up to what he refuses to - that his happiness has a cost. All of which becomes clear as she drifts into the song's bridge: "I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited/but I couldn't stay away, I couldn't fight it/I hoped you'd see my face, and that you'd be reminded/that for me... it isn't over". This is what she wants - for her suffering to be felt and acknowledged by the Other as the price of his happiness.

It's at this point that she explodes into the song's chorus with the words "never mind" - she'll find another, she wishes her ex the best. And this is the real heartbreak moment; after making a point of rubbing his face in her pain, she picks up and carries on - because what else can she do? Where 'Grenade' threw a melodramatic tantrum over the unfairness of love, 'Someone Like You' just stares it down and accepts it. "Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead," Adele shrugs at the end of the chorus, and that's the real message of 'Someone Like You' - sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you don't; the winner takes it all, the loser has to fall.

With a simple piano figure her only accompaniment, Adele has to carry 'Someone Like You' pretty much all by herself. The construction of the song is strong enough for her to get away with it, and her voice is rich, powerful and strong. You might think it's a bit too strong - that 'Someone Like You' would be better served with some weakness, some cracks, some faltering. But actually, Adele's powerhouse performance suits the lyric, inhabiting it with a sense of steely determination, a refusal to show weakness. If I'm nitpicking, I think I do slightly prefer Adele's performance on the BRITs to her performance on the record, perhaps because it is just that bit more faltering and flawed, and also because she switches up the melody of the chorus a little bit so as not to be reaching for the high notes, making the BRITs performance sound more centred, and less like a bit of vocal showboating.

Nevertheless, 'Someone Like You' is a wonderful and unexpected number one single. Of course, Adele's perceived 'authenticity', the starkness and simplicity of the song's arrangement, its concern with ordinary human feelings - none of this automatically makes 'Someone Like You' more meaningful or impressive, and liking Adele isn't 'just about the music' any more (or less) than liking Kesha is. This isn't about substance triumphing over 'mere' style - style is part of the substance of pop. But 'Someone Like You' is a genuinely great song, and would remain so if it were sung by Rihanna or Britney and backed up by a whole army of David Guetta rave synths and an incongruous dubstep breakdown. (Actually, that would be absolutely amazing.) But while Adele might not be that kind of pop star, she is starting to seem very much like a genuine star. Before her 2011 comeback with 21, I had her down as a peddler of bland, tedious MOR, in whom I had precisely zero interest. But based on 'Someone Like You' - and its brilliant predecessor, 'Rolling In The Deep', an unconventional and bitter disco-blues stomp that reached number 2 in January - I may have misjudged her.

#1 this week: Jessie J feat. B.o.B. - Price Tag

2011-02-08T17:15:00.003Z

The last time I remember hearing the phrase 'price tag' in pop music was in the track 'Up All Night' from Drake's Thank Me Later album, on which Nicki Minaj shows up to sneer "I mean, we can't even rock them shoes if it ain't got a comma on the price tag!" She soon remembers herself, though: "but then again, who looks at the price tag?" There's a tension there - money is all-important, but what's important is that you demonstrate how little you care about it. Status comes through rocking shoes that cost thousands of dollars; but real wealth is demonstrated through not even checking the price tag at all. "Forget about the price tag," advises Jessie J, but Nicki Minaj knows all too well that you can only forget about the price tag when you already have money.

Nicki at least has things the right way around - she's forgetting about price tags in a context where she's bragging about how rich she is, and being knowingly ridiculous into the bargain. Jessie J, on the other hand, says she doesn't care about money at all, but still feels the need to broadcast this to everyone throughout every second of 'Price Tag' - look how unimportant I think money is, the record screams, clearly taking the declaration itself to be of paramount importance. The perspective is inherently privileged and despicably smug.

I find it pretty hard to read 'Price Tag' sympathetically as a critique of materialism. Jessie opens the song complaining that "everybody's got a price", before going on to wonder, "why is everybody so serious, acting so damn mysterious? You got your shades on your eyes and your heels so high that you can't even have a good time!" So materialism - concern with money - is connected here to that age-old stereotype of people taking themselves, and their image, "too seriously" - the suggestion being, presumably, that if we just relax, and stop taking things seriously, we'll all feel a lot better. Or as Jessie J puts it, later in the song, if "we all slow down and enjoy right now, guarantee we'll be feeling fine." (A reiteration, I suppose, of the old Stoic idea that inner peace will result if one withdraws one's emotional investment from the trappings of the external world.)

