CEREGHINOLOGY

MY GRAMMY PREDICTIONS 2011

2011-02-13T11:39:00.000-08:00

The music's biggest night of the year is here!!. This is also my favorite time of the year, THE GRAMMY NIGHT!!! It's my 27th consecutive year having my own special party (ME+ TV+VINO) and my predictions are already set and picked. Let's see how I do!!

Cheers amigos!!

53rd Annual Grammy Awards, My Predictions:

RECORD OF THE YEAR

Fuck You - CEE LO GREEN

ALBUM OF THE YEAR

The Suburbs - ARCADE FIRE

SONG OF THE YEAR

Love the way you lie - EMINEM FEATURING RIHANNA

BEST NEW ARTIST

Florence and The Machine

BEST FEMALE POP VOCAL PERFORMANCE

Bad Romance - LADY GAGA

BEST MALE POP VOCAL PERFORMANCE

Just the way you are - BRUNO MARS

BEST POP PERFORMANCE BY A DUO OR GROUP WITH VOCALS

Don't stop believin' - GLEE CAST

BEST POP COLLABORATION WITH VOCALS

Telephone - LADY GAGA FEATURING BEYONCE

BEST POP VOCAL ALBUM

The Fame Monster - LADY GAGA

BEST DANCE RECORDING

In for the kill - LA ROUX

BEST ELECTRONIC/DANCE ALBUM

La Roux - LA ROUX

BEST TRADITIONAL POP ALBUM

Love is the answer - BARBRA STREISAND

BEST SOLO ROCK VOCAL PERFORMANCE

Helter Skelter - PAUL MCCARTNEY

BEST ROCK PERFORMANCE BY A DUO OR GROUP WITH VOCALS

Ready to start - ARCADE FIRE

BEST ROCK SONG

Little Lion Man - MUMFORD AND SONS

BEST ROCK ALBUM

Le Noise - NEIL YOUNG

BEST ALTERNATIVE MUSIC ALBUM

The Suburbs - ARCADE FIRE

BEST R&B PERFORMANCE BY A DUO OR GROUP WITH VOCALS

Soldier Of Love - SADE

BEST CONTEMPORARY R&B ALBUM

The ArchAndoid - JANELLE MONAE

BEST URBAN/ALTERNATIVE PERFORMANCE

Fuck You - CEE LO GREEN

BEST RAP SOLO PERFORMANCE

Power - KANYE WEST

BEST RAP PERFORMANCE BY A DUO OR GROUP

Shutterbug - BIG BOI & CUTTY

BEST RAP/SUNG COLLABORATION

Love the way you lie - EMINEM FEATURING RIHANNA

BEST RAP SONG

Love the way you lie - EMINEM FEATURING RIHANNA

BEST RAP ALBUM

Recovery - EMINEM

BEST COUNTRY SONG

Need you now - LADY ANTEBELLUM

BEST COUNTRY ALBUM

Need you now - LADY ANTEBELLUM

BEST LATIN POP ALBUM

Paraiso Express - ALEJANDRO SANZ

BEST LATIN ROCK, ALTERNATIVE OR URBAN ALBUM

Bulevar 2000 - NORTEC COLLECTIVE PRESENTS: BOSTICH + FUSSIBLE

BEST COMPILATION SOUNDTRACK ALBUM FOR MOTION PICTURE, TELEVISION OR OTHER VISUAL MEDIA

Crazy Heart

BEST SCORE SOUNDTRACK ALBUM FOR MOTION PICTURE, TELEVISION OR OTHER VISUAL MEDIA

Toy Story 3

BEST SONG WRITTEN FOR MOTION PICTURE, TELEVISION OR OTHER VISUAL MEDIA

The Weary Kind (From "CRAZY HEART")

PRODUCER OF THE YEAR, NON-CLASSICAL

Danger Mouse

BEST REMIXED RECORDING, NON-CLASSICAL

Sweet Disposition (AXWELL AND DIRTY SOUTH REMIX)

BEST SHORT FORM MUSIC VIDEO

Bad Romance - LADY GAGA

BEST LONG FORM MUSIC VIDEO

Under Great White Northern Lights - THE WHITE STRIPES

THE TOP 50 SONGS OF 2010 (So Far) - The Number 1

2010-07-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

1
The Cave - MUMFORD AND SONS

From the first mellow acoustic guitar sound heard on title track Sigh No More followed by the haunting Fleet Foxes style harmonies, you know that Mumford and Sons have you wrapped into their world of love, heartache and emotion.

This tale of hope and defiance is a reference to Plato's Allegory of the Cave in which the Greek philosopher argued that the invisible world is the most intelligible and that the visible world is the least knowable, and therefore the most incomprehensible. Plato believed that the soul exists in a realm apart from the body and the thinker is separate from the world he thinks about.

The Cave starts with an acoustic guitar before a variety of instruments accompany it and the song bursts into life. With quick riffs, tapping drum beats and that infamous banjo, Mumford and his band of merry men have re-created folk music.

There’s something of Dexys Midnight Runners in the way the music goes bounding forward while the lyrics seesaw between misgivings and affirmations. “I will hold on hope/And I won’t let you choke on the noose around your neck,” Mr. Mumford vows as Winston Marshall’s banjo plinks briskly behind him. “And I’ll find strength in pain.”

Sigh No More is a triumphant, hopeful debut and has the power to capture and convey your own emotions as well as those of the band. If you’ve been waiting for that near-perfect debut of 2010, at long last – here it is.

THE TOP 50 SONGS OF 2010 (So Far) - PART 3

2010-07-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

11
Girl I Love You - MASSIVE ATTACK FT. HORACE ANDY

They remain one of our most fascinating, extraordinary bands. Startling as this may be to thirtysomethings who grew up in prescribed awe of Massive Attack, but a whole new generation has arisen in the 12 years since their last pivotal album, Mezzanine, a generation to whom the Bristol duo are at best peripheral. So while an army of griping fans and sniping critics will argue that Heligoland doesn’t match their early triumphs, or break as much new ground, there will be younger listeners who hear it as something entirely new and recognise it for the gloomily, beguiling beauty it is.

GIRL I LOVE YOU features the vocals of roots reggae master Horace Andy, who is a long time associate of Massive Attack.

The haunting horns under Andy's vocal are pure genius from the minds of Grantley Marshall and Robert Del Naja: creepy and danceable.

"Some people have said in reviews, 'Oh, this is classic Massive and Horace doing what Horace does.' And I've thought, 'well actually that's not quite right', because, with Horace, you've got to understand the depth of the man. He's really coming from this kind of reggae, lovers' rock, Studio One type of background and we've taken him out of that and got him to do completely different things with us. Horace would love us to do lovers' rock. He goes back to Jamaica and his old-skool sparring partners over there are like, 'what is that weird white-man music you've been making with those boys in Bristol again...?'. They don't really understand that s--t at all. And Horace is like, 'why don't you make me a hit single, so I can have a big hit in America like Shaggy?'. And we're like, 'shut up Horace, we've done this minimal tune'. But he loved the results. It's fun working with him." - Robert "3D" del Naja

Massive Attack spent their first 12 years as breathtaking pioneers, while 99.9% of their rivals might manage ten minutes of such inspiration. They may never be as original again, but as long as they make albums as rich, textured and seductive as Heligoland they will remain one of our most fascinating, extraordinary bands.

10
Dance Yrslf Clean - LCD SOUNDSYSTEM

This brooding nine minute epic is the opening track from James Murphy's third and perhaps last studio album, This Is Happening.

Dance Yrself Clean opens with a naive vocal melody accompanied by 8-bit curlicues, before bursting into a gigantic breakbeat-driven block-rocker.

"Talking like a jerk except you are an actual jerk, and living proof that sometimes friends are mean," Murphy mumbles to himself. His lyric touches on the same territory as All My Friends, the narrator’s hedonistic impulses shaded by an awareness that he’s too old to still be feeling this way. It’s as wry and emotionally resonant as it is physically bone-shaking, and nothing else here comes close to matching it.

9
You've Got The Love - FLORENCE + THE MACHINE FT. THE XX

The original version of this song is based on a 1985 Chicago House recording by Jamie Principal & Frankie Knuckles called "Your Love." This song that claimed to be the first ever House Music track was never released on vinyl but tapes were circulated round the clubs. Record producer John Truelove aka The Source combined it with an acapella Gospel track sung by Candi Staton and "You Got The Love" became a huge international club in 1986.

More than 20 years later the talented Flo Welch and Company decided to record a slightly retitled "You've Got The Love" version of this classic as a bonus track for their 2009 debut album LUNGS.

"As a kid, going to clubs and raves, this song made me feel love. At 2008's Bestival we were top of the bill on that stage, so we were thinking of an amazing cover we could do, and I thought of Candy Staton. Even in rehearsals, playing it was just the most euphoric feeling. Then playing it live and seeing everyone's arms in the air, and the faces – it was the best feeling ever! I was dressed as a genie sea-monster, and I remember looking at my guitarist as we played the first chords, and then there was the reaction and it was like tearing ourselves open and just exploding on the crowd, and then they all did it back. It's a feeling you couldn't express. I'm really excited that now in our live shows I'm going to be playing one of my favourite songs ever, loads." - Florence Welch

After the XX supported Florence on her sold-out UK tour, a plan was hatched for them to remix "You've Got The Love". And while she is known for her over-the-top pop moments, the XX's quiet and whispery approach meant this was always going to be an exciting prospect. The result? Well, the reaction speaks for itself. Within hours of its appearance, it became the most popular track on the internet. On the airwaves, DJs of all over the world have heralded it their remix of the year. And justifiably so. If you had to pick a track that's captured the genre-splicing sound of rave in 201009, it's this. Taking elements of classic 2-step garage, UK funky, and bass-line, with the famous Candi Staton lyrics being mumbled by the male-female duo of the XX, against Florence's high-pitched parts, this truly is a remarkable piece of music.

Most remixes probably don't deserve their own videos, but this clip, which was made just by editing the clip for Florence + the Machine's original cut of "You've got the Love", its the xx's dubby remf ix of the track so well that it's certainly justified in this instance. Though, to be fair, footage of Florence doing her whole diva thing on a sequined moon probably goes well with just about everything.

8
On Melancholy Hill - GORILLAZ

'On Melancholy Hill' is a fine example of a stress-relieving, carefree, relaxation-session song. After the dubious 'Stylo', this song comes up trumps and reminds us of how brilliant the Gorillaz are with a tune.

Laid-back synths, a slight buzzing sound, spongy drums, and a pretty electric string riff that can't help but bring a smile to your face and give you a wave of goose-bumps are all the Gorillaz provide on this track, but what a track it is... Stuart's vocals appear muffled and sleepy, but have just enough charisma to come across as charming, backed up with lyrics like "You are my medicine, when you're close to me", and "Does anybody know, if we're looking out on the day of another dream?", that’s when the true beauty of the melody, production and lyrics beams up.

This is a hazy pop gem with the sugary 80s sparkle of Strawberry Switchblade or early Lightning Seeds.

Damon Albarn get away with conducting a project as sprawling, daring, innovative, surprising, muddled and magnificent as Gorillaz' third album Plastic Beach: not just one of the best records of 2010, but a release to stand alongside the greatest Albarn’s ever been involved with and a new benchmark for collaborative music as a whole. The scope and depth of Plastic Beach is staggering. For anyone frustrated that Blur never quite managed their White Album, look no further.

7
Airplanes - LOCAL NATIVES

Local Natives (formerly known as Cavil At Rest) are an LA band formed out of high school by Taylor Rice (vocals/guitar), Kelcey Ayer (vocals/keys/percussion), and Ryan Hahn (guitar/vocals), who then added Andy Hamm on bass and Matt Frazier on drums. Their debut, Gorilla Manor, named after the house in which they lived together, was released in late 2009/early 2010 (depending on where you live.) Interestingly, Local Natives were signed by a UK label before a US label, but have made up for it in the States this year, the highlight coming at SXSW in Austin, Texas through March where they played a whopping 9 shows in 3 days.

Airplanes was released as the third single of Gorilla Manor. It begins with some piano noodling, before the vocals soar atop the steady percussive drum beat. Everything about the chorus here is perfect; each time I hear “I want you back,” I just get this chill; it’s the execution of the perfect song.

This song is actually about keyboardist Kelcey's grandfather. He died when Kelcey was two years old, so he only knew him through stories that his father told. And I think it's very funny because people (including me) think it's a romantic song about a girl.

Local Natives have spent a great deal of time honing their craftsmanship, and Gorilla Manor is the ultimate reward for listeners and the band alike. You’ll find that the differentiation and light changes will keep you interested all the way until the end, allowing you to finally spend time with a solid record you’ll want to listen to time and time again.

6
Rill Rill - SLEIGH BELLS

From savage metal and school teaching to dance-pop and online hype, the Brooklyn pairing's journey has been winding.
They met in a New York restaurant; Derek serving the food, Alexis dining with her mother.

"We struck up a conversation," says Sleigh Bells lead singer Alexis Krauss. "I was teaching at the time so I wasn't involved in music but my mum was like, 'Oh, Alexis is a singer'. So we exchanged emails and we got together later that week."

This was summer 2008, when dance-pop twosome Sleigh Bells was born. So-called because "everything else is taken".

Derek (guitars and beats), who'd moved from Florida a few months previously, followed up their meeting by messaging Krauss. They hooked up.

Shortly after he quit his table waiting job, she quit teaching 10-year-olds at a school in the Bronx, New York, so the pair could take things seriously.

Treats, their debut album is a thrill ride: It's aggressive but not macho and smart without losing its sense of fun. Most of all, it's somehow both an aural assault and a piece of pop candy, albeit one in a overblown wrapper. In Sleigh Bells, Derek Miller is responsible for the excessively compressed beats and abrupt guitars, while singer Alexis Krauss provides a melodic counterpoint, with a sweetness that can turn fierce.

“Rill Rill” recontextualizes a Funkadelic hook into a summertime jam for high school romances. It's a sassy, country-tinged guitar song that finds Krauss singing about “wondering what your boyfriend thinks about your braces”. It won’t be Sleigh Bells’ signature song, and rightly so – it’s the sonic mayhem that’ll get them noticed. But like Crystal Castles before them, it suggests they’ve got content beyond the chaos.

