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Re: Time Magazine's Top 10 Songs of 2008
1. Kanye West's Love Lockdown
Singing in an Auto-Tuned monotone with little regard for melody, West sounds ghostly as he recounts his romantic failures in brutal detail. Just when "Love Lockdown" seems too brittle to sustain itself, humanity arrives in the form of an army of Japanese taiko drums. At first it sounds like pop-guns going off, but the drumming gets faster, warmer, wilder, and matched against West's distant vocals "Love Lockdown" turns into a dance song about misery — far closer to "Love Will Tear Us Apart" than any hip-hop ancestor. It's easily the most interesting pop experiment this year, and, if you grant its premise and stick with it, also the best.
2. Pink's So What
Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me a River" remains the greatest rebound song of all time, but at least Pink can say she made a spirited run at the crown. "So What" packs in chanting, hand claps, a nursery rhyme melody and a chorus overdubbed until it sounds like 50 Pinks are calling her ex "a tool." It's the least subtle act of pop vengeance since Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes lit a match. It's also astonishingly fun thanks to the rubber-ball bounce of producer Max Martin's keyboard hooks and Pink's swaggering, emotional vocal. You definitely don't want to break up with her, but no song this year was as much fun to go out with.
3. Ida Maria's Oh My God
A million songs have been written with these three guitar chords and a million more have used lyrics like "Find a cure for my life." So what makes "Oh My God" one of the best songs of the year? Ida Maria Børli Siversten. This 24-year-old Norwegian has a powerhouse voice — deep, commanding, a little masculine, exotic, too, like Nico, but with an abundance rather than an absence of feeling. As her taut band rips away at their instruments, Ida Maria turns her lyrics into epic drama; singing the word "God" in the chorus, she times the g to the crash of the snare and the roar of the guitar, just in case there's a deity who could ignore her.
4. Lil Wayne's A Milli
Like all rappers, Lil Wayne rarely lets a song go by without declaring at some point that he's ill. The difference is that he really seems to be. The backing track here — little more than a bass kick, some plastic-y snares and an endlessly looped sample of the words "a milli a milli a milli" stolen from A Tribe Called Quest's "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo" — never coheres into a chorus, and all the elements move in different rhythms. It's like hearing a song through cough syrup — perfect for Wayne, who wheezily declares "I don' write shit 'cause I don't got time," and then conjures up enough crazy, off-balance wordplay to convince you he's either a liar or a savant. Either way, he's definitely some kind of ill.
5. Fleet Foxes' White Winter Hymnal
This chorale roundelay about a school trip to the woods in winter is just 52 words and two-and-a-half minutes long. Songs don't get tinier, but Fleet Foxes pack their miniature tale with an eerie plot ("I was following the pack/ All swallowed in their coats/ With scarves of red tied 'round their throats") repeated with slightly more instrumental oomph in each of the three verses and sung in the sweetest of Beach Boys inflected four-part harmonies. It's as quaint and precious as a Joseph Cornell box, and just about as pretty.
6. Jonas Brothers' Burnin' Up
Overlook the indulgence of a rap verse contributed by their bodyguard and this is an almost perfectly constructed pop song. Allegedly inspired by Prince, Disney's adorable little cash registers sing about their infatuation — "High heels, red dress/ All by yourself/ Gotta catch my breath!" — in credible R&B falsetto over power guitar chords. The production is door-in-the-face obvious (there's a boiling kettle at the open to make sure we get that they're burnin' up) but edginess is not the point; sweetness is, and the Jonases achieve it with irresistible harmonies and exuberance.
7. Beyoncé's Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
People who don't dance usually don't make exceptions, but I saw a man who has abstained from any rhythmic movement for nearly a decade crack within 20 seconds of hearing this ludicrously infectious Beyoncé hit. The rhythm is double-dutch. The lyrics are liberating if your idea of liberation ended with Gloria Gaynor. The melody is — who are we kidding? It's not a melody, just the sound track from the '80s arcade hit Frogger. Still, "Single Ladies" works because Beyoncé cuts through all the racket like a train whistle and she seems to believe every word she sings, while the slightly menacing minor chords that creep in halfway through keep things from getting too repetitive.
8. MGMT's Time to Pretend
It's a challenge to communicate one simple emotion in a pop song, let alone two complicated ones. The achievement of "Time to Pretend" is that it's simultaneously detached and wrenching. Brooklyn duo Benjamin Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden mock their own rock star ambitions ("I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars/ You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars") while a space-pop melody with a Ziggy Stardust-worthy keyboard riff builds and swirls around them, gradually overwhelming all the irony until what started as a joke of a song ends in genuine sadness.
9. Duffy's Rockferry
From the way the piano bangs away at the opening chords, it's clear that 24-year-old Aimee Anne Duffy isn't planning on just singing a song: she's going to announce her arrival. Duffy delivers on the fanfare with an audacious vocal test drive that shows off impressive control in the first verse and the full fusillade of her range in the third. She makes pit stops along the way in Memphis and Motown for inspiration — and maybe takes a little too much inspiration — but as debuts go, it's hard to think of a recent one that's as instantly attention grabbing.
10. Gnarls Barkley's Going On
2006's "Crazy" was so convincingly insane that most people were disappointed with this reasonable-seeming follow-up. "Going On" is just a sweet soul song about moving past a relationship without bitterness ("May my love lift you up to the place you belong/ But I'm going on"). Still, it's hardly dull. Danger Mouse fills the track with little quarks and shooting stars that rotate deferentially around Cee-Lo's interplanetary vocals. If that's not weird enough for you, at least they made a strange video.
- Communist China
- Rep: 130
Re: Time Magazine's Top 10 Songs of 2008
Don't think I could sing a bar of any of those songs, but Pink's I've heard and Gnarls Barkler's I've heard.
Re: Time Magazine's Top 10 Songs of 2008
I think I might have heard Pinks song. I know Gnarls Barkley but never heard the new song. Haven't heard of some of these acts. Personally I think MIA's Paper Planes should have been on here, or whichever her hit song was. & I'm not just saying that to appease James either, I think it warrants top 10 of the year.
- luckylittlelady
- Rep: 20
Re: Time Magazine's Top 10 Songs of 2008
I only know Pink and Kanye :-\
I feel like I should know the Ida Maria one but damned if I can place it and I didn't know Duffy had a song called Rockferry as well as the album!
Re: Time Magazine's Top 10 Songs of 2008
Personally I think MIA's Paper Planes should have been on here, or whichever her hit song was. & I'm not just saying that to appease James either, I think it warrants top 10 of the year.
Kala was released in 2007. Not gonna dig up the single, but I'm pretty sure it was released last December. Reason it got huge this year was because of Pineapple Express. The song may get a second wind because of the Slumdog Millionaire film and soundtrack.
She's a media darling and I'm sure they wanted to include it, but they couldn't.
Re: Time Magazine's Top 10 Songs of 2008
Good audience for her too with the Pineapple Express movie which was great. Also the rapper T.I sampled the song for his song with Jay Z, Kayne, and Lil Wayne. After that I noticed increased airplay for her single on the main rap stations.
Re: Time Magazine's Top 10 Songs of 2008
Time magazine also made Adolf Hitler man of the year back in the 30s. Obviously there hasn't been a whole lot of intellectual development since then.
If that list is what goes on on radio today I'm glad I don't listen to it. I actually don't have a clue to any of those songs. Never heard the titles even.
That makes me a little proud.