That's one of the things that irritates me about 'Price Tag' - it wants to have its answers too easily. As though all the problems of consumer capitalism will evaporate if we all just 'chill out'. This position is infuriatingly privileged. Of course people won't just "feel fine"; people consume because they feel shit, and there's a reason why Nicki Minaj doesn't want to wear shoes without a comma on the price tag. "Why is everybody so obsessed?" Jessie J wants to know, given that "money can't buy us happiness."

"We buy a lot of clothes, but we don't really need 'em/things we buy to cover up what's inside/because they made us hate ourself, and love they wealth/that's why shorty holla 'where the ballers at?'"
-Kanye West, 'All Falls Down', 2004

I suppose I look at it this way. There's an obvious sense in which, as I've already suggested, people without money need to worry about it a lot more than people who do. But symbolically, too, groups of people who are dispossessed - especially in terms of class - will find more import in the status that material acquisition can bring. Coldplay's Chris Martin, like Lil Wayne, is a millionaire. But only Lil Wayne is likely to write songs about being a millionaire, or pose for pictures like this, and there's a reason for that. 'Price Tag' is partly a response to the fact that the language and imagery of over-the-top capitalist materialism has entered the pop vocabulary; this has happened through the influence of hip-hop and the reason why hip-hop does this is because it is, fundamentally, an underclass music that not only successfully invaded, but actually completely redefined, the mainstream. The response of 'Price Tag' seems to be, basically, condescending mockery. This makes me uncomfortable.

Funnily enough, there's actually a bit of a parallel on this score between 'Price Tag' and Jessie J's debut single, 'Do It Like A Dude'. That song is a whole can of worms that I can't even get into right now; but Jessie J says that it was intended as a "joke" to make fun of "guys with their trousers down by their knees and their neck chains so heavy they couldn’t hold their head up". That quote is very much in the same spirit as the targets of 'Price Tag', acting "serious" and "mysterious", heels too high to have a good time. And this, I suppose, is why Jessie J annoys me. It seems like we're supposed to take her first two singles as mocking, respectively, the hypermasculinity and hypermaterialism pop culture has absorbed from hip-hop. Now, these two features of hip-hop music and culture are ones that I find incredibly problematic, but I think that they are deserving of serious attack, not whimsical mockery. One of the reasons that I find hip-hop compelling - and one of the reasons that it has, I think, been so successful - is that it makes explicit, to the point of exaggerated and ridiculous parody, many of the unpleasant background attitudes that are at play in contemporary Western culture; if you like, it says the unsayable. Misogyny and materialism are the two most prominent ways hip-hop does this; the reason it can is fundamentally connected to its seemingly ineradicable connection to an economic underclass. It's not just rappers who are sexist and materialistic, the social world is. So attacking these attitudes is not just a matter of shrugging them off, of taking ourselves less seriously and having a bit of a dance and a bit of fun.

Incidentally, this is why 'Price Tag' compares really unfavourably to Lily Allen's 'The Fear', an obvious comparison; 'The Fear' wasn't perfect, but it is sad rather than smug, and Lily - unlike Jessie - admitted that she was a part of the problem, that her ordinary-girl-next-door persona did not represent a perspective outside of the system. This is essentially the message I get from Jessie J: that normality, everyday common sense, is a good enough lens through which to resolve the world's problems. If only everyone would stop taking themselves so seriously - stop thinking - we'll be feeling just fine. I beg to differ.

Okay, deep breath. So - what's Jessie J's alternative to materialism in pop? If "it's not about the money", what is it about? Her stated intentions in the song - and this is clearly meant to be her alternative to everything she is critiquing - is to "make the world dance", and to "take it back in time, when music made us all unite!" The latter line reminds me of nothing so much as the vacuous nostalgia-without-object of Sandi Thom's 'I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)'. (Weren't things great in the olden days, when nobody ever sang about money?) I will suggest, also, that in the past, making the world dance, and bringing people together, has often - in pop music - been entirely consistent with caring about money, taking image seriously, taking oneself seriously, and even - most shockingly of all - not feeling fine.