Treats is just a whole goddamn lot of fun to listen to. It’s a supremely raw and visceral pop masterwork, one appropriate to rocking out with headphones on, windows-down bumping on car stereos, four-A.M. warehouse dance parties and countless other summer moments that’ll soon have soundtracks courtesy of Sleigh Bells.

5

All I Want - LCD SOUNDSYSTEM

Murphy delighted in listing his inspirations and influences on the first LCD album, and elements of Bowie, Eno and Reed had clearly been folded into LCD’s own style on Sound of Silver. Here, however, the influences aren’t so much discernible as obvious to the point of distraction.

"I kept oscillating back and forth between this John Cale version and this country version I had in my head. The song nearly killed me for two-and-a-half weeks, but I couldn't get my head around it. I hated it, then fell back in love with it. - James Murphy

All I Want is a passable power ballad containing some great waspish one-liners, but first you have to get past how much the guitar part sounds like the distinctive sustain created by Robert Fripp for Bowie’s “Heroes”. Joined by another aping the effect-slathered tones of Eno’s St Elmo’s Fire, these strong aural borrowings overpower everything else. It’s as if Murphy took those two records as a starting point for his own composition, then forgot to go anywhere.

4
The High Road - BROKEN BELLS

Part Kanye West, part Brian Eno, producer-musician Brian Burton — a.k.a. Danger Mouse — has defined himself with his excellent taste in brilliant misfits. His biggest smash was Gnarls Barkley, with whom he turned oddball former Dirty South rapper Cee-Lo into a falsetto swinging soulman on the sublime "Crazy," triggering moving karaoke performances worldwide. He's helped blues-rock freaks the Black Keys find their groove; helped midcareer weirdo Beck locate his mojo on 2008's Modern Guilt; even molded his mash-up sensibility to the arty David Lynch soundtrack project Dark Night of the Soul.

His latest one-off, Broken Bells, could be his biggest stretch yet: It pairs him with career introvert James Mercer, the sublimely melodic singer-songwriter of the Shins. The two have a little history — one track together on Dark Night — but Mercer might seem an odd match for the producer whose first big idea was combining the Beatles with Jay-Z, and whose trademark move is melding hip-hop-rooted samples and beats with vintage psychedelia.
It turns out the two pop-science geeks are a perfect match. Danger Mouse pushes Mercer's gorgeous, existential tunecraft outward with Day-Glo dynamics.

The High Road is a wonderfully crafted song and Mercer makes the song complete with his lyrics that rightfully fit the vibe. The song juxtaposes an uplifting melodic chorus with a depressing lyric about not knowing if the dead can talk, or even not knowing if you're alive. The duo likes it that way. "I gravitate towards darker, minor sounds. That's where I feel comfortable," Burton told The London Times. "The High Road is a lament," Mercer added. "Is this person happy? I'm in hell now. Sometimes you just repeat it over in your head — I'm screwed, I'm screwed, I'm screwed."

3
Zebra - BEACH HOUSE

Beach House has been steadily making a name for itself with its narcotic dream pop, and “Zebra,” the leadoff track to the band's Sub Pop debut Teen Dream, finds the Baltimore duo setting their ambitions ever higher. But despite the track’s thicker arrangements and quicker pace, the band retains its praise-worthy knack for winning melodies and minimalist arrangements. The band's ode to the “black and white horse” is a shimmering display of slow, hand-plucked guitar and woozy vintage organs, anchored by lead singer Victoria Legrand’s smoky and intoxicating vocals.

“Zebra” grows and grows within the space it is given, and though we are not talking about the epic scale of, say, The Arcade Fire, they are not too far off either. Legrand and Alex Scally create a sound that is much bigger than the two-piece that they are, helped by the fact that Legrand can carry a song on her own with her powerful voice.

Beach House is clearly ready to step out from the shadows and play timeless music intended for dreamers and romantics, the kind of dreamers and romatics that you would find in a Staten Island's Music School Program. These kids are great!!

2
Midnight Directives - OWEN PALLETT

After extensive touring and arranging string-type things for Beirut, Pet Shop Boys, and Arcade Fire, Owen Pallett is back with his long-in-the-works LP, Heartland. The 45-minute album features the Czech Symphony along with Arcade Fire drummer Jeremy Gara.Heartland is the first of Pallett's records to be released under his own name, rather than his recording moniker of Final Fantasy. This was out of concern of creating confusion with the Final Fantasy video games in Japan and to avoid infringing on any trademarks.

Talking about the album in a press release, Pallett said, "The songs themselves form a narrative concerning a farmer named Lewis and the fictional world of Spectrum. The songs are one-sided dialogues with Lewis, a young, ultra-violent farmer, speaking to his creator".

I appreciate Pallett’s sci-fi meta-fiction conceit, but at least early on, I find it difficult to pay much attention to his lyrical games when his arrangements are so dazzling on a purely musical level.

“Midnight Directives” is an agile, flamboyant tune that builds from a hum to a symphonic sweep without losing an essential lightness. Pallett is working with a broad palette, but he’s a deliberate, decisive arranger, and he employs sound in a gestural manner that reminds me of the way great cartoonists imply a lot of information in simple, well-placed lines. Even without the high concept, this is incredibly ambitious pop music that deftly avoids the typical traps of symphonic indie music.

This is a brilliant composition, the sort of piece that is urgent in tone, yet reveals itself upon repeated listening. The melody swoops and soars, but its a rather chilly sort of bombast — it’s a drama of intense thought, not physicality. I find myself often rewinding and going back over that final climax in the vocal section, just before the instrumental resolution: “For a man can be bought, and a man can be sold / and the price of a hundred thousand unwatered souls…” In context, that bit sounds defiant, thrilling, and terrifying all at once.

Coming up... LA NUMERO UNO of the First Half of 2010!!

THE TOP 50 SONGS OF 2010 (So Far) - PART 2

2010-07-15T22:50:00.000-07:00

20
Need You Now - LADY ANTEBELLUM

In the US, Nashville country-rock trio Lady Antebellum have become monstrously big with indecent haste. This second album shifted well over a million in its first month and is still flying. It’s up there with Grammy-magnets like Beyoncé and Gaga.

Need You Now is a huge hoary pop seduction, with a chorus it’d take a heart of stone to resist. Immediately, it announces itself as power-anthem paradise, evoking such guilty-pleasure godhead as Alone by Heart or I Drove All Night by Roy Orbison/Cyndi Lauper.

It's maybe the most romantic song ever written about a drunken booty call. Singing about the draw of an old beau on a lonely night, singer Hillary Scott is emotional but not too dramatic: a Carrie Bradshaw type, making do with diminished expectations. Answering her, Charles Kelley sounds more old-fashioned. He croaks, he growls, he spits out the crow he's eating.

You’ll briefly, secretly love it with a passion for about three weeks before TV talent-show kids start devaluing it. That is one belting chorus. “It’s a quarter after one, I’m a little drunk but I need you now...”

Been there, done that...

19
It Kills Me - MELANIE FIONA

Melanie Fiona Hallim is a Canadian recording artist from Toronto, Ontario. She was born to Guyanese immigrant parents (mixed with black, Indian, and Portuguese ethnicities) and grew up in the inner city of Toronto. Living in a music filled household, Fiona says she always knew music was her passion. Her father was a guitarist in a band and would allow her to sit on the stage when she was younger as he practiced, and remembers her mother playing music at home; everything from The Ronettes to Whitney Houston.

Her debut album The Bridge was released in the summer of 2009. "It Kills Me", became her breakout song on the Billboard Hot 100 where it cracked the Top 50, along with topping the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. The song earned Fiona a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. The Bridge also earned her a NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding New Artist.

18
Bad Romance - LADY GAGA

Lady GaGa's songs do not exist to please you, why should they? You have to look after yourself when you enter Lady GaGa's world, and if you do not, you may find yourself impaled on a spike. The spike could be made of latex or rubber or stainless steel or shiny plastic or even human hair, but it will hurt like hell and the inevitable pool of blood will make a mess.

Lady GaGa does not appreciate mess, unless it has been made by Lady GaGa.

The amazing thing is that even though all of the above is true, there's still a bleeding, fragile beating heart at the core of this song which anyone can relate to. A song which is about a failing, obsessional kind of passion for someone who is clearly bad news. And it's a passion which is strong enough to reduce GaGa to gibbering nonsense syllables, and speaking in tongues (assuming French counts, of course). These are the best bits of the song, naturally:

"ra ra ah ha ha, roma roma mah..."

"Bad Romance" was the moment where the music didn't just live up to the (self-inflated) hype, but surpassed it. The track is epic in construction-- by the time she gets to the bridge, more than three minutes in, the realization that there are hooks yet to come is thrilling. It helps that RedOne's production matches the songwriting's torrential drama; the churning, earth-shifting low-frequency synths are a programmatic reflection of the singer's unsteady, perhaps unwise, infatuation. But it's Gaga's performance, the wholly unapologetic fools-rush-in carnal energy, that commitment to emotional bravery in a context of increasingly twee chart pop, that makes this song feel so necessary.

Bad Romance, which features cheesy rave synths, the now typically Gaga stomping beat and a controversy-lite lyric (“I want your ugly, I want your disease”). Melodically, it recalls Black Celebration-era Depeche Mode and keeps up Gaga’s habit of referencing herself in her songs. Admittedly, Warhol would have loved it.

17
Excuses - THE MORNING BENDERS

In a smart bicoastal alliance, the Morning Benders — a band from Berkeley, Calif. — enlisted Christopher Taylor from Grizzly Bear to produce its second studio album, “Big Echo”, along with Chris Chu, the band’s leader. Their shared fondness for California pop gloss with experimental underpinnings, from Brian Wilson and psychedelia to Fleetwood Mac, has transformed a straightforward, 1960s-loving, folk-rock and Merseybeat band into one whose songs exult in texture. Now Mr. Chu’s voice is awash in vocal harmonies, electric and acoustic guitars, exotic keyboards and ripples of reverb. Sometimes lush, sometimes turbulent, the arrangements make Mr. Chu’s melodies more luminous while they open up mysterious spaces behind lyrics that ponder continuity and collapse. It’s a splendid transformation — and now the band has moved to New York City.

In this song, Christopher Chu's warbly croon floats along with a kind of lazy charm, and later an a cappella break accentuates a distinct 1950s doo-wop influence.

"Excuses" possesses a simple sweetness, proving you don't have to be "difficult" to sound so gloriously complicated.

16
One Life Stand - HOT CHIP

The title track of HOT CHIP fourth's LP is an otherworldly fusion of infectious tropicalia and synth drone, and the kick/snare drumbeat is the extra push that makes it a toe-tapper.

The nerdy/sexy/sweet electropop lads open ONE LIFE STAND the way Basement Jaxx might, spare bass and synth portending some sort of explosion, but then it turns to slick dance rock territory, the disco guitar, Joe Goddard’s molasses-coated backing vocal, etc. The hook is sweet, because Hot Chip’s got a way of mixing their booty shaking with genuine pathos. Alexis sings “I only want to be your one life stand / tell me do you stand by your man.” It’s a bit heavy for a club-floor come-on, but then Taylor’s already spent an album sounding the warning, and another telling you he’s ready for the floor.

15
Odessa - CARIBOU

Dan Snaith is a Canadian electronic musician who records under the name of Caribou. This is the opening track and first single from his 2010 album, Swim, the follow-up to his 2008 Polaris Music Prize record, Andorra.

ODESSA's main reference point is the icy geek disco of Hot Chip, Junior Boys, and Erlend Øye. Dan Snaith tricks out the sound with ESG-style sound bombs, a little chicken-scratch guitar, clanging polyrhythms playing off a globular bassline, and eventually, a piano cribbed from an early-90s house track that feels right at home. Snaith works with restraint, riding the beat for all its worth and keeping his affect more or less in check.

Like Hot Chip, Caribou’s new disco bent doesn’t focus on that hot club ecstasy so much as a weird, strangely melancholy sensuality. Added to the video – a woman stumbling and driving through fog, smoke, and ghostly, disconnected memories, “Odessa” tells a strange, captivating story of love, loss, and escape. And it works like a charm.

14
Giving Up The Gun - VAMPIRE WEEKEND

"I got the idea for the song from a book my dad gave me called Giving Up The Gun. It's a history book about the time when Japan expelled all the foreigners from the country, closed off all trade and stopped using guns and reverted back to the sword. It seems unimaginable now that humanity could willingly go back to an older technology. It got me thinking about whether you could give up all the things that you have and go back to a simpler way of life."

Frontman Ezra Koenig

13
Afraid Of Everything - THE NATIONAL FT. SUFJAN STEVENS

Brooklyn’s The National are the absolute antithesis of an overnight success. Together for over a decade, the group’s slow ascent to international acclaim has been emotional. While several critics have clicked with albums of swollen heart and bruised soul, a handful have mistaken deliberate, delectable languor for dismissible listlessness. But those who’ve embraced Matt Berninger’s baritone, and subsequently each fascinating detail that trails in its wake, have discovered a band for life – for love and loss, euphoric highs and exhausting lows. For everything, always.

"Afraid of Everyone" is anxiety and paranoia and not knowing how to deal with it. It's desperately wanting to defend yourself and your family from the chaotic forces of evil, and you don't even know what they are, or who's right or who's wrong and what to believe.

Detroit singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens handles harmonies on this track.

"Sufjan came in one day when we were struggling with 'Afraid Of Everyone' – that song was very difficult to make happen – and he just started playing the harmonium and singing along with it. He made up this little melody and he layered it four times – that gave the song a whole different dimension. That was his contribution."

Guitarist Aaron Desner

12
Little Lion Man - MUMFORD AND SONS

Folky music doesn’t stay quiet in the hands of Mumford & Sons, an english band that is part of the latest iteration of trad-rock from Britain. They have rediscovered the modal melodies and unflinching lyrics of traditional songs as foundations for their own. Marcus Mumford, the band’s songwriter and lead singer, merges those folk roots with the often glum but upbeat rock of Dave Matthews, showing a similar grain in his voice.

