Just like last year, I can't bring myself to rank the songs I really liked from this year, but there were definitely a bunch of standouts. So instead, I came up with fake awards for them. Enjoy.
The BWAHAHA Award for Most Brazen Thing Ever
The Dead Battery Award for Why Can't I Stop Listening to This
Cardi B & Megan Thee Stallion
"WAP"I'm going to keep this short and sweet, because you've heard this song so is there really a need to explain? The song is full of the most bawdy and totally unabashed sexual messaging, but it's in the service of telling women everywhere to not just own but DOMINATE their sexuality. "Beat it up, n*****, catch a charge," in this context, has to be one of the best lines I've heard in five years, easy, and that's in the first 30 seconds. As much as I despise their journalism, Pitchfork said it best: "'WAP' is so decisively absent of shame," and we are all the better for it.
TIE
Christine & The Queens
"People, I've been sad"
Christine & The Queens (aka Héloïse Letissier) has been somewhat quiet recently. Despite the massive hit she scored when teaming up with Charli XCX for "Gone" last year, the time spent waiting for a follow up to Chris has been silent. Sure, it's only been two years, but that's an eternity in the pop world, and 2020 has actually been seven years, so hurry up okay? "People, I've been sad" is, like, the most ennui a French person has ever been, and there's nothing like a person made entirely of shrugs to represent our collective morning decision of whether to wear pants to a Zoom meeting.
Dehd
"Loner"
Dehd are one of the few bands able to reproduce surf-rock on a level that isn't purely nostalgia or a terrible Beach Boys cover band. And while I could go on and on espousing all the great musical nuances of this song, the real reason it shares this award is for the line "I've had enough of each other / I want nothing more than to be a loner," and the end chant that's clearly the thing we all say to ourselves as we rock back and forth in our fetal positions every night, "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, fine, fine, fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, fine, fine, fine."
The 70s-Only Billy Joel Award for Closest Thing to A Capella That's Still Listenable
The Facepalm Award for Extreme Prescience
Fiona Apple
"Relay"
Fiona Apple's dramatic and striking new album is an exercise in pure minimalist production with maximalist songwriting. Most of the songs use only homemade percussion instruments with the barest piano accompaniment to back Apple's striking alto voice. And while many of the songs feature political or philosophical themes, "Relay" boasts the most in-your-face example: "Evil is a relay sport, where the one who's burned turns to pass the torch." That the song repeats this phrase until it's covered by a din of layers and random drum sounds before eventually devolving into nonsensical vocal hoots and woos seems only to provide evidence for Apple's thesis statement: do not take up the torch of hate, it burns us all.
Yves Tumor
"Asteroid Blues"
The award for this song is a bit mischaracterized, but it's the best I could come up with, sue me. The real star of "Asteroid Blues" is the crazy, balls-to-the-wall bass line that's fat PHAT like the juiciest peach. That the song is punctuated with stabs of what is clearly an early-80s B-movie horror scream, mixed ten times louder than anything else is incidental, if not at least a fascinating stylistic choice. The entirety of Yves Tumor's Heaven to a Tortured Mind is peppered with unforgettable bits like this, but "Asteroid Blues" is where everything comes together with the greatest effect.
Perfume Genius
"On the Floor"
"It's really like I'm back in the 80's feeling like I'm back in the 50's," says Wanda Pierce, BoJack Horseman's new girlfriend on their first real date--and Wanda's first real date since waking up from a 30 year coma--to a definitely-not-a-Pulp-Fiction-reference 50's style diner. I don't know but that's all I could think of listening to this incredibly bubbly, poppy call-back by Perfume Genius (who, secretly, has clearly gotten over his drug abuse and turned it around; look at that chiseled marble up there). Each album since 2012's Put Your Back N 2 It has incorporated more and more instrumentation, particularly drums and synthesizers; and though none have been as experimental or jaw-dropping as Too Bright, they do keep increasing the arsenal and repertoire of one America's best alternative-pop songwriters.
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SAULT
"Monsters"
SAULT's duo of absolute masterpieces were a stunning addition to 2020's already stacked catalog of political and conscious R&B. The first entry, Untitled (Black Is), is a brutal sermon delivered to the indifferent everywhere, while secretly delivering hope to those of the true faith. "Monsters" is the fever pitch of that sermon. At times tear-inducing, at others beautifully inspiring, the song tells those that are oppressed and underrepresented that the white world calls them "monsters" out of fear of their raw power--that the term is not one to be ashamed of, but to be embraced. If they call you a monster, it means you're headed in the right direction. "Baby, your mind is worth more than gold / Wipe your tears so they can see the glow." Glow on. Raise your fist in righteous anger and glow.