By the time B.o.B. shows up, rapping about how "you can keep the cars" because all he needs are "keys and guitars", it becomes clear what is really at stake here. One person's consumerist identity-construction over another; the bouncy, jaunty reggae-pop of 'Price Tag', with its cheery interjections of session-band guitar, fighting the supposed "good fight" against autotune and David Guetta trance riffs in the battle for the soul of the top 40. Buy this, take this seriously, the song seems to say, because this is proper music, with a proper point, which doesn't need to take itself seriously because it assumes that everybody already will.

Oh yeah, and the song itself? Well, it's as catchy and infectious as all hell, and actually pretty pleasant in its frothy little way - if you can look past the lyrics, that is, which I can't, and which - more importantly - you're not meant to. If 'Price Tag' sounded exactly the same, but had some banal but unobtrusive lyrics about nothing in particular, I would - I suppose - quite like it. But the jovial, sunny bounce of the song, those nudging, insinuating guitars, and its fiendishly-constructed singalong chorus are inseperable from the song's intended message; we are supposed to read all of those things in the light of what Jessie J takes herself to be doing here - aiming an ill-judged, faux-irreverent sneer at popular culture in general, and inviting us all to join in, to feel like we are somehow above everything ugly and problematic about the world, for the 3 minutes and 40 seconds that we spend singing along. The message seems to be - aren't we so much cleverer, and happier, and better, than those people over there? This song sickens me.

#1 this week: Kesha - We R Who We R

2011-02-03T18:11:00.006Z

"We are who we are" - a vacuous tautology that it would easy to mock. But the spirit, and the sense, of Kesha's declaration is clearly the same as Gaga's similarly rhetorical new slogan "born this way". In both cases, the point is not what is literally said (were we really born 'this way'? Does it matter?), but the message. Kesha has said that 'We R Who We R' is "a celebration of any sorts of quirks and eccentricities", and is intended as an encouragement to "celebrate who you are". It's got a sort of fuck-the-haters spirit of celebrating marginalised identities; we are who we are, whether you like it or not. Specifically, Kesha claims to have written the song partly in response to the suicides of gay youths as a result of homophobic bullying. Notably - and it would be easy to be cynical about this - there's absolutely no reference to this, even elliptical or vague, in the actual lyrics of the song.

Here's the thing, though. Kesha wants 'We R Who We R' to work as an anthem for marginalised freaks, and a middle finger to bullies. But this is the same woman who has, in the past, proffered such lyrics as "you're acting like a chick, why bother?/I can find someone way hotter" and "don't be a little bitch with your chit chat/just show me where your dick's at". So Kesha's definitely not above playing the bully herself, and - specifically - she's certainly not above trying to undermine men by comparing them to women. She’s not averse to relying upon the misogynistic assumption - which informs a lot of homophobia directed against gay men – that men being in any way ‘feminine’ is inherently laughable, something to be mocked. This is misogyny for the same, obvious, reasons that using the word “gay” as an insult is homophobic – the assumptions in the background are that being a girl, or being gay, are bad things to be. The above-cited examples are certainly not atypical or unrepresentative of Kesha's on-record persona, and the misogyny she displays in them is, of course, not a million miles away from – and is clearly connected to – the sort of bullying she claims to be standing against with 'We R Who We R'.

I'm going to give Kesha the benefit of the doubt and assume that she really is sincere in her sentiments in speaking out against homophobia and bullying, and equally sincere about her desire to celebrate difference and weirdness, and empower the marginalised, with 'We R Who We R'. But the problem is, it's very easy to say, and believe, that bigotry and bullying are, you know, bad things. But bullies and bigots aren't cartoonish villains, they're everywhere; most bullies and bigots don't mean to be any such thing. Homophobia, misogyny, racism, and so on, are part of the ambient background of our culture. Standing against those things means being willing to check ourselves on them, and not thinking that it's funny (or acceptable) to, ooooh, I don't know, put down a male suitor by sneering "you're acting like a chick" at him. For example.

Which is to say that maybe Kesha is talking the talk here without walking the walk, or going the (relatively) easy route of churning out anthems with vague themes of acceptance and empowerment without doing the hard work of thinking through the implications of the values you're espousing. It's also to say - perhaps more to the point, in Kesha's case - that you can't just absorb various bits of other pop star's personas (Gaga's hedonistic pro-queer agenda plus Katy Perry's vacuously "ironic" heteronormativity) and think that you'll end up with anything coherent as a result.