Together, Mumford & Sons — the four band members are not related — reach back to the way British families once harmonized closely on traditional songs. Their tunes echo sea chanteys, Celtic ballads, and jigs and reels, while also reaching across the Atlantic for bluegrass. They play mostly acoustic instruments, with plenty of guitar strumming and banjo picking. Yet their dynamics aim for settings much bigger than porches or parlors; the songs are as volatile as grunge.

Mr. Mumford sings about soul-searching, pondering troubles that intertwine the romantic, the spiritual and the existential. He’s not exactly easygoing; in the songs on this album every doubt is a chasm, every breakup a disaster.

The rousing chorus of “Little Lion Man” admits, “It was not your fault but mine,” with a tune as jovial as a pub singalong. For all the torments and uncertainties, Mumford sings about on this album, there’s the momentum of a hoedown to carry him through.

Personally I’ve long enjoyed the song, but felt much more moved by the video . A rougher, more emotional performance is conveyed in the clip than comes across in the song itself. There is a sense of urgency that adds depth that wasn’t recognizable prior.

THE TOP 50 SONGS OF 2010 (So Far) - PART 1

2010-07-10T12:16:00.000-07:00

50
Here Lies Love - FATBOY SLIM & DAVID BYRNE FT. FLORENCE WELCH

Included in the seft titled concept album by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, about the life of the former First Lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos, Here Lies Love is the prologue to the Imelda tale, as sung by Florence Welch, singer of Florence and The Machine.

This song acts as a prologue and is sung from Imelda’s point of view in a style reminiscent of mid-to-late-’70s club music. She’s whooping it up at a disco, and at the same time she’s looking back on her life, her achievements, her sacrifices and her childhood. She’s also thinking ahead, imagining her legacy, what it might be.

“Here Lies Love” is nothing like Welch has recorded thus far; a kind of swelling, closing credits theme song mashed in between modern disco beats and timeless, romantic strings.

49
Hollywood - MARINA AND THE DIAMONDS

The quirky and flamboyant Marina Diamandis is gaining a following for her inventive songwriting, theatrical stage shows and dazzling style. If a young Liza Minnelli was starring in a Broadway musical telling Tori Amos's life story, it might sound like this.

In her teens, she auditioned for girl bands and cruise liners, dropping in and out of university to fund her ambitions with student loans.

Frustrated by failure, the Welsh-Greek chanteuse realised she needed to strike out on her own. So she taught herself piano and began writing spiky, memorable pop songs under the stage name Marina and the Diamonds.

Fearless, ambitious and stylish, her debut album The Family Jewels is a compelling pop confessional. Comparisons to Kate Bush and Siouxsie Sioux have been plentiful - but, on tracks like Shampain, she also channels the harmonic dazzle of Abba.

On HOLLYWOOD she sings about who she was: "Hollywood infected my brain and I really valued the wrong things in life, but I changed dramatically. This obsession with celebrity culture is really unhealthy. I don't want to live my life like that, and I don't want to be a typical pop star".

48
I Feel Better - HOT CHIP

Boybands, screaming fans, a lazer-breathing Christ-like figure and a floating head, The perfect formula for what I consider one of the best and most funniest videos of this year (so far).

Hot Chip - I Feel Better

Hot Chip MySpace Music Videos

47
Faithfully - GLEE CAST

What a great way to end this (long) first season. The Glee kids went back to their original JOURNEY inspiration and we saw Rachel and Finn declaring their teenage love FAITHFULLY. Somehow it felt like Danny singing to Sandy and we all Gleeks come together for this finale. Can't wait for Season Dos!!!

46
My Baby Left Me - ROX

Roxanne Tataei is a half Iranian, half Jamaican Londoner who makes nourishing soul music and counts Lauryn Hill and Sade as her biggest inspirations.

Her musical training came at church as a child before she enrolled in the Brit performing art school, the former stomping ground of Leona Lewis, Adele, Kate Nash and Amy Winehouse. With a powerful, jazzy voice, she is likely to get this year's Amy comparisons.

MY BABY LEFT ME was produced by Al Shux, the man behind Jay-Z’s and Alicia Keys’ number one hit “Empire State of Mind". Rox seems mainly interested in turning out a memorable pop tune, and that is exactly what this is.

45
Tightrope - JANELLE MONAE FT. BIG BOI

This James Brown-style funk workout by the futuristic R&B showstopper Janelle Monáe was the first single taken from her second album, The ArchAndroid. Monae's voice is a tough, confident rat-tat-tat, more Katharine Hepburn than Erykah Badu. On the verses, she tosses out tight, controlled couplets with the sort of speedy idiosyncrasy that mentor Big Boi must appreciate. But when the chorus hits, she switches up into a classic soul-singer wail, the type of immediate retro yowl that keeps Sharon Jones in fancy shoes. And after Big Boi struts on in and rhymes "NASDAQ" with "ass crack", she ups the ante, rhyming "alligators" with "rattlesnakers," "another flavor," and "Terminator." It's just a star performance all around, and god knows we need those lately.

44
Hard - RIHANNA FT. JEEZY

43
The Pursuit of Happiness - KID CUDI FT. MGMT & RATATAT

This song features the New York based dance punk act MGMT and was produced and co-written by New York electro duo Ratatat.

"It was a dream come true, and I was excited to be that artist to bring them together and really do it in the proper way." "THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS is the epitome of what you would imagine a Ratatat-engineered Kid Cudi song would sound like. And these songs came about fairly quickly – we went in the studio for hours and hours and hours trying to just do this one song and figure out a first verse, I wrote it down really quickly, and that was the whole method behind the entire album, just movin' off of that creative spark right away."

42
Watching You - INSTRA:MENTAL

Here is a beautiful piece of music that I had to share with all of you. Instra:mental has really dug themselves into a nice little sub-genre in the past few years with their minimal approach to drum and bass music. Al Bleek and Kid Drama are the highly acclaimed duo that have been testing the boundaries of drum and bass with a unique style that is unrestriced by tempo.

This is a stunning tune, built more for home listening and journeys than the club. Haunting and emotional, this is wonderful music.... love it!

41
Hey Soul Sister - TRAIN

This is 2010's best selling digital with 3.4 million, making it the only tune to shift more than 3 million this year. What a great come back for this band that gave us the unforgettable DROPS OF JUPITER back in 2001.

40
Halcyon - DELPHIC

Indie guitars and euphoric electronica have rarely gone together well, but this Manchester group make them a natural fit. Hypnotic songs are driven by pulsating beats as frontman James Cook sings infectious hooks. Their motto is: "The guitar is dead, long live the guitar."

This is what would have happened if New Order embraced ambient techno, or Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant had spent his time at raves. Great tune!!

39
Cinnamon - STONE TEMPLE PILOTS

STP is back!! And even when this song hasn't be released as a single yet, it's the best tune of the new Stone Temple Pilots self titled/come back album.
CINNAMON it's psychedelic, man. It's fun, poppy, light-hearted, totally grooving - the flipside to STP that they don't often show people.

Stone Temple Pilots, the album marked the first time that Dean DeLeo and his bassist
brother Robert had written together since Army of Anyone's self-titled album in 2006.

Dean explained:

"We were working on the song, and during a dinner break my brother Robert grabbed a Tele and asked Eric (Kretz, drummer) to lay down a single beat, and in a matter of minutes they had the song tracked. It's pretty much my brother's song. Even though I play the solo on the record, Robert wrote it. The whole thing is very joyous."

38
She Said - PLAN B

This finger-snapping tune is the second single from The Defamation of Strickland Banks, the sophomore album from British singer/songwriter and rapper Ben Drew, who records under the name of Plan B.

Once upon a time, Plan B was a startling proposition, a sweary UK rapper with a penetrating stare, dragging an acoustic guitar behind him. That's right, an acoustic guitar. Here's this tough kid with tough rhymes and street-hardened scowl standing on stage with an instrument more commonly associated with weedy singer-songwriters and their endless tales of slightly-disappointing love, basically the essence of SHE SAID.

37
Nothin' On You - B.O.B. FT. BRUNO MARS

B.o.B., who is known to his friends and family as Bobby Ray Simmons or Bobby Ray, is a rapper and producer from Atlanta Georgia. After signing to Atlantic Records through Jonsin's Rebel Rock on October 3, 2006, he recorded several mixtapes and EP's before the release of his debut album B.o.B presents "The Adventures of Bobby Ray" in 2010.

This melodic track that was originally slated for rapper Lupe Fiasco is the first full single release from his debut album and it features the vocals of R&B singer Bruno Mars.

Lyrically on this smooth number, the singer is assuring his girl that she has nothing to fear from other women as they've got "Nothing on You".

"I'm still young, but in the song I'm reflecting on my younger days when I was all about chasing girls. I was a hopeless romantic and made a lot of stupid decisions. It's about those days. I'm compiling my observations of myself and putting them on a record. I feel like it was a happy marriage between the lyrics that Bruno sang and what I'm doing because he pretty much summed it up and I just had to elaborate on it in my way. I switched up my vocal inflection. It's different; a lot of B.o.B. fans didn't notice it was me on first listen."

Here's some cool trivia for you:

B.o.B. is the first American act whose name is a palindrome to top the Hot 100. The other two who did so prior to the Atlanta rapper were both Scandinavian groups. They were ABBA, who reigned with "Dancing Queen" in 1977, and A-Ha, who led with "Take On Me" in 1985.

36
Rude Boy - RIHANNA

This was released as the third single from Rihanna's Rated R. "Rude Boy" features Rihanna dancing and singing in front of a green screen, with a rainbow of Jamaican-flag-inspired colors animated in during post-production. According to MTV News, Rihanna claims the vid was inpsired by the Pop Art movement, and there's definitely some Keith Haring homage in the clip.

But there seems to be some other inspiration at work here, as well. That of M.I.A.'s vibrant video for "Boyz."

The colorful, purposely lo-fi animation, the color palette. Nothing particularly wrong with it; heaven knows there's a hundred videos of dudes playing guitar in the desert.

No less an authority on M.I.A. than Diplo has noted the similarity in this tweet: "anyway.. riri is lookin soo damn hawt in this video but its super boyz boyz boyz #howmaydere ? yahmsayin?"

35
Telephone - LADY GAGA FT. BEYONCE

Video of the year (so far)?

When was the last time a pop video became a global talking point? Lady GaGa’s all-singing, all-dancing, lesbian-prison-sex and mass-murder promo for Telephone has stirred up the kind of pop sensation not seen for a decade or more. It has featured on television news bulletins and the front pages of newspapers, as well as predictably tearing through the internet, breaking records on YouTube, trending on Twitter and inspiring frame-by-frame analysis and vigorous pro and anti blog commentary.

Can a video really tell us about the times we live in? If anything, GaGa’s video seems to refer back to the excesses of the Eighties, the supposed golden age of the music video, when bigger was better, and decadence and transgression were the standard currency of pop.

In a move boldly contrary to the credit-crunch spirit of the modern music business (where the average pop video budget has fallen to under £10,000), GaGa’s big production is on its way to becoming one of the most watched videos of all time, clocking up 17 million views in its first four days, and that’s not counting its massive television audience. It propelled her song to the top of charts around the world on downloads alone.

This, after all, is how videos began: as a promotional tool. The Beatles were among the pioneers of the genre, when they realised they could send clips to US television shows rather than cross the Atlantic in person. In 1965, they shot 10 black-and-white promos in one day at Twickenham film studios. But it was with their avante-garde, backwards film for Strawberry Fields Forever in 1967 that something new was born, something more than just an advertising tool, effectively a visual extension of the song itself.

MTV was launched in 1981 to exploit the new medium. Then came Michael Jackson and Madonna, visually intuitive pop stars for whom video was the sharp point of their attack on global consciousness. More than any artist before or since, video defined them.

If necessity has been the mother of video invention, Lady GaGa threatens to turn back the clock to an era when nothing succeeded like excess. I don’t expect it to start a new video budget arms race, however, partly because there isn’t another pop star today who could pull this kind of thing off.

With the musicality and showmanship of Michael Jackson and the powerful sexuality and provocative instincts of Madonna, Lady GaGa might just turn out to be the ultimate video queen.

34
Under The Sheets (Jakwob Remix) - ELLIE GOULDING

Hands down, The best remix that I've listened in the last 6 months!

Singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding came out on top of the BBC Sound of 2010 list, which showcases the best rising music stars for the coming year.

Born in Hereford, the 22-year-old's "folktronica" sound mixes a traditional acoustic approach with a more cutting-edge electronic style.

Ellie Goulding was discovered at a talent contest in her home town of Kington, Herefordshire, and began as a traditional acoustic singer-songwriter.

But while studying drama at university in Canterbury, Kent, she hooked up with dance producers Frankmusik - who appeared on the Sound of 2009 list - and Starsmith, and the results soon gained a following on MySpace.

Goulding has also received the Brit Awards' Critics' Choice prize and said she was "absolutely honoured" to be at the top of the Sound of 2010 list.

"I didn't expect to get anywhere a few years ago," she said. "I didn't even expect to have a record deal, let alone be put in such a prestigious thing so I'm very happy. I think the list this year is great and I really believe in a lot of the acts."

As far back as the summer, people were touting her as the next big name. She looks good, she's got a good story and her songs are great - haunting, ethereal, but somehow catchy, like Cocteau Twins go pop, or something.

33
Everlasting Light - THE BLACK KEYS

The Black Keys — singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney on drums — are a two-man combo with a big-band mind. On Brothers, their first studio album after a year of offshoot affairs (Auerbach's solo album, Keep It Hid; Carney's side group, Drummer; a hip-hop project, BlakRoc), the Keys make a thick, dirty racket, overdubbed but never overstuffed. "Everlasting Light" has hive-of-bees distortion, corn-pone harmonies and an Auerbach falsetto that suggests Prince singing through a mummy's gauze. This tune dips, drives, and plunges, a series of pelvic thrusts under a fuzzy falsetto. It doesn't speed up, it doesn't slow down; it's confident (charmingly cocky?) enough to persist at a medium pace, well aware that forcing it never does the job.