Caroline Rose
"Feel the Way I Want"
I have not exactly been hiding my love for Caroline Rose's Superstar under a bushel. I wrote an entire album review about how it was on repeat in my headphones for almost a month. Three of my five most listened-to songs of 2020 were from that album, and "Feel the Way I Want" led that charge. In a year of extreme feelings and darkness, this song is the self-love anthem that everyone needs. And while it is one of the happiest songs of the year, it cleverly delivers a message of mental health empowerment: "There's only so much that a person can take / Too much abuse and somebody can break" Rose croons over a bouncing beat straight out of a 2000's bubblegum pop chart topper, expounding on the theme of letting loose and feeling however it is you feel. Stoicism is a poison, and Caroline Rose has the cure: "Baby watch me freak out!"
Jessie Ware
"What's Your Pleasure?"
Goddamn is this song hot! Pulling straight from Donna Summer's foray into Italo-disco with Giorgio Moroder, Jessie Ware calls on all her clearly divine powers to deliver THE DANCEFLOOR RUMPRATTLER OF THE DECADE!!! The sly, silky beat is taken directly from the Warriors soundtrack and is headed straight to a White Sox-sponsored bonfire near you (look it up, I have good references dammit). Ware's lyrics and their soul-melting delivery will have you weak in the knees, and rarely has a dance song had poetry like this: "Is this love too hot to handle? / Make a wish blow out my candle," was already causing me to fan myself until "On the floor your clockwork timing / Spin me 'round so I'm unwinding." Tonight we burnin' it all the way down.
The Weeknd
"After Hours"
The penultimate, and title song of The Weeknd's excellent After Hours is perhaps not the most radio-worthy ("Blinding Lights" was covered ad nauseum, and "In Your Eyes" is ready for millions of fans' lighters to be raised in stadiums around the world post-pandemic), but "After Hours" is the dark, synth-laden backroom that made The Weeknd so dangerous and exhilarating on songs like "The Hills" and the entirety of House of Balloons. His unique falsetto voice delivers a "fuck you; nevermind come back" straight out of The-Dream's best work: "Baby / Where are you now when I need you most / I'd give it all just to hold you close." And not to get too far into the weeds of music theory, but my spine melts when there's a perfectly placed off-beat sample, which, Christ-alive is this man great at doing. At six minutes, it's a bit long for the playlist-it-and-forget-it crowd, but trust me the invested time is well worth it.
Kelly Lee Owens
"L.I.N.E."
Kelly Lee Owens has the distinction of being one of a very select few artists to surprise me multiple times. The first was her self-titled debut album, which so stunned me into silent awe it made 2017's short list for best albums of the year the day before I had to write the article. The second time was "L.I.N.E.," a powerfully somber and plush (anti-)love ballad in the middle of an otherwise alt-electro album. And while "L.I.N.E." is most definitely a break-up song, it also has an uplifting core about the power of individualism ("death begins with compromise") and perseverance in the face of unbelievable heartbreak: "You'd think I'd learn by now that this shit's not easy / That's what you get for wearing your heart on your sleeve." Is...is someone cutting onions?
Run The Jewels
"walking in the snow"
And so here we are at the end of all things. Run the Jewels have, for years now, been known for their high-energy, fist-in-your-face rap that stuns both critics and fans into adoration. But if there was ever a year that needed a real bitch slap it's this one. RTJ4 is absolutely loaded with political messaging and ruminations on the current state of the world, but nothing is more striking, heartbreaking, and rage-inducing than the bars shared here. The songs starts with an absolute essay from El-P which I will try my best to pare down into it's most prescient parts:
"This whole world's a shit moat, filled to the brim like Gitmo / When you think it don't get mo' low it limbo 'til the stick's on flo'"
"Hungry for truth but you got screwed and drank the Kool-Aid, there's a line / It end directly at the edge of a mass grave, that's their design / Funny fact about a cage, they're never built for just one group / So when that cage is done with them and you still poor, it come for you / The newest lowest on the totem, well golly gee, you have been used / You helped to fuel the death machine that down the line will kill you too"
Note: that's not even half of the lyrical content of just his part of the song. And if that seemed heavy, well brother have I got a verse for you.
Killer Mike's portion is almost entirely targeted at something we thought, at least until around May of this year, was in the American rearview: police killing unarmed black people. Well, I should say, "we" means people like me: white, privileged, working from home at full salary while others are laid off, whose interactions with the jackboots have amounted to nothing more than inconvenience and eyerolls. The people of color in America have never had this in their rearview, it's only ever in their face...all the time. When Mike delivers his line "And you so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me / Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper 'I can't breathe'"... I can't stop being angry about how this line was originally written about ERIC GARNER and that event was somehow repeated almost congruently AGAIN. "Never forget, in the story of Jesus the hero was killed by the state."
Never forget, they murdered them all, and then gassed the people speaking up about it.
They want you to forget.
Fight the power. Black Lives Matter
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