As for 'We R Who We R' itself, Kesha doesn't say anything glaringly offensive here; but she doesn't say anything remotely interesting either. I don't want to be mean about Kesha; her vocals are deliberately awkward, clunky and obnoxious, and it's obvious that she expects people to be annoyed by her. Anyone who ever had the even the slightest affection for shambolic indiepop, or for early Beastie Boys, or Descendents-esque brat-punk, ought to recognise her appeal, and it seems particularly churlish to knock her for being shit and irritating on a record like 'We R Who We R', which is all about Kesha being unapologetically herself. I will say that, to my ears, 'We R Who We R' sounds terrible. It occupies the same sonic universe as 'The Time (Dirty Bit)', all hyper-processed vocals; it wields the ubiquitous "big trance riff" up front. If you've been listening to chart music over the last eighteen months, you know exactly what this song sounds like. I have nothing at all against processed vocals or heavily synthesised music; I'm a huge fan of both. But 'We R Who We R' is as stodgy, plodding and lacking in transcendence as any tedious bit of landfill indie.

Kesha's vocals and lyrics are obviously the Marmite selling point here, but all she mainly seems to be asserting is her right to be a young girl who goes to parties. That's fine - if Kesha wants to wear glitter and ripped stockings, make hipsters fall in love, wear Jesus on her neck-a-lace, and hit on 'dudes' (all actual claims made in the song), then I have no objection to any of it. But 'We R Who We R' doesn't do its job - it doesn't actually make any of these things sound like any fun at all. The track is cynical and workmanlike, and no matter how distinctive her voice may be, Kesha's persona never really comes alive; she never really manages to bring the listener into her world and make it seem like somewhere you'd want to spend three minutes and twenty-four seconds exploring. That's why her bratty, shambolic vocals don't have any charm, and it's not helped by the fact that the persona she is shooting for doesn't even really feel her own, but more like an uneasy mish-mash of contemporary chart archetypes. If Kesha is speaking for anybody other than herself with this song, then they deserve better. And it's possible that they might be getting it pretty soon.

"The funny thing is that some people have reduced freedom to a brand. They think that it's trendy now to be free. They think it's trendy to be excited about your identity. When in truth, there is nothing trendy about Born This Way. This connection that we all share is something so much deeper than a wig or lipstick or an outfit ... Born This Way is about what keeps us up at night and what makes us afraid."
-Lady Gaga

Watch this space.

#1 this week: Bruno Mars - Grenade

2011-01-18T16:57:00.002Z

You'll remember Bruno Mars from his last UK number one, 'Just The Way You Are', which I gave a pretty unforgiving write-up. I stand by what I said there, and a fair bit of it applies to 'Grenade', too, although the latter song is certainly better. One of the things I noticed about 'Just The Way You Are' was the way that the song was careful to position itself as 'authentic' - the sleeve, for instance, was mocked-up to look like an old-fashioned 7-inch sleeve, complete with, ridiculously, a 'Now In Stereo' logo. And check out the sleeve for 'Grenade' - all faux-aged, like a worn and battered bit of vinyl. It's an interesting glorification of - and perhaps expresses some nostalgia for - the idea of the pop record as a physical object, to be valued and treasured until it is old and worn. 'Grenade', as a single, has never been released in any physical format at all; but that sleeve sends the message that this is a song existing in the real world, with heft and weight to it, not just a disposable, digitised ghost.

This, then, is supposed to be Proper Music, and the melodramatic balladry of the record certainly feels more like something from a longstanding tradition of pop music than a lot of recent hit records - put simply, 'Grenade' is about love, and not the sort of love that takes place in a club. This record is implicitly positioning itself against the sort of hyper-artificiality we have seen from the likes of the Black Eyed Peas recently - while most of mainstream US pop are turning into robots and singing like robots on pills about "partying" in "the club", Bruno Mars is a Proper Singer singing the kind of songs which make sense to people who don't go to clubs. Love songs, basically; he's a Mick Hucknall figure, a Michael Bolton, an Extreme or a Wet Wet Wet. I'm thinking of all of these people in their early-'90s incarnations, and I'm drawn to early-'90s comparisons, I think, partly because that was an era in which smooth and soulful 'authenticity' was battling for chart supremacy with the then-startling new noises of rave and rap. Similarly, something like 'Grenade' feels like (depending on your perspective) either a corrective tonic to, or a reactionary and conservative response to the chart dominance of club-targeted machine-music. (All of which is to reiterate a lot of what I said in my post on 'Just The Way You Are'.)

