By Brett Yates
updated
Wed, Mar 28, 2012 02:52 PM
For some reason, I can always remember the year in which a movie
came out - I can do this even for classic movies, made eons before
my birth - but I can never remember in which year a particular song
appeared.
This is a little weird, I find, given that, with music (or pop
music, at least), the period in which I experience the product,
again and again, tends to be in the months following its release,
rather than at a random date perhaps years down the line, as with
many films: movies float around on Netflix and television forever,
whereas most songs played on the radio stick around for half a year
and then disappear, and in this way they seem more tightly bound to
their eras.
It occurred to me yesterday that, in an effort to better connect
the music I've heard to the moments of my life in which I heard it,
it would be a fun exercise to try to determine the best song of
each of the last 10 years. If you want to play along at home (use
Wikipedia for help), here's the big, important rule: every song has
to have been an enormous pop hit, preferably of the kind that's
played endlessly on teenybopper radio stations at the request of
corporate music executives whose job it is to get together in a
board room every three weeks and decide which of their shiny
music-products we'll be forced to enjoy next. If it didn't chart,
it doesn't count.
2011: "We Found Love" by Rihanna
An interesting thing about Rihanna is how she's steadfastly
rejected the victimized-woman role thrust upon her in the wake of
Chris Brown's abuse. It seems un-PC of her even to claim that their
relationship was "love" at all, but this song, whose doomy music
video features a blond, handsomer Chris Brown-type, goes further to
proclaim Rihanna's complicity in a romance that spun out of
control. It's a confession of pleasure and nostalgia; you have to
respect it just for how wrong it seems.
2010: "Black and Yellow" by Wiz Khalifa
A wonderful thing about rappers is their ability to take a song
about any subject and turn it into a song about their car (case in
point: Young Jeezy's election-year anthem "My President," in which
he somehow devoted more attention to the rims on his Lamborghini
than he did to Obama). I'd listened to "Black and Yellow" at least
15 times before I realized that it was about Pittsburgh, not about
the paint job on Wiz Khalifa's automobile. In any case, the phrase
"black and yellow" appears 38 times in the song, by my count; if
you say something enough, it achieves its own meaning.
2009: "TiK ToK" by Kesha
I hated this song for months, and then I saw the music video - in
which, amid lyrics about partying like a rock star, we see a blowzy
Kesha living with her parents and pedaling around her suburban
neighborhood on a bicycle - and then I realized it was all a joke
and loved it. These lyrics tell about the eternal, desperate quest
we're on to convince ourselves that our lives are, in fact,
"cool."
2008: "No Air" by Jordin Sparks (feat. Chris
Brown)
My genuine affection for Jordin Sparks's music is one of the great
mysteries of my life. I don't like R&B, I don't like "American
Idol," and I don't like emotional pop singers belting out epic love
ballads. Yet I think pretty much every single Jordin comes out with
is awesome. (Sorry to have had to mention Chris Brown's name again
- last time, I promise.)
2007: "This Is Why I'm Hot" by Mims
The fun part of this one was how, right around the time at which
everyone was discovering Facebook's bottomless pool of conceit and
bluster, the song's central line (with its unforgettable
tautologies: "I'm hot cause I'm fly; you ain't 'cause you not")
ironically highlights the baselessness of our collective vanity.
We're hot because, well, we just are, OK?
2006: "Ridin'" by Chamillionaire (feat. Krayzie
Bone)
One of the classic hood songs embraced by teenage suburban white
girls, which is always kind of charming. It inspired one of the
best Weird Al parodies, "White & Nerdy."
2005: "Sugar, We're Goin Down" by Fall Out
Boy
I couldn't go through the entire emo era without picking at
least one representative anthem, right? Patrick Stump's enunciation
here is so terrible as to inspire real awe. In 2005, I passionately
hated this song, along with all the solipsistic melodrama of its
genre, but now I look back on it sort of fondly, as I do with
nearly everything I used to hate.
2004: "Dragostea din tei" by O-Zone
True, this didn't get that much airplay in the United States, but
O-Zone is pure boy-band pop; they just happen to be Moldovan. The
song was made famous as "Numa Numa" by the web-cam dancer Gary
Brolsma, whose ecstatic home video provided a feel-good
counterpoint to the mocking voyeurism of the previous year's "Star
Wars Kid" phenomenon: here was an overweight, overzealous guy who
had embraced his goofy energy.
2003: "Stacy's Mom" by Fountains of Wayne
Exactly what a pop song should be: beautifully trivial,
relentlessly cheerful, full of desperate adolescent longing.
2002: "A Thousand Miles" by Vanessa Carlton
Yeah, I'm a 13-year-old girl, so what? The first time I heard "A
Thousand Miles," actually, I was talking on AIM to the girl I had a
crush on during the '01-'02 school year, and she told me it was her
new favorite song and urged me to download it; I did, and I enjoyed
it, but in my tiny eighth-grade brain, it seemed manlier to tell my
friend that the song was lame and to tease her for liking it -
which, of course, was exactly the wrong move. I've just remembered
this all now, which I guess means that making this list was worth
it.
Tagged:
gen y, generation y