32
Pass Out - TINNIE TEMPAH FT. LABRINTH

Tinie Tempah's real name is Patrick Chukwuem Okogwu Jr. But by the age of 13, he had invented his stage name.
He explained to The Independent: "I looked up 'anger' in the thesaurus and I was starring at 'temper.' I thought, 'this is a little bit aggressive'. I didn't want to scare anyone off. So I added Tinie. By playtime, Tinie Tempah was born."

This debut single was co-written by the London MC and producer Labyrinth.

"We tried out so many different things by going in the studio and having fun. It wasn't like we just put a drum & bass ending on it and then thought, done! We tried out so many things, guitars, reggae bass; we were having so much fun. That track at least took 24 full hours to put together. Me and Labyrinth both tired, with Red Bulls in hand, were like this track is sick. Labyrinth had two of his stylists in the studio and by the time the track was done they were singing the bass rhythm and the chorus. The drum & bass mix up was a trialled and tested method. Once we put it in there everyone went crazy in the studio and that's why we thought we would keep it there."

The perfect tune to have fun, dance (for a little bit), get drunk and PASS OUT!

31
Born Free - M.I.A.

If you thing Gaga makes the most controversial videos, wait 'til you watch this video.

She might not have many nice things to say about Lady Gaga lately, but M.I.A. freely admits that her controversial "Born Free" video took more than a little inspiration from Gaga. Like, way more than a little.

"With our video, we were really copying 'Telephone,' " M.I.A. told the New York Times Magazine in a feature set to run on Sunday (May 30). "Both our videos are road movies. We kill people, and they kill people. They start out in a prison, and we start out in a squat, hunting people down."

But the (sorta) pleasantries end there, as M.I.A. went on to land another jab against Gaga. "All I'll say is, it's upsetting when babies say 'ga-ga' now," the British/Sri Lankan artist told the magazine. "It used to be innocent. Now, they're calling her name."

She said she gets annoyed when LG is praised for her originality — saying she mostly borrows from ABBA — and positively livid when her rival is compared to Madonna.

"You can't really say that Gaga is culturally a change," she said. "Madonna was truly unique."

Of course, in the same feature, M.I.A.'s pal — and "Born Free" director — Romain Gavras gets far nastier, joking to the Times' Lynn Hirschberg that "Madonna was pretty. ... Pop stars should be pretty."

M.I.A. explained that she and Gavras had originally intended to shoot the "Born Free" clip on the U.S.-Mexican border, but ultimately had to move production to Los Angeles because, as she put it, "Interscope won." And she told Hirschberg that she purposely avoided showing the completed video to the folks at the label (to which both she and Gaga are signed) because "the Interscope lawyers will want to send [it] to a censorship board." (Of course, Interscope head Jimmy Iovine told the Times that not only did he see the video, but that it "was more than fine with me. ... I didn't even have a blink.")

Building on that concept, M.I.A. said she's planning a stage show based entirely on censorship, with the audience's every move monitored and recorded, and individuals singled out and asked to leave if they violate certain rules.

"I want to be like the government," she said. "It could be interesting."

30
The Only Exception - PARAMORE

Paramore, who usually write and record darker material, mainly of the alternative and emo genre, had, musically, gone in a different direction with "The Only Exception"

The song's lyrics pertain to the protagonist not believing that love exists and trying to live without it, mainly to avoid rejection, but eventually realizing that it does.

"The Only Exception" features singer Hayley Williams forging a connection instead of simply spitting out her feelings, while the band locks in at a sympathetic simmer behind her.

Falling in love with someone is hard, we have doubts, we rethink ourselves, we make up excuses. But then we find that exception, that one person who makes it all worth it. The one that is finally worth the risk.

Not only I know it, I feel it... You are the only exception...

29
World Sick - BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE

This tune was the first single to be leaked for their "Forgiveness Rock Record" released on May 4th. I can’t say anything bad about Broken Social Scene they are without a doubt the heart and pride of Canadian indie music. It’s a great rock song, not too heavy on the guitar heavy on the drums and just the right amount of everything. An epic tune.

28
My Boys - TAKEN BY TREES

This is “Young Folks”/ex-Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman's (aka Taken By Trees) gender-specific take on the Number 1 Song of 2009, Animal Collective's “My Girls”.

"My Boys," sticks with the repetition of the original but this time it sounds like hand claps and bongo drums. The insistent bass in the original becomes a synth key here, and the whole thing suggest tropicalia.

THIS ONE IS DEDICATED TO MY BOYS KEVIN AND ED!!

"I don't mean to seem like I
Care about material things,
Like a social status,
I just want
Four walls and adobe slats
For my boys..."

27
Good Intentions Paving Company - JOANNA NEWSOM

"I regret how I said to you, 'Honey, just open your heart,' when I've got trouble even opening a honey jar," she twists, the piano and organ that have been pulsing and pealing behind her relenting to a playful banjo-and-guitar gait. She teases her own nervous disposition, segues "Auld Lang Syne" into "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours", and compares her love-stricken state of mind to a fistfight with the fog.

Actually, love takes the other lead here. As Newsom, the passenger, and her new partner, the driver, head toward a gig through what seems to be a treacherous mountain pass, she confesses that she's committing: "I fell for you, honey, easy as falling asleep," she sings when she knows they're safe, her voice more tempered and casual than it's often been. She admits she's tried to control her heart, describing the limbo-- to love, or to run-- with a zest for syllables worthy of a backpacker rapper and a Rickie Lee Jones-like knack for shaping bits of verses into little hooks. The song keeps shifting, and each piano line pulls her like rope to a simple romantic conclusion: "I only want for you to pull over, and hold me, till I can't remember my own name."

This is a rare thing, then-- an unapologetic love song that feels, you know, new.

26
Stylo - GORILLAZ FT. BOBBY WOMACK AND MOS DEF.

This was the first single from animated quartet Gorillaz's third studio album, Plastic Beach. The song features R&B singer Bobby Womack crooning the chorus, as well as rapper Mos Def, who joined Gorillaz as an animated character named "Sun Moon Stars" on the album.

Womack told Q magazine March 2010 that he gave the band a scare during the recording of this song. He said:

"I'm diabetic, and after an hour I could feel myself passing out. Last thing I remember is thinking, Lord, don't let this happen to me. They walked me to the couch and gave me a banana. In two or three minutes I woke up and said, 'Let's go again.' They said, 'No, we got it on tape.' I know it musta freaked them out because it freaked me out. Murdoc kept a straight face. He said, 'I'm telling you, man, you're my idol.' I said, 'well don't kill your idol.'"

Bassist Murdoc told The NME: "This is a new sound for Gorillaz. An electro-ish 'crack funk' sound, with a little bit of politics and a lot of soul going down. With 'Stylo', I wanted the music to feel euphoric, whilst still putting across how precarious our tightly packed situation is now, worldwide. Where we're at as a species on this overpopulated planet ('Coming on to the Overload. Overload. Overload')."

UK reggae artist Eddy Grant alleged that this song plagiarises his 1977 track "Time Warp" by using the same keyboard section as his hit. "This is pure piracy, it is an obvious infringement of my song," he said. "Anyone who knows 'Time Warp' will know this is 'Time Warp' with people singing and rapping over it, [along] with funny little noises. 'Time Warp' is a very popular song and has been a staple of the DJ scene for many years and I feel total disrespect from Gorillaz and their management company. It's such an obvious copy that from day one the band and their management should have taken control of this situation with EMI Publishing. I would like the outcome to be that the band admits that they have lifted my song, that I have a full credit for the song and an apology from the band."

25
O.N.E. - YEASAYER

"I had this idea about writing a song about addiction — alcoholism — but kind of relating it to a way you'd get rid of a girlfriend or something. So we worked on that song for many months Upstate, in Woodstock, and threw a big beat over it. It became kind of like a early-'90s era Beck song, with a break beat over it. And then when we brought it to the live setting, with our new bandmates, Chris [Keating, vocals and keyboards] kind of said, 'It's not a dance song,' and we were talking about how, on this album, we wanted to commit to certain styles for an entire song and not jump around. So, finally, I caved in. I only caved in after the Bonnaroo audience was so excited by our live version, and I was like, 'OK, I guess I lost that argument.'"

Guitarist Anand Wilder on the "One is Not Enough" song

24
Just Breathe - PEARL JAM

Eddie Vedder said Backspacer was meant to be a more optimistic album, having stated, "I've tried, over the years, to be hopeful in the lyrics, and I think that's going to be easier now,” and I think ‘Just Breathe’ couldn’t have made that comment more accurate, with lyrics: “Oh I'm a lucky man, to count on both hands the ones I love / Some folks just have one, yeah, others, they've got none”.

Unlike many other recent Pearl Jam singles, it is the absence of fanfare that really makes 'Just Breathe' something worth listening to. A paced bass line and a subtle layer of strings laid over the guitar adds further texture to the basic tune. The gentle calm of the melody, and raw honesty in Eddie Vedder’s lyrics, are completely engaging, and the delicate song seems to flow naturally from the grunge rock legends.

For me this is the song that describes this wonderful feeling that have been experienced since the beggining of this year. February 21st was the day that happiness re-appears in my life and it hit me with a double shot.
Life should be this easy and enjoyable.

"Oh I'm a lucky man, to count on both hands, the ones I love...
Some folks just have one, others, they've got none...
Stay with me, Let's just breathe..."

23
Soldier of love - SADE

According to the rumor mill, Kanye West and hip-hop's newest "it" boy, Drake, reached out to Sade, the reclusive chanteuse, for a possible collaboration. She said she'd have to do some research to find out who they were before she could say yes. The story is apocryphal at best, but is spreading at an urban legend's pace because, like the best urban legends, it confirms what we already thought. Sade, the notoriously press-shy songstress who has stingily parceled out music since the mid-'80s, seems like the type to have never heard of Kanye West. She doesn't keep up with music; music keeps up with her. YES!!!

For Sade’s most ardent listeners, the time between the present and Lover’s Rock (2000) has lasted an eternity. When “Soldier of Love” surfaced online at the beginning of this year, news of a new Sade song fast ignited a blaze of exclamation points across blogs and Facebook pages all over the world. The excitement stirred by “Soldier of Love” has made Sade’s latest release the first hotly anticipated album of the ‘10s.

Sade can casually drop back in to a warm reception because she has built the pop-music equivalent of a luxury brand.

Part of the Sade brand just comes from who she is: born to a Nigerian father and English mother, raised in London, blessed with a beauty that looks barely weathered at 51. She's the exotic, alluring foreigner. Her music is essentially pop, but heavily flavored with music styles favored by the elite.

It comes as some surprise, then, to hear Sade loosing up-to-the-minute martial beats on the title track of her new album, Soldier of Love. The video finds the 51-year-old in a spangly catsuit, swinging a lasso over a smoking wasteland. Succinct, masterful and adventurous!!

When you’re not trying to stay in fashion, you can concentrate on doing one thing extremely well and not worry that people will find it dated. Sure, the production on Soldier Of Love sounds a bit tougher and chunkier than the band’s early work, but the classic Sade vibe we love is still front and centre.

Waiting 10 years between albums usually means a crisis in confidence. In this case, it seems to have been the opposite – they’ve got nothing to prove, so they can just relax and take their time.

22
Older - BAND OF HORSES

On 2007's Cease to Begin, Band of Horses became more of a one-horse town, with frontman Ben Bridwell carrying the load in the wake of partner Mat Brooke's exit. He sounds less lonely on the group's third set, which adds singer-songwriter Tyler Ramsey as a full member, and sees multi-instrumentalist Ryan Monroe growing as a songwriter. Suddenly, the band has blossomed into something more like the Band, with rich harmonies — even when Bridwell just multitracks his own voice — and fuller arrangements. You can also hear some Fleet Foxes, a soft-rock shift that may bum out older fans. But for tuneful chilling out, it's like a fine old couch.

21
Let's Go Surfing - THE DRUMS

This local band from Brooklyn have said their song 'Let's Go Surfing' isn't about surfing at all, but is, in fact, is an ode to American president Barack Obama.

In a track-by-track guide to their self-titled debut album, Frontman Jonathan Pierce and guitarist Jacob Graham explained that they wrote the track on November 4, 2008, the day of the last presidential election.

"We actually wrote it on the day that Obama won the election, and everyone was so excited," said Graham. "We're not very political and we don't usually know what's going on, but in America you couldn't really help but know what was going on and get excited about it. The whole country had suffered eight years of feeling like we were in prison or something and then Obama came through and it was impossible not to get swept up with the whole nation, so that's when we wrote 'Let's Go Surfing.'"

Pierce added that the second verse of the song is a direct reference to Obama.

"There's a new kid in the town / Honey, he's moving into the big house / Remember / When I was so very hopeless / Darling, he's gonna make it all better."

THE GRAMMYS 2009 (My Predictions)

2010-01-31T02:22:00.000-08:00

Get ready for some hot girl-on-girl-on-girl action at tonight's Grammy Awards.

Let's see how many guesses I got right...