The lyrical conceit of 'Grenade' basically sees Bruno Mars going on about all of the things he would be willing do for his beloved - catch a grenade, throw his hand on a blade, jump in front of a train, take a bullet to the brain. (I told you it was melodramatic.) But the woman he addresses the song to won't do the same for him; she doesn't return his love. All of which causes much impassioned wailing and gnashing of teeth, culminating in a rather massive musical crescendo.

"I would die for you, baby," Mars wails, which puts me in mind of that Lauryn Hill lyric from 'Ex Factor' - "cry for me, cry for me/you said you'd die for me/give to me, give to me/why won't you live for me?" There's the rub; it's easier to say you'll die for someone than to live for them, easier to posit imagined acts of over-the-top self-flagellation than to put in the hard work of actually making another person happy. Bruno Mars, in this song, seems to feel the need to enact his histrionic love through violent self-sacrifice, but why on earth is that the appropriate way to enact love for another human being? What good does it do for Mars' beloved for him to do any of these things?

The song also leaves me wondering why he loves this woman so much; he doesn't seem to find anything good to say about her. The emotional narrative of the song seems to be - Bruno Mars develops irrational and completely out-of-proportion fixation on someone; she is then reviled and castigated for not returning this sentiment. All of which is pretty fucked-up, self-absorbed and even, I'm sure one could argue, misogynistic. It's not that fucked up, self-absorbed, and misogynistic sentiments can't make for grimly engrossing music (see, of course, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, natch). But 'Grenade' is done so clumsily and unconvincingly ("tell the devil I said hey when you get back to where you're from", "you'll smile right in my face, then rip the brakes out of my car" - give me a break) and - crucially - with so little awareness that there might be anything fucked-up, self-absorbed or misogynistic about it, that it just ends up tremendously annoying.

Musically speaking, this is probably the most likeable thing I've heard from Bruno Mars - its subject matter makes it spikier and sadder than the smug, self-satisfied likes of 'Just The Way You Are' and his turns on B.o.B.'s 'Nothin' On You' and Travie McCoy's 'Billionaire'. Lyrics aside, it's a well-executed and pleasant-sounding - if ultimately rather nondescript - midtempo ballad. Mars' vocal performance is actually genuinely really good, but the lyrics he's working with mean that he doesn't have anything to sell with that performance; all he ends up convincing you of is that he really is that shallow, short-sighted, and self-absorbed. Which is not what you'd need to be made to feel if you were going to get any enjoyment out of 'Grenade'.

Shallow, ridiculous, over-the-top? Yes, basically, but not in a good way; and it's a small miracle that a song fitting that description can nevertheless end up being pretty boring. Both 'Grenade' and 'Just The Way You Are' just give voice to stock sentiments without getting under the skin of those sentiments, without telling the listener anything about life. I feel like saying that 'Grenade' does what it aspires to do nicely enough; but it's patronising to suppose that the creators of this song only aspired to create a semi-decent piece of schlocky radio-filler. Pop music can, and should, do more than this.

#1 this week: Rihanna feat. Drake - What's My Name?

2011-01-09T19:46:00.004Z

So, my 99th favourite song of 2010 becomes the first number one single of 2011; the sales of 'When We Collide' had to slip sooner or later, and as Matt Cardle finally relinquishes the top spot, and with no new challengers in sight, Rihanna's 'What's My Name?' - having hung around the top reaches of the charts for eight weeks - is left sitting at number one.

That's not to imply that 'What's My Name?' is just number one by default, or anything - it's no mean feat to climb to the top spot after being in the charts for such a long time. It also sees Rihanna set a new chart record - apparently she's the first female solo artist to score a UK number one single in five consecutive calender years. It's fitting, because Rihanna is really starting to look like an established, iconic artist, in it for the long haul. Her album, Loud, is also still sitting at number one in the album charts, Take That's mega-selling Progress having finally relinquished the spot last week. After all the dust of the festive period has settled, and the 'normal' world of pop has resumed, with the typical January lull in new releases, the charts tell an interesting story, and Rihanna is left looking like the world's biggest pop star right now.

I gave 'Only Girl (In The World)' a hard time when it was number one in November. I still don't like it, but I like 'What's My Name?' enough to re-frame its predecessor in my head. I now see 'Only Girl' less as a symptom of Rihanna losing the plot, and more as a doesn't-quite-work-for-me isolated misstep. Basically, Rihanna retreating from the moody darkness and gothic aesthetics of my beloved Rated R in favour of lighter, frothier pop climes doesn't feel like such a bad idea now that it's actually married to a great record. There's some kind of lesson here; 'Only Girl (In The World)' felt cynical and conservative to me, perhaps only because I didn't - and still don't - get it.

Unfortunately, if you want to enjoy 'What's My Name?', you do have to endure the embarrassment of Drake's opening verse. Writing about the song in my tracks of the year list, I said that he sounds "like a man who's been double-dared to get as many shit lines into a 16-bar verse as he possibly can", which I think is pretty fair. For the record, and while I'm still in list-making mode, here are the official top 5 stupidest things that Drake says on 'What's My Name?':

5. "Soon as you go, the text that i write is gon' say..."
Not that stupid, but it does lead right into Rihanna's chorus - Drake is apparently going to send a text saying "oh na na, what's my name?" Possibly repeatedly. As a pop chorus, it's fine; as a text message, a bit weird.

4. "The things that we could do in twenty minutes, girl..."
Oooh, tempting.

3. "Only thing we have on is the radio."
Cringe.

2. "The square root of 69 is 8 something, right? 'Cause I've been tryna work it out."
The square root of 69 is 8.3066238629180748525842627449075. Good luck trying to work it out, Drake. That is not sexy.

1. "I heard you good with them soft lips/yeah, you know, word of mouth."
That "square root of 69" line has taken more of the flak, but for me, this is worse. This might actually be one of the single worst lyrics in the history of pop music. "Yeah, you know, word of mouth"? Seriously?

Of course, 'Umbrella' also kicked off with a rubbish-on-paper rap verse, but Jay-Z's turn on that song worked - partly because 'Umbrella' is such a different song from this. 'Umbrella' - musically, if not lyrically - was all about steely authority, all big, bold drums and icy, humming synths. Jay's ridiculous "no clouds in my stoooooooones" business was all about that same hardness, reinforcing the sheer stadium-filling size of the backing track, keeping all the music tightly coiled, breath held, until Rihanna's smooth, honey-voiced entrance. The music of 'What's My Name?', by contrast, is soft and subtle, all gentle insinuation and small movements. Unfortunately, Drake understands this all too well, and he's only capable of gentle insinuation and small movements when he's not trying so fucking hard. I'm not sure coyness - which is what the song calls for - is really part of his range.

Luckily, as soon as Drake shuts up, you actually forget that he was ever there, so masterful and commanding is Rihanna's presence on 'What's My Name?' The song returns her to the vaguely Caribbean 'island music' that dominated her early pre-'Umbrella' career. Since that big breakthrough, she's gone increasingly cold and icy - leaving her, after Rated R, without much further to go. So this single is something of a reclamation of roots that she has been distancing herself from, and she makes the sound powerfully her own. 'Umbrella' was actually one of the songs that started the 'whitening' of black pop, moving R&B away from the influences of soul and dancehall and towards rock ballads and European techno. This trend has become so dominant now that the synth-laden reggae of 'What's My Name?' actually sounds incredibly refreshing in the current context.

In the final analysis, this is just a really, really great pop song - perfect production, a subtle but catchy melody, a verse as insistent and memorable as a chorus, and a perfectly-measured vocal performance from one Robyn Rihanna Fenty. Run through those record-breaking UK number ones - 2007's 'Umbrella', 2008's 'Take A Bow', 2009's 'Run This Town', 2010's 'Only Girl (In The World)', and 2011's 'What's My Name?' - and they have little in common. Rihanna has succeeded through reinvention and adaptation, and is quietly building one of the most formidable pop discographies of our century. 'What's My Name?' chalks up another victory. Long may she reign.