THE 52nd ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS

GENERAL FIELD

Record of the Year

"Poker Face" - Lady Gaga

Album of the Year

Fearless - Taylor Swift

Song of the Year

"Pretty Wings" – Maxwell

Best New Artist

The Ting Tings

POP

Best Female Pop Vocal Performance

"You Belong With Me" - Taylor Swift

Best Male Pop Vocal Performance

"Love You" - Maxwell

Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals

"I Gotta Feeling" - Black Eyed Peas

Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals

"Love Sex Magic" - Ciara & Justin Timberlake

Best Pop Instrumental Performance

"The Fire" - Imogen Heap

Best Pop Vocal Album

The E.N.D. - Black Eyed Peas

DANCE

Best Dance Recording

"Poker Face" - Lady Gaga

Best Electronic/Dance Album

"The Fame" - Lady Gaga

ALTERNATIVE
Best Alternative Music Album
"It's Blitz!" - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

ROCK

Best Rock Solo Vocal Performance

"Working On A Dream" - Bruce Springsteen

Best Rock Performance By a Duo/Group w/ Vocals

"Use Somebody" - Kings of Leon

Best Hard Rock Performance

"Check My Brain" - Alice in Chains

Best Rock Song

"Use Somebody" - Kings of Leon

Best Rock Album

"No Line on the Horizon" - U2

R&B

Best Female R&B Vocal Performance

"Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" - Beyoncé

Best Male R&B Vocal Performance

"Pretty Wings" - Maxwell

Best R&B Performance By a Duo/Group W/ Vocals

"Blame It" - Jamie Foxx & T-Pain

Best R&B Song

"Pretty Wings" - Maxwell

Best R&B Album

"BLACKsummers'night" - Maxwell

Best Contemporary R&B Album

"I Am... Sasha Fierce" - Beyoncé

RAP

Best Rap Album

The Ecstatic - Mos Def

Best Rap Solo Performance

"D.O.A. (Death Of Auto-Tune)" - Jay-Z

Best Rap Performance By a Duo/Group

"Make Her Say" - Kid Cudi, Kanye West & Common

Best Rap/Sung Collaboration

"Run This Town" - Jay-Z, Rihanna & Kanye West

Best Rap Song

"D.O.A. (Death Of Auto-Tune)" - Jay-Z

COUNTRY

Best Country Song

"White Horse" - Taylor Swift

Best Country Album

Fearless - Taylor Swift

LATIN

Best Latin Rock, Alternative or Urban Album

"Los De Atras Vienen Conmigo" - Calle 13

WORLD MUSIC

Best Contemporary World Music Album

"Welcome To Mali"- Amadou & Mariam

MUSIC VIDEO

Best Short Form Music Video

"Life in Technicolor II" - Coldplay

Best Long Form Music Video

"The Beatles Love — All Together Now" - Various Artists

FILM/TV/VISUAL MEDIA

Best Compilation Soundtrack Album

Twilight

Best Score Soundtrack Album

Up- Michael Giacchino

Best Song Written For Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media

"All Is Love" (From Where The Wild Things Are) - Karen O & The Kids

Cheers Amigos!!

SAYING GOODBYE TO 09' (Part 1, The Year Of Gaga)

2010-01-18T20:21:00.000-08:00

LADY GAGA, THE MOST FASCINATING ARTIST OF 2009

Things weren't going well for young Stefani Germanotta, an 18-year-old from the Upper West Side, at the Bitter End. It was Friday night at the famed Greenwich Village club and the chattering NYU kids in the audience -- there because the place didn’t card -- outnumbered the handful of misfit East Village friends who had come to see her play. “See the lonely girl,” she sang in her agile and slightly husky voice, letting her fingers fly up and down the keyboard of the beat-up house piano like the child prodigy she once was, “out on the weekend, trying to make it pay.” Set up on the piano’s soundboard, Germanotta’s own portable disco ball spun tiny shards of light and her laptop spat out beats, but no one was listening.

She thought of her hustle to book the show, calling the club and posing as her own manager. She thought of the cramped, piss-smelling dressing room she’d have to go back to and how, if she failed here, the Bitter End would be her bitter end. Fuck this, thought Germanotta. I’ve got to do something. So Germanotta shrugged her shirt from her slender shoulder and pulled it over her head. She tugged off her skirt. The little Italian firecracker sat on stage in the Village in her fishnets and her underwear and sang. The audience was gape-mouthed and agog, unsure whether this was part of the act or not. They gawked and, almost unwittingly, began to nod their heads to the music. They were hooked. Later, Germanotta would identify that moment as a turning point. “I felt a spontaneity and nerve in myself that I think had been in a coffin for a very long time.” By the time her set ended, Stefani Germanotta had disappeared and Lady Gaga was born. “At that moment,” she says, “I rose up from the dead.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Abk1jAONjw

Five short years later Lady Gaga -- whose name was inspired by the Queen song “Radio Ga Ga” and bestowed upon her by producer Rob Fusari because her theatrical vocals reminded him of Freddie Mercury -- has become an international pop sensation. But even that description is too modest. Tiffany was an international pop sensation. Neneh Cherry was an international pop sensation. Though she has released only one album, 2008’s The Fame, Gaga is much more. Her style is imperious, her defense is impregnable -- in short, she’s ferocious.

At 23, Gaga has become only the third artist in history to score three number 1 hits from a debut album on Billboard’s Mainstream Top 40 chart, and her fans, pledging allegiance to Gagaland, are a nation unto themselves. Her music, catchier than a cold in February, is compulsively hummable and burrows so deeply into the psyche, you’ll catch yourself staring into your fridge at 3 o’ clock in the morning murmuring, “muh muh muh mah” and not know how long you’ve been standing there. In the dying light of the CD era, and at a time when pop music has been run off the charts by hip-hop and mopey emo, The Fame has sold more than 3 million hard copies -- plus another 20 million track downloads -- worldwide. But even the fame of The Fame fades next to Gaga herself, whose wild, shocking outfits have spurred an interest in avant-garde fashion unseen, perhaps, since King Louis XIV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bESGLojNYSo&feature=channel

The influence of Gaga is pandemic. In Belgium, The Fame went gold; in America it went platinum; in New Zealand it went double platinum. Try to remember a night out at any gay bar anywhere when “Pokerface,” “Just Dance,” or “LoveGame” wasn’t played at least once. Statistically speaking, if you have ears, you’ve probably heard Gaga’s music. If you have eyes, you’ve seen her. If you have a mind, you haven’t forgotten her. That’s the first rule of Gagaland: Be life-changing, historical, and memorable. “Those are,” she says, “the three things that are important to me.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mB0tP1I-14

A little brunette lighting bolt of energy born in Manhattan to Joseph and Cynthia Germanotta -- Catholics with a healthy appreciation for the arts and the good sense to recognize a star when they bore one -- Gaga began playing piano at 4 and composing at 13 under the tutelage of several gay mentors. “I had a few gay piano teachers. I was in acting class and ballet from a very young age, and I remember being around a lot of gay boys in dance class. I feel intrinsically inclined toward a more gay lifestyle.”

She did Ellen before Leno, performed in gay clubs before straight ones, and plugs the gays constantly in interviews, even those with straight publications. Despite a lesbian subtext to “Poker Face” -- the song is about, among other things, a woman lusting after a woman while dating a man -- Gaga says, “I myself am not a gay woman -- I am a free-spirited woman: I have had boyfriends, and I have hooked up with women, but it’s never been like ‘I discovered gayness when I was dot dot dot.’ ”

A life of glamour is an ethos to which every gay -- from the 17-year-old Dominican tranny voguing in his bedroom to the tanorexic middle-aged Miami circuit queen -- can relate. It’s one reason we love Gaga. Another, of course, is that Gaga loves us back. Gayness is in Gaga’s DNA.

Her devotion to gay culture is unparalleled by any other artist operating at her level of visibility or success. “When I started in the mainstream it was the gays that lifted me up,” she says. “I committed myself to them and they committed themselves to me, and because of the gay community I’m where I am today.”

Earlier this year, in her acceptance speech for her MuchMusic award for best international video, Lady Gaga thanked “God and the gays.”

That’s another clause in the Gagaland constitution: Gay culture shall gush undiluted into the rapids of society. It shall not be co-opted, fancified, dolled up, or Uncle Tommed. “I very much want to inject gay culture into the mainstream,” she says, “It’s not an underground tool for me. It’s my whole life. So I always sort of joke the real motivation is to just turn the world gay.”

If glamour and vanity and music are the sparks that animate Gaga, she relies on a vast reference library to give herself a body. She regularly plunders her predecessors, finding time in her whirlwind schedule to make stops at museums. The ’80s synthesizers of The Fame are just part of Lady Gaga; she herself is synthesis. She’s been compared to and compares herself to Christina Aguilera (who thought she was a tranny), Madonna, Debbie Harry, David Bowie, and Grace Jones, but her reading list is more Patti Smith (Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is one of Gaga’s favorite books) and her frank sex talk is straight out of blueswoman Bessie Smith’s 1920s catalog. “I need a little hot dog on my roll” isn’t so different from “I’m bluffin’ with my muffin.”

Gaga may sing about sex a lot, but she does it with a hyperbole and naïveté bordering on ironic. Unlike her provocative predecessors, most notably Madonna, Lady Gaga seems less interested in sex than in talking about talking about sex. Lady Gaga doesn’t care whether you think she’s sexy. She just wants you to think. Her body is a small, highly bosomed, well-proportioned, deadly delivery system programmed to explode the way you look at music, sex, fashion, fame, and everything that came before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVEG793G3N4&feature=channel

She’ll take, as she did at the MuchMusic Awards, the missile cone bra, last seen during Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour, and rig it to shoot fire from her breasts. Madonna and the other pop matriarchs should take cover. Lady Gaga may nod their way, but she won’t bow. “Lady Gaga is more like a collection of quotes than a singular performer,” Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers wrote. “Every move she makes, every crazy ensemble she wears, can easily be traced. She’s a human mash-up, a sample bank, recycled and reused.” As Gaga herself puts it: “You’re only as great as your best references,” and in the epic eight-minute clip for “Paparazzi,” she proves it by riffing on film noir, Cindy Sherman, cyborgs, Macbeth, Lindsay Lohan, and horror films of the ’50s. Of the video she notes, “There’s an art to fame. Even in the most humiliating and defaming moment of your life, you’re still ready for the camera.”

The monster lives and demands to be fed. Gaga cannibalizes herself to feed it, exposing more and more of herself. She finds immunity in confession, detailing her shocking drug antics and sexual peccadilloes with an avidity that outstrips the paparazzi.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ladygagaofficial?blend=1&ob=4#p/f/6/d2smz_1L2_0

“Everyone knows what my breasts look like, who I’m sleeping with, what my real hair looks like, and when I’m wearing wigs—all the information is out there,” she says, not without pride. “But somehow there’s an ambiguity that hovers.” That ambiguity is the constant desire to peek behind the curtain to glimpse the real Gaga. Too bad the curtain doesn’t exist. As Powers put it, “the split between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ seems to have closed. This isn’t because the quest for authenticity has been abandoned. It’s because, for artists like Gaga, fake has become what feels most real.”

Though Lady Gaga is rarely caught in the same outfit twice, the disco ball runs like a leitmotif through her wardrobe. She wore a homemade disco ball bra in the video for “Just Dance” and a dress made from dissected disco balls at the Glastonbury Festival in England in June. On stage, the angular mirrored dress refracted the fervent faces of her fans, happily bouncing up and down. Each one sees in Gaga a reflection of him or herself, picking from her array of looks and melodies and messages those that appeal to them. Gay, straight, misfit, mall rat, teen, tween, or twink, look at Gaga and you’ll see yourself.

Lady Gaga made The Fame and The Fame made Lady Gaga famous. In return, she’s become fame’s greatest apostle.

“What I want to deliver, as a message about fame, is that anyone can have it. My fame lives in my friendships, in my convictions about the power of art and love -- you could have 500 pairs of shoes that cost 10 cents and still be famous.”

In a culture where kids close their eyes and dream of being a contestant on Big Brother, Gaga’s fame free-for-all is an irresistible message for those yearning for a fame monster of their own. And when it comes accompanied by more hooks than a fisherman’s tackle box, it’s a message few can resist. Is it true? Lady Gaga’s poker face is notoriously hard to read, but “This isn’t the Lady Gaga newscast,” she says. “Nobody gives a shit what is really going on -- everyone wants me to tell them a story. Art is a lie, and every day I kill to make it true.”

No one really knows what she'll do next. And that, of course, is how rumors get started. Go Google and read all the crazy speculation about how she's really a man, the elaborate story about how she's a Satan-worshipper brainwashing us with her songs, that she's a talentless puppet. The truth might be harder to believe than the conspiracy theories.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ladygagaofficial?blend=1&ob=4#p/f/3/qrO4YZeyl0I

At 23, she's already broken Billboard records and sold millions of albums. She writes all her own lyrics and music. She carefully curates her image along with a handpicked group of stylists and artists she's dubbed the Haus of Gaga. She's quite suddenly a very powerful woman in what's still a man's music industry. She's not just selling sex; she's selling art — which may be the most terrifying idea of all.

THE TOP 100 SONGS OF 2009 (The Conclussion, The NUMERO UNO)

2010-01-18T01:03:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, The BIG CHEESE of 2009!

01
My Girls ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

Glucose-drenched acid-sonics - and something of a hit.

For nearly six minutes it teetered on the edge of Frankie Knuckles’ classic ‘Your Love’ (also the base for the much-covered ‘You Got The Love’), but teasingly never quite dived in. Plus the gradual realisation that the “I just want four walls and adobe slabs” lyrics were a paternal rumination over the housing conditions of Noah Lennox’s ‘…Girls’ showed a more human, emotional side to the band.

For the majority of this decade, Animal Collective have been breaking down barriers and reinventing their musical identity, inspiring and cultivating a legion of fans. These nearly-obsessive fans broke out in hysteria when word that Merriweather Post Pavilion finally leaked. “My Girls” was my first taste of the album and what a taste it was. It had the usual bleeps and blips, but also melodies to sing along with, beats to bop your head to, simple lyrics with deeper meaning. The message is transcendent and timeless, the music is entirely modern and original.

Animal Collective created a track that could be played to dance-happy teens as easily as it could be played to awkwardly standing-still 40-somethings. A song that could be blasted from car speakers on a hot summer day or listened to softly on headphones on a rainy one. A song that could be felt, shared, experienced. “My Girls” is a musical masterpiece, an underwater voyage (true to the album’s concept and the music video) : it’s the perfect gateway into Animal Collective’s expansive musical collection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zol2MJf6XNE

Leaked in late 2008, right in the middle of an ongoing economic meltdown, "My Girls" was perfectly of its moment, decrying materialism for simpler joys: "I don't need to seem like I care about material things like social status/ I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls!" They don't sing those lines; they exclaim them amid a whirl of synth beeps and sine waves that started from chaos and coalesced into an exuberant stomp.

Panda Bear's promise to provide a proper house for his wife and young daughter, in the wake of his father's death-- "But to provide for mine who ask, I will, with heart, on my father's grave," he pledges-- yielded a blissful, near-ecstatic song that practically requires participation, be it hollering along (try to keep yourself from yelling a synchronized "ooooh!" after the chorus) or shimmying in your subway seat. Panda Bear and Avey Tare's harmonies here are warmer (and groovier) than most anywhere else in the band's catalogue, and the electronics are gentle and buoyant; in some ways, "My Girls" feels like a life preserver for people tottering on the precipice of adulthood. Panda Bear might be apologetic about his craving ("I don't mean to seem like I care about material things," he hedges), but "My Girls" is ultimately a celebration of the simplification-- of desire, of priorities-- that comes with growing up.

It may be a strangely sentimental point for an indie group with avant-noise roots to make, but it also signaled another sea change in a decade full of them for Animal Collective. If previously they donned masks and adopted nicknames to hide their identities, coming across as way too esoteric to play to the rafters, on "My Girls" the band step forward as pop stars of their own making, managing the impossible feat of straddling so many different audiences: indie nerds, jambanders, your parents. They could end up being Phish or Arcade Fire or maybe both, but this song is the key to their future: effervescent, heartfelt, inventive, original, and gutsy enough to suggest that we don't need a stable economy to be rich.

"My Girls" is all heart arguably the most earnest expression of basic human want recorded in 2009.

In a way, it was the song that made me evaluate this life in the mid 30's while determined to pursue my own happiness, the one who left that question in my mind while watching some pictures of good old friends on Facebook...Is it really my time?

THE TOP 100 SONGS OF 2009 (Part 4, From #20 to #2)

2010-01-17T15:29:00.000-08:00

20
Pretty Wings MAXWELL

Heartbreak is a constant in popular music, and with good reason; Maxwell is among the billions across the globe who have had their hearts broken at one time or another, but his latest record, BLACKsummers'night, is a deeply moving and evocative record that finds the singer expounding on this universal feeling like few can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZJYW4odlm0

Although Maxwell has always seemed preternaturally mature, there is something new in this, his first piece of the BlackSummer'sNight trilogy, a depth of emotion appropriate for this level of heartbreak.

"Pretty Wings", the lead single and album centerpiece, doesn't work in simple binaries or reductive ideas; it lays out a fair yet confused examination of a relationship's fall.

Maxwell even acknowledges his own mistakes after an indictment of his partner's, creating a realization of loss and all of the intricate personal responses that implies. But what is truly powerful is that it is just as musically complex as a relationship's disintegration is emotionally.

Maxwell's patience allows him to effectively write such paens to devotion; it is as if he wanted to catalog every aspect of this very human breakdown, identify each strand to create a song that fully captures, laid bare, the complex emotional terrain that wells up during such an exceptionally difficult and human experience. This level of detail carries with it a lived-in feeling, a convincing truthfulness simply because the emotions are too specific to be anything but real.

Music this effective is difficult, and only someone as passionate about music as they are the human heart could so successfully produce work that reflects well on both.

19
Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) BEYONCÉ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m1EFMoRFvY

Love has always been a high-stakes business transaction for Beyoncé, ever since that lousy boyfriend maxed out her credit card in "Bills, Bills, Bills." "Single Ladies" is her definitive statement on that subject.

The beat, courtesy of The-Dream and Tricky Stewart, is irresistible and exuberant, the vocal hook is stormy and virtuosic, and her lesson is blunt: Seal the deal. With a shiny ring. A lesson learnt by some of my dear girlfriends in 2009.

CONGRATULATIONS GIRLS!

18
Bulletproof LA ROUX

Some people in pop music are banking on eccentricity right now: When the BBC announced its influential "Sound of 2009" list back in January, it was striking how many of the performers on it-- La Roux, Little Boots, Frankmuzik-- presented themselves as quirky, described themselves as making pop, and had come at it using netroots tactics. La Roux in particular has become a bona fide smash in Britain, her shrill homebrew electropop heralding a surprising return of the DIY ethic to the pop mainstream.

Bulletproof is a bright, bouncy slice of Yazoo-ish electropop with a chorus every bit as immediate as 'In For The Kill'. Jackson's vocals are less shrill this time around, but she comes off just as formidable.

17
Daniel BAT FOR LASHES

With a knack for high-concept storytelling and a distinct visual aesthetic to accompany her rich, moody pop, Bat for Lashes' Natasha Khan may be the closest thing to a video star in today's indie realm. Though perhaps not as iconic as her Donnie Darko-inspired clip for 2007's "What's a Girl to Do?", the video for "Daniel", the standout from her Two Suns LP, matches the song's hope and longing. In it, Khan wrestles with sorrow (in the form of faceless, black-clad dancers) as she races toward the titular character and the track's skyward chorus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ZHah-c0hQ

This struggle for salvation is central to "Daniel"'s appeal, and Bat for Lashes play masterfully with shades of light and dark to achieve the effect. With its dark romance, soaring vocal hook, and skillful songcraft, "Daniel" does feel like a direct descendant to similar work by Kate Bush and Sinead O'Connor, though I'm also reminded of songs like Concrete Blonde's "Caroline"-- the kind of goth-tinged gem that, sadly, seems to have disappeared from the airwaves.

16
Two Weeks GRIZZLY BEAR

No track better typifies the fully-formed Grizzly Bear than "Two Weeks", but it's not the craftsmanship that's winning people over and making them want to spin this one again and again. It's the intangible, of course, the sound of a band that has struck upon something timeless, inspired, holistic, and utterly wholesome. Some people will hear "Two Weeks" and instantly feel better about their day, some will want to join a boys' choir, and most will feel the urge to share this exceptional thing with those close to them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjecYugTbIQ

15
When Love Takes Over DAVID GUETTA FEAT. KELLY ROWLAND

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zudbz4hOcbc

Kelly Rowland was never going to find it easy forging a solo career. Even before the demise of Destiny's Child, Beyoncé crowned herself the Queen of R&B, leaving her former bandmates scrambling for a piece of the action. But every cloud has a silver lining, and after her second album Ms. Kelly failed to impress, Rowland drafted in dance duo Freemasons to spice things up. Confident she can 'Work' the club scene again, her latest single is another dancefloor-filling stomper.

This collaboration with French DJ David Guetta, 'When Love Takes Over' is further evidence that Rowland may no longer be resigned to living in Beyoncé's shadow. Fusing classic dance beats with a heady, emotionally-charged vocal, it's a world away from the midtempto R&B numbers with which she started her solo career. In fact, this packs a punch from the very first listen, where it became the summer anthem of 2009. Bigger yet, THE GAY ANTHEM OF 2009 as me and my friends lived it during last summer.

Day 'N' Nite (Crookers Remix) KID CUDI

On this Remix of Day N' Nite, The Crooker's music is engrossing and Cudi's angst genuine but his raps get pedestrian. And asserting ad nauseam that he is a "lonely stoner" is just annoying — a hipster boast masquerading as a confession.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSWrepLjTKc

Day 'n' Nite was well received by the Hip Hop community and was considered to be one of the best singles of 2009. Critics praised Day 'n' Nite for its smooth, relaxing beat and its unique production. The song propelled Kid Cudi into a household name, making him one of the biggest stars of contemporary Hip Hop.

13
Just Dance LADY GAGA FT. AKON & COLBY ODONIS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Abk1jAONjw

Just dance was the #92 in the Top 100 Songs of 08' and marked the beginning of the Gaga Supremacy in 2009. This is the diva's 4th of 5 songs included in this countdown. Can you believe that Gaga was introduced to the world (without the world noticing her) during the Miss Universe Pageant in July of 2008? ALMOST 2 YEARS AGO!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGvSB4GPPqQ&feature=related

12
Panic Switch SILVERSUN PICKUPS

"For some reason, when we were mixing it, we kept playing around with this visual thesaurus that had a computer voice, and [bassist] Nikki [Monninger] and I kept typing up weird words, trying to find the dirtiest ones we could. So every time I listen to that song now, I just keep hearing this computer voice saying all these dirty words. Anyway, it's our dance song. We wrote it later on in the process — really close to the end, because we were seeing how the album was shaping up. I remember coming into the rehearsal space and just told everybody, 'OK, we're locking it down,' because we had a lot of songs to work with. And then the next day, I came back like, 'Hey, hey, wait, there's one more song to fit in.' And it's a very bizarre song. There were no verses in it. ... Hopefully it conveys a theme on the album, which is basically a nervous breakdown. It's pretty chaotic, and of all the songs on the record, that one represents that [theme] the best."

Silversun Pickups' frontman Brian Aubert

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQeJPb7VbKk

Panic Switch became the third independently-distributed song ever to reach the #1 position on the Hot Alternative Tracks of Billboard Magazine's chart. The other two to achieve this feat were The Offspring's 1994 debut hit "Come Out and Play" and Everlast's "What It's Like,"which had a nine-week run at the summit in 1998-9.

11
You Belong With Me TAYLOR SWIFT

Remember the night that Kanye West became the biggest Douche Bag in the entire world?

It was the night when this song's promo won the 2009 MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video, beating Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on it)" amongst others. Taylor Swift's victory apparently did not meet with the approval of Kanye West:

"Yo Taylor, I'm really happy for you, I'll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!"

A stunned Taylor was timed out and consequently unable to complete her acceptance speech. Later when "Single Ladies" won the show's top honor - Video of the Year, Beyoncé showed her class by calling back Swift to the stage to finish her speech. "I would like Taylor to come out and have her moment," she said.

Billboard magazine reported on 24th September 2009 that with an audience of 117 million, The Video Music Awards made this tune the most heard song on US radio that week. The song was the first country crossover track to achieve that feat since tracking firm Nielsen Soundscan's started keeping records in 1990.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuNIsY6JdUw

10
I Gotta Feeling BLACK EYED PEAS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSD4vsh1zDA

Poor Black Eyed Peas. All they have from 2009 to comfort themselves now is their worldwide fame, record-setting 26 weeks at #1 on the Billboard charts, six Grammy nods, gobs of money, and an appearance in one of those bizarre DirecTV ads.

Weirdly, we suspect that "Boom Boom Pow" will sort of fade over the years, despite its success-- so you might have the last collective laugh there. "I Gotta Feeling" though? That's gonna be soundtracking your office parties/weddings/multi-gen gatherings for a long, long time. BELIEVE IT!!

09
Dog Days Are Over FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE

Florence Welch marks a clear break from the contentious-yet-fruitful Lily vs. Amy era. And that's not only because this self-professed "real geek" is a redhead who'll take harps over horns. Whereas Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse worked their way through the tabloids while breaking down life's troublesome bits into startlingly candid profundity on record, Welch aims for little but the outer reaches on her debut LP, Lungs. Welch hovers high above her native London's seedy back alleys-- and she's looking skyward.

Lungs is a cloud-headed introduction to Welch's world, where It Girl hype, coffins, violence, and ambition combust on impact; it's a platinum-shellacked demo reel drunk on its own hi-fi-ness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGrx6etMl0w

Instead of giving this gothically pale 22-year-old with megaphone vox some classy pop-soul to work with à la Duffy or Adele, Lungs takes the smorgasbord approach. Welch bursts mouth wide wide over garage rock, epic soul, pint-tipping Britbeat, and-- best of all-- a mystic brand of pop that's part Annie Lennox, Grace Slick, and Joanna Newsom. A lesser talent might fall prey to such veering stylistic change-ups (cough, Kate Nash, cough), but Welch powers through, her ear-snapping alarm call of a voice making Lungs sound like the work of a courageous artist rather than a group of well-paid producers. Of course, well-paid producers are still involved-- specifically, James Ford (Simian Mobile Disco, Arctic Monkeys), Paul Epworth (Bloc Party), and Stephen Mackey (Pulp).

"Dog Days Are Over" is incredibly entertaining and furthermore a complete storm of a song. Florence plays with this song, exerting a huge energy. It is a wonderfully spiritual four minutes that will never fail to impress.

08
No You Girls FRANZ FERDINAND

‘Tonight: Franz Ferdinand’ – three years, several producers and one grimy Glaswegian recording space in the making – is loosely a concept album based around an epic night out.

Still louche, still dancing, but this time they’re showing off some new moves.

Album number one: “music to make girls dance”. Album number two: “music for girls to cry to”. Album number three, in your own words Mr Kapranos?

“Music of the night: for the dancefloor, flirtation, for your desolate heart-stop, for losing it and loving it, for the chemical surge in your bloodstream… for that lonely hour rocking yourself, waiting for dawn and it all to be even again”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lmzLuFDMSU

Franz Ferdinand are doing the same thing, more or less the same way, with the same proficiency that catapulted them to the top of the international indie heap: setting louche tales of sex and romance to ferociously catchy white-boy disco grooves.

The debauchery in the lucious NO YOU GIRLS is transmitted with its percolating Studio 54 bass line, blasts of guitar noise, rakish pickup lines and perhaps from that human skeleton used in its percussion. Bloody Wicked!!

07
1901 PHOENIX

Phoenix is a Grammy nominated Frenchalternative rock band started during their childhood by Thomas Mars, Deck D'Arcy, Christian Mazzalai and Laurent Brancowitz in the suburb of Versailles, in the same culture that produced late-'90s bands such as Air and Daft Punk.

When "1901" debuted on the Phoenix website with animated pink shards slashing across a black backing, it looked like the track's error-message synthesizers were clawing a neon marquee out from underneath the sooty abyss. And the song itself is similar restoration, layering sloppy guitar jangle into a propulsive motor and goosing the synthesizers into an air-raid crescendo until the whole mess is a glass-smooth shiny bauble. People in indie rock circles often talk about hit singles in alternate dimensions, but Phoenix prove you don't need quantum theory to make pop out of indie rock ingredients... you just need to be from Versailles.

According to lead singer Thomas Mars, the song is about early 20th century Paris:

"Paris in 1901 was better than it is now. So the song is a fantasy about Paris..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL548cHH3OY

06
Use Somebody KINGS OF LEON

"The meat of song was written on tour. When I came up with 'I could use somebody,' I didn't know if I was talking about a person or home or God. I felt immediately that it was a big song, and it scared me away. Then, when we were writing the record, Matthew kept sayin', 'What's that song, man?', and I acted like I didn't know what he was talking about. Then, finally, I went, 'All right, we'll do it,' and as soon as we started playin' it, the producers looked up and said, 'Whoa, that's a good song.' I was like, 'OK.'"

Frontman Caleb Followill

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnhXHvRoUd0

Poker Face LADY GAGA

For about a year, she was nothing but a lot of talk and a badge-- only without the badge. She filled her résumé and interviews with style icon namedrops-- Andy Warhol and his notions on celebrity, the denizens of New York's downtown arts scene, and avant couture designers like Thierry Mugler-- but her singles betrayed none of the artistry that she insisted was part of her package. "Poker Face" had about three big hooks, but next to her other singles-- which ran the gamut from forgettable fluff ("Just Dance") to "Muffin Top" ("LoveGame")-- it seemed like a fluke. Then, between the VMAs and "Paparazzi", she came into her own. And on "Bad Romance", the lead single from The Fame Monster, she became kind of awesome.

Like Madonna or Prince, it's impossible to separate the song from the performer. But unlike those artists, Lady Gaga isn't particularly attractive, and she uses this to her advantage by suppressing her vanity and making herself a slippery figure. She's still largely unknowable and also almost unrecognizable from moment to moment, as she contorts, disguises, masks and maims her face and body like a Matthew Barney or David Cronenberg creation.

Her first 21st Century Classic, the international hit "Just Dance" was predominately electropop, "Poker Face" carries a dark sound with clear vocals on the chorus and a pop hook while combining the synths from "Just Dance" and the more dance-oriented beat of the next single "LoveGame".

The tune carries the pleather-and-sequins vibe of the downtown New York scene out of the underground and onto the FM dial without losing its smut and sass.

‘Poker Face’ is pretty much the one song 2009 will be remembered for and becomes essential for anyone who even remotely likes pop. For the rest of us, it’s the moment Gaga cements herself as a real star.

Whether Gaga can keep up the streak is another matter. Maybe she'll get chewed up and spat out in the end, or maybe her chameleonic image changes are just Madonna's career at the speed of the Internet era and we're seeing all of her ideas at once. But all of a sudden, for a brief time at least, she's the only real pop star around.

http://www.mtv.com/videos/lady-gaga/294748/poker-face.jhtml#id=1627390

04
Zero YEAH YEAH YEAHS

The YYYs is definitely one of my Favorite Bands of the 00's. Their monumental It's Blitz album released in March of 2009 showcases the sound of the entire band putting aside their past difficulties and just having fun for the first time."This is a new era for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. This record got our confidence back and was really a move towards enjoying being in a band again. We started off writing this record with guitars, but gradually the sound developed into what you hear now. We chose synths because they allow for more space. They have a quality which is different to Nick (Zinner's) grungy guitar sound. But, at the same time, Nick's synth work mimics what he does on the guitar. So in a way it was a natural progression."

Karen O

Beginning with a synth pulse straight from Studio 54, ‘Zero’ was immediately, grippingly the sound of Yeah Yeah Yeahs emerging from their red booth in the shadows onto the dancefloor. Not just emerging either: as the song stepped up its disco beat with Karen O exhorting you to “climb, climb, climb high up”, then exploded into an ecstatic, multiply-climactic thriller, it was apparent they were storming the floor astride a strutting...

Moment Of Surrender U2

"I was born to sing for you/I didn't have a choice but to lift you up," Bono declares early on this countdown, in a song called "Magnificent." He does it in an oddly low register, a heated hush just above the shimmer of the Edge's guitar and the iron-horse roll of bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. Bono is soon up in thin air with those familiar rodeo yells, on his way to the chorus, which ends with him just singing the word "magnificent," repeating it with relish, stretching the syllables.

But he does it not in self-congratulation, more like wonder and respect, as if in middle age, on his band's 11th studio album, he still can't believe his gift — and luck. Bono knows he was born with a good weapon for making the right kind of trouble: the clean gleam and rocket's arc of that voice. "It was one dull morning/I woke the world with bawling," he boasted in "Out of Control," written by Bono on his 18th birthday and issued on U2's Irish debut EP.

He is still singing about singing, all over No Line on the Horizon, U2's first album in nearly five years and their best, in its textural exploration and tenacious melodic grip, since 1991's Achtung Baby.

Most of the great — and biggest-selling — U2 albums have been confrontational successes: the dramatic entrance on 1980's Boy; the spiritual-pilgrim reach of 1987's The Joshua Tree; the electro-Weimar whirl of Achtung Baby; the return to basics on 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Produced by the now-standard trio of Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Steve Lillywhite, No Line on the Horizon is closer to the transitional risks — the Irish-gothic spell of 1984's The Unforgettable Fire, the techno-rock jet lag of 1993's Zooropa — but with a consistent persuasion in the guitar hooks, rhythms and vocal lines.

The rising-falling effect of the harmony voices around Bono in the long space-walk "Moment of Surrender" is a perfect picture of where he really wants to be, when he gets to the line about "vision over visibility."

It's amazing that U2 can still write a song this incredible 30 years down the road. Their best song in years, PERIOD!! Moment of Surrender is the Bad of the 21st century. It has that same unsettling but incredibly moving atmosphere, and Bono seriously sings the flaming hell out of this thing. Surrender's meaning is meant to be pretty ambiguous, different things to different people, like One was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5OEIBSH1FQ&feature=related

No Line On The Horizon is an album that for many people takes time. The first time I listened to it I was hooked, but I have found that it has grown on many people who wrote if off because of "Get On Your Boots" as the first single. "Magnificent", "Moment Of Surrender", and "Breathe" are three of the greatest songs U2 has ever written and deserve to rank among their all time classics.

Bono knows he was born with a voice. He also knows that without Mullen, Clayton and the Edge, he'd be just another big mouth.

In For The Kill (Skream's Let's Get Ravey Remix) LA ROUX

2009 will somehow be remembered as the year that the 80s made a noteworthy comeback. This Eighties spirit is reflected in new music and after decades of dourness and plastic perfection, pop has become shameless again with artist like Lady Gaga, Little Boots, Ladyhawke, Empire Of The Sun, etc.

An electro duo fronted by a pale, skinny, androgynous young red headed woman with a big quiff, tailored suits and garish make-up, her high strung vocal blaring over cheesy synths and chintzy drum machine as she insists she is coming in for the kill... NOPE! Not the Eurythmics, circa 1983, but breakthrough British stars La Roux.

La Roux are red haired singer Elly Jackson and her studio partner Ben Langmaid, who is a veteran of the 1990s dance scene.

When the original version of In For The Kill was released as the second single of their debut album, it proved to be a huge hit for the electro-pop duo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ1Mi77nogQ

"None of us expected it to do that at all. Me and Ben have had faith in it and we always thought it had potential to go far but we were never sure if other people were going to feel the same or if other people were going to like it. We know it has a Marmite effect vocally. Some people don't like it or they find it a bit annoying which is totally fine. We knew that when we wrote it that it was going to be a love/hate thing. It's just always really lovely when music speaks for itself like that."

Elly Jackson

In For The Kill is an emotional leap of faith set to stabbing synths. Strangely powerful yet angel-wing-light at the same time. This will still sound staggering in a decade’s time.

The "Let’s Get Ravey" version remixed by Dubstep Producer Skream transformed this tune from La Roux’s most accessible chart hit to the darkest remix to ever come from England. Simply A MASTERPIECE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq5GdutCRo8

Coming up, The NUMERO UNO OF 2009!!

THE TOP 100 SONGS OF 2009 (Part 3, From #50 to #21)

2010-01-16T18:13:00.000-08:00

Don't Stop Believin' GLEE CAST

Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’" hasn’t just taken on another life, it’s going to outlive us all. What started as a top-10 power ballad back in 1981(it peaked at no. 9 on the pop charts) has become the song with more lives than nine cats. The most notable return to the pop culture zeitgeist came, of course, with the Sopranos series finale, but it’s also turned up in the current Broadway show Rock of Ages, as well as Laguna Beach (which landed the song on to iTunes Top 10 back in 2005) — even the memorable roller-rink scene in 2003’s Charlize Theron Oscar bait Monster.

And just when we’d thought we’d escaped the grasp of Steve Perry’s epic plea to "hold on to that fee-eee-ee-lin’" Fox’s Glee came along and put the ultimate earworm back in its rightful place: the number-one spot on iTunes.

Of course, it sounds slightly different in this Freaks and Geeks meets High School Musical pilot, but it’s a good kind of different. Even if you aren’t one for show choirs (which, is quite frankly, shocking), it’s pretty damn hard to resist. What do you think, Music Mixers? Are you loving Glee’s take on "Don’t Stop Believin’," or are you ready to ship it back on the midnight train goin’ an-y-where?

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9d28q_glee-dont-stop-believe_shortfilms

Uprising MUSE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8KQmps-Sog

One of my favorite moments of 2009 was definitely the night that I met the band MUSE in Atlanta. It was the night before they open for U2 in the 360° Tour.
My good friend Antoine invited me to have dinner at CRAFT, the restaurant where he works as a Captain. Sure, our meal, the wine and the "special" guest (Antoine's roomate) were memorable but nothing like the moment when I noticed Singer Matthew Bellamy and music mates having dinner in the table next to mine! (OH MY GOD!!!)

Almost 10 minutes later after I found this great surprise and encouraged by Antoine and company, I approached the band's table.

I COULDN'T BELIEVE IT!! I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO!!

My first instinct was to introduced myself, tell a lil' white lie (I told them that I flew from Lima, Peru just to see them play) and explain my fascination for "Starlight". They were the nicest people on earth! The singer introduced me to his fellow musicians and his other guests (Record Company Executives and Promoters). He even asked me if I wanted an autograph of every single member of the band, basically because they couldn't believe that I flew from a South American country just to see'em perform.

I know, lies are bad... but this little one got me a glorious moment and an autograph from one of the best rock bands of this new century.

48 (TIE)
I'm not alone CALVIN HARRIS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnBpUGmcsFo

Dance with somebody MANDO DIAO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nh931yRQIM

Mando Diao is an alternative rock band from Borlänge, Sweden. The band got their breakthrough with the release of the album Hurricane Bar in 204. Their main fan base is in Sweden, Germany, and Japan although their influence has recently spread to Western Europe thanks to the huge success of this song that released in early 2009.

48
Heartless KANYE WEST

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co0tTeuUVhU

47
Warrior's Dance THE PRODIGY

This song is built around a vocal sample from the 1991 techno anthem "Take Me Away" by True Faith. It was originally written specifically for a Gatecrasher gig that the band were participating in. It was also the first song that Liam Howlett, Keith Flint and Maxim Reality had recorded together for a number of years and the catalyst to get the trio working together again. (The Prodigy's previous album Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, featured only Howlett musically).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxZJTRhcFg4&feature=fvst

Flint explained to The Guardian February 6, 2009: "It was the anniversary of 20 years of acid house and the rave scene, and we were a genuine part of that - a really significant British youth culture movement. That realization freed us up. We wanted to write something like a bootleg-type retrospective track that represented that, just to play live. It wasn't meant as the start of an album."

46
Let It Rock KEVIN RUDOLF & LIL WAYNE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0n4eMGXAyk

Brother Sport ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2010/01/08/animal-collective-premiere-trippy-brother-sport-video/

"The very first version of the song was just me improvising singing over a couple guitar chords, I can't remember what effects I was running through with an acoustic guitar, but I was playing to a Moodymann sample. I'd taken a little piece of a song of his as a rhythm to make a song to. I didn't really want to use that as the final thing, but the first version of the song was that. It was really house-y sounding and I came across a weird Brazilian drum school sample that eventually became the thing we used as the foundation of the song. The guitar chords kind of came second after the rhythmic part of the song and then the lyrics were the very last thing, which is kind of typical for me - the lyrics are always the last part of the puzzle of the song.

Panda Bear

44
Paparazzi LADY GAGA

The epic eight-minute video for this song was helmed by Swedish director Jonas Akerlund, the man behind The Prodigy's controversial "Smack My Bitch Up" clip. It stars Lady GaGa and Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård, who played Meekus in in the 2001 Ben Stiller movie Zoolander and the vampire Eric Northman on HBO's True Blood.

Lady GaGa explained to The Canadian Press: "It has a real, genuine, powerful message about fame-whoring and death and the demise of the celebrity, and what that does to young people. The video explores ideas about sort of hyperbolic situations that people will go to in order to be famous. Most specifically, pornography and murder. These are some of the major themes in the video."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgKrzdaDQMw

The video won two awards at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Special Effects.

43
Gives You Hell THE ALL-AMERICAN REJECTS

Gives You Hell was the band's first to break into the Top Five on Billboard's Hot 100 and stayed in the Billboard Top 10 for over 13 weeks. It was also a success internationally and became the All-American Rejects best selling single worldwide. The track peaked in the Top Five in Canada and Australia and in the Top Twenty in several other countries including the UK, Ireland, Germany and New Zealand.

At the end of the decade, Gives You Hell was named the #1 Most Played Song of 2009 on Billboard's Top 40 Chart.

"We are thrilled that we have been played relentlessly over the past year, hopefully people aren't too sick of us by now," said frontman Tyson Ritter. "But truly, we have the best fans in the world. It's because of them that this band is where we are. They are the ones who kept our song on the charts and on the radio for so long and we thank them."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxUATkpMQ8A

42
Beautiful EMINEM

"It's the only one song I could actually listen to and feel OK about. It brings me back to a time when I was really depressed and down, but at the same time it reminds me of what that space is like and what never to go back to. There is a lot of honesty in that song that I wouldn't want to just throw away. I started writing the first verse and half of the second when I was in rehab going through detox. I didn't have a beat in my head or anything like that… I wrote the verse and just knew I wanted it to be a bounce-style, I guess. I got that first bit out and finished it when I got out of rehab, when I relapsed right back into taking pills. If you listen to that song and how it starts off, I'm just so f--king depressed."

Eminem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgT1AidzRWM

41
Stuck On Repeat LITTLE BOOTS

Little Boots originally wrote the song with Australian dance-pop singer Kylie Minogue in mind.

The disco-pop nugget was co-written and produced by Hot Chip's Joe Goddard. His first contact with the Blackpool singer-songwriter came about after she handed to him a demo tape containing an early version of this song. After listening to it he tagged Heskith (aka Little Boots) as "The future of British pop." After posting the song on her MySpace page it became a blogosphere hit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxJmp7KUqjg

40
The Boy Does Nothing ALESHA DIXON

Here's another "most played" tune in my ipod during 2009 and a catchy tune!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn9lLnVurYI

The Boy Does Nothing resembles Lou Bega's 1999 UK #1 hit "Mambo No 5 (A Little Bit Of)" but started over as more jazzy, bluesy music and ended up going there.

We need a good feelgood song now, what with everything going on in the world...

39 (Tie)
Cornerstone ARCTIC MONKEYS

Alex Turner told Uncut Magazine that he wrote this breezy love song about meeting girls in pubs who remind him of the one he's trying to forget, "one morning, quite quickly."

He added: "There's something to be said for writing in the morning. At other points in the day you're a bit more defensive. I saw it as a challenge to write something in a major key, but that wasn't cheesy."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIQz6zZi7R0

&

Sweet Disposition THE TEMPER TRAP

The Temper Trap is an alternative rock quartet from Melbourne, Australia. Their name is a combination of their favourite song "The Lady is a Tramp" and their favourite movie The Parent Trap. The Temper Trap released their debut EP in 2006 in Australia, and two years later recorded their first album, Conditions with English veteran producer Jim Abbiss, who also helmed the debut albums by The Arctic Monkeys and Adele. This atmospheric single was the first release from the album. GREAT TUNE!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN7HQrgakZU

38

21 Guns GREEN DAY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00ikilDxW4

37
E.S.T. WHITE LIES

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SGmBjNzPCM

36
I'm Yours (Bass Over Babylon Mix) JASON MRAZ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkHTsc9PU2A

Already a classic tune from the first decade of the 00's. On the chart dated August 29, 2009 this song logged on for its 70th week on the Billboard magazine's Hot 100, breaking the record for most weeks spent on that chart. The track surpassed LeAnn Rimes "How Do I Live," which had a 69 week run on the survey between June 14, 1997 and Oct. 10, 1998. The song finally departed the Hot 100 after 76 weeks.

I'm Yours is one of 3 songs included in my TOP 100 Songs of 2008 countdown. Along with Just Dance and Single Ladies, this Jason Mraz' tune seems to never go away from the radio, TV and our own lives. It became a memorable 2009 Summer Anthem during a fun weekend at the Jersey Shore with my buddy/ex roomate Said. GOOD TIMES BROTHER, GOOD TIMES!!

35
The Climb MILEY CYRUS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG2zyeVRcbs

It's a fact that I can't stand this annoying brat! But this song (that wasn't written by the chipmunk) got me soooo bad last year! Somber piano, Trilling stringss, Nondescript-yet-inspirational message about overcoming adversity. This song's got it all, and it bears mentioning that Miley sings the bejeezus out of it, too. It literally saved my life one night that I was so drown in dark thoughts. You can't deny it, The Climb is very uplifting...

34
Magnificent (Dave Aude Club Mix) U2

Talking about songs that can lift you up... Or in my case, save me from falling asleep...

During the beginning of the summer of 2009, I went to Rhode Island for the first time . Coincidentally it was the Providence Gay Pride Weekend(Lucky me!).

I went to the Pride Fair, drank beer, saw Debbie Gibson performing at the stage, drank beer, ate greasy food, drank beer, went to the bars and clubs, drank beer, danced and I ended up all drunk seating at the side of the dancefloor of the Mirabar club. I was soooo tired and ready to bed. I was falling asleep by the dancefloor!! (What was wrong with me!!)

Suddenly, Mr. DJ played this amazing remix!! I was so drunk that I couldn't recognized the music or the lyrics! Damn,NOT EVEN BONO'S VOICE!!

I was thinking to myself: What is this song? I know this song but who sings it? Where am I? What song is this?.. AND THEN... THE EDGE's RIFF hit me like an electroshock!!

That was the night that U2 saved my life! (and saved me from "all drunk falling asleep")

(Wanna experience this? Listen to the remix at the 5 mins 9secs time)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So0-pQpkCjY

33
Bonkers DIZZEE RASCAL AND ARMAND VAN HELDEN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci40ae8BlcE

Sometimes, the best thing a song can do is make you shut your eyes and jump up and down rapidly on the spot.

After ‘Dance Wiv Me’ annihilated dancefloors nationwide, no-one expected its follow-up to enjoy anything like the same level of success. Yet ‘Bonkers’ was such a cast-iron belter it made everyone from skinny-jeaned fops to sportswear-clad trainee muggers make the letter ‘T’ with their hands and bellow “TUNE!” long and loud.

32
Walking On A Dream EMPIRE OF THE SUN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMJjF4LHOkY

31
D.O.A. [Death Of Auto-Tune] JAY-Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z13AjI8n4I

30

Seven FEVER RAY

The house-inflected, booming low end of The KNIFE's Silent Shout has been scrubbed away, leaving Karin Dreijer Andersson's voice naked and upfront for her first solo project album as Fever Ray.

Where those on Silent Shout had a witchy scale and ambition appropriate to the hugeness of the songs, Fever Ray's words feel so interior as to seem slightly unhinged.

Indeed, one of Fever Ray's most remarkable aspects comes from how Dreijer Andersson funnels little moments of humor, banality, remembrance, mania, and anxiety through her deadpan affect to create a central character worthy of any psychological horror.

You might even reasonably suggest this record is about psychosis...

"I've got a friend who I've known since I was seven/ We used to talk on the phone/ If we have time/ If it's the right time" she declares conspiratorially, amidst pattering drums and faintly tropical synths in this amazing tune.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I26syp0abpA

Fever Ray's self-titled debut was a constant fount of sinister music video greatness in 2009, and the clip for "Seven" continued that diabolical legacy.
I honestly have no idea what the video's feeble, half-crazed old woman is doing in a barn filled with cows and sheep (and a burly weirdo bodyguard with an out-of-control beard), but it makes for some seriously creeped-out, edge-of-psyche viewing.

29
Bad Romance LADY GAGA

In theory, she was an artist you want to root for all these ideas about art and celebrity and a flair for the dramatic. But the first few singles made the Lady Gaga project feel so presumptuous, her artsy entitlement overwhelming her songs' occasional strengths.

"Bad Romance" was the moment where the music didn't just live up to the (self-inflated) hype, but surpassed it. The track is epic in construction-- by the time she gets to the bridge, more than three minutes in, the realization that there are hooks yet to come is thrilling. It helps that RedOne's production matches the songwriting's torrential drama; the churning, earth-shifting low-frequency synths are a programmatic reflection of the singer's unsteady, perhaps unwise, infatuation. But it's Gaga's performance, the wholly unapologetic fools-rush-in carnal energy, that commitment to emotional bravery in a context of increasingly twee chart pop, that makes "Bad Romance" feel so necessary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I

28
Boom Boom Pow BLACK EYED PEAS

A massive and global hit of 2009. The song was the top-selling single on iTunes last year. Billboard also named this as the best-selling song of 2009 in the US.

The song's first-week total of 465,000 downloads in the US overtook the previous record for a group. Previously the highest sum had been the 253,000 that Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" achieved in the week dated June 21, 2008.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m48GqaOz90

BOOM BOOM POW was the first US #1 for the Peas. Their previous best chart placing had been the #3 ranked singles "Don't Phunk With My Heart" and "My Humps." Fergie had previously recorded three #1s as a solo artist in 2006-07. Prior to this song reaching the summit, there had been only three other instances of groups following individual members to the peak position (excluding one-time acts like USA for Africa).

The first time this occurred was in July 1986 when "Invisible Touch" became Genesis' first chart-topper, following four #1 singles by Phil Collins in 1984-85.

In 1984 John Waite had a #1 hit with "Missing You." Five years later, as a member of the super group Bad English, he topped the chart again with "When I See You Smile."

In July 2000 Matchbox Twenty's "Bent" led the Hot 100 for a week. The previous fall, the band's vocalist Rob Thomas had spent 12 weeks on top as a featured artist on Santana's "Smooth."

27
Love Story TAYLOR SWIFT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xg3vE8Ie_E

"I was going through a situation like that where I could relate. I used to be in high school where you see [a boyfriend] every day. Then I was in a situation where it wasn't so easy for me, and I wrote this song because I could relate to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. I was really inspired by that story. Except for the ending. I feel like they had such promise and they were so crazy for each other. And if that had just gone a little bit differently, it could have been the best love story ever told. And it is one of the best love stories ever told, but it's a tragedy. I thought, why can't you... make it a happy ending and put a key change in the song and turn it into a marriage proposal?"

Taylor Swift

26
Sleepyhead PASSION PIT

This song was originally included on Passion Pit's debut EP, The Chunk of Change, which they released in September 2008. The set was originally a belated Valentine's Day present, which singer Michael Angelakos put together for his girlfriend at Boston's Emerson College.

Sleepyhead samples Irish folk artist Mary O'Hara. Angelakos explained to Ireland's State Magazine:

"I'm big fan of '70s singer/songwriters and just general folk artists. Mary O'Hara was part of the revival over seas and also in the American '70s folk scene. When I came across her traditional folk stuff and I was absolutely blown away. Everything on the record is, it's like 25 tracks, everything is just utter perfect folk music in Gaelic. I was like 'Oh my god, this would be so perfect for me to sample right now. I need to sample this.' I cut it up, worked with it and I finally figured out a way to do it. I never thought I'd have to deal with copyright stuff y'know, the issues that come with another artists publishing. It's a traditional song, she didn't write the song, but I used her actual recording of it. I was a huge fan, a really big fan. I loved her voice. I loved her work with harp so I wanted to integrate it into a song."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zherMkcXdo

25
Halo BEYONCÉ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnVUHWCynig

24
Empire State Of Mind JAY-Z FT. ALICIA KEYS

2009 marked my 5th year anniversary living in this beautiful city. This HOV tune was the confirmation of this supreme pride that I have for living in the Big Apple.

Jay isn't at his best here. His vocal tone and delivery are a little ragged, and on paper "Empire" reads like the literal endpoint to Jay's "black Sinatra" fascination: a late-period piece that somehow becomes his biggest-charting hit. But then Alicia Keys' elemental voice blows in on the chorus, and suddenly, we are all holding hands together and singing along on top of the Empire State Building. That giddy, heart-swelling whoop is what transforms "Empire State of Mind" from über-schmaltz to, well, transcendent über-schmaltz, the sort of song that bids your singing voice up out of you before your conscious mind can even check it.

"In New York/ Concrete jungles where dreams are made of/ There's nothing you can't do," Keys sang. "Now you're in New York/ These streets will make you feel brand new/ The lights will inspire you/ Let's here it for New York, New York, New York."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjsXo9l6I8

23
The Fear LILY ALLEN

Lily Allen has at the very least a visitor's pass to the gauzy, half-real celebrity world she's singing about. That doesn't help "The Fear" work as satire, but it still cuts a good deal deeper than you'd expect.

That's partly due to the irresistible chorus and to Lily's blissfully callous performance-- the way her sweetness makes "I heard people die while they're tryin' to find them" chilling where it could be excruciating. But it's partly down to these crazy times, the consumer economy running off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote and the boom it magicked up melting into air. Lily's character in "The Fear" senses dimly that something's not real and that it might be her, and what makes her dread and confusion convincing is the fact that a lot of people know how she feels. This song, as delicate and pretty as a bubble, is about 2009 in ways its obvious zings can only hint at.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-wGMlSuX_c&feature=fvsr

I And Love And You THE AVETT BROTHERS

This definitely has to be one of the biggest grassroots success stories of the decade.

The Avett Brothers spent years self-releasing albums and self-promoting shows to gradually growing audiences, eventually signing to North Carolina indie label Ramseur before moving up to Sony/BMG/Columbia Records. For their major-label debut, the trio (which includes brothers Scott and Seth and unrelated bass player Bob Crawford) worked with producer Rick Rubin, whose involvement gives the album added critical and commercial cache. With a large and loyal fanbase, they could be as big as Dave Matthews and bring string-band rootsiness to the mainstream. Or not. One thing is for sure: After I and Love and You, they can no longer go back to being the Avett Brothers they once were.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj8HDe5M-Jo

Scott Avett once explained that the song was inspired by a gig at Brooklyn's Galapagos. "It was the coolest place we'd ever been, and the furthest from home we'd ever been in every sense," he said. "So the Brooklyn chorus kind of embodies the rest of the lyrics."

I and Love and You was the centerpiece of their live shows over the summer of 2009, it’s a song they’re obviously proud of and for good reason—it’s stellar!!!

21
The Way It Used To Be PET SHOP BOYS

For nearly 25 years, the Pet Shop Boys have been Euro-disco's poet laureates, setting epigrams worthy of Oscar Wilde to thumping Hi-NRG production. On their excellent 10th album YES, the music leans toward the ornate, with snatches of Tchaikovsky and spaghetti-Western atmospherics enveloping the synths and house beats. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are now past 50, and some songs take a surprisingly philosophical turn.

Immersed in the moving "electro-melodies" of this album during 2009, I can say that quite possibly the finest thing they've written is The Way It Used To Be. This has a very melancholic feel right off Behaviour. And it captures the Pets other great quality in the way that Neil uses the past, nostalgia and memories to act as a salve for the future.

It could have come from late period Abba in the way it describes a tale of betrayed love with its lilting piano chords. The weird electronics two thirds in are fabulous and the Xenomania sheen, especially the female harmony vocal, is a perfect match for the Pets writing. Superb!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPDDNR2PCuc

If The Man Who Can't Be Moved was my break up song of 2008, This beautiful tune has to be the sequal of my everlasting love and devotion to a good man.

"I'd survive with only memories
If I could change the way I feel
But I want more than only memories
The human touch to make them real"

To be continued...