So
finally I'm getting up my annual Top 100 Pop Songs list! I don't know if anybody waits with baited breath for these or anything, but I enjoy doing them as a sort of for-posterity thing.
Anyway, after two years of nonstop In Da Club Dancing Until The World Ends hyper-sampled party hits, I thought the music of 2012 was really refreshing. With my daily commute (in a van that doesn’t have satellite radio or an ipod hookup) and employment in a job that kept music on in the background, this year was the first since 2009 that I’d spend a substantial amount of time captive to the radio, and I was impressed with how
tolerable the music was
. . . but then I read this list and realized that just because I’ve been listening to stations that play music released in the past year doesn’t mean I’ve listening to a
pop station.
I mean, who knew? I grew up in a town where the options were Pop, Oldies, Classic Rock, Country, and the Mom Station*. (Indie hits? New rock? On the
radio? The fuck is this shit? What is this alien place?).
*Mom Station: adult contemporary rock and inoffensive pop hits with no rap and minimal profanity, generally featuring the Delilah program in the evening. THERE IS ALWAYS A MOM STATION IN THE MIDWEST.
So while I was listening to
Macklemore,
Mumford & Sons,
Of Monsters and Men,
M83,
AWOLnation, and
Rise Against, and thinking pop had suddenly gotten miraculously really different and awesome, I apparently just had my dialed tuned to the wrong place >.<
This list was also surprising to me in some ways I think because people in the greater New York area (I use the list published by the Z100 station out of NYC) don’t listen to the same exact music as people in the greater LA. I’m surprised by how many of the songs I just straight-up didn’t hear—and I know I was listening to legitimate pop stations often enough I should have. However, I’ve used
Z100’s list since I started doing this in 2007, so I kept with my tradition and used it this year. If I still don’t recognize half the stuff for next year, maybe I’ll switch to Billboard’s Top 100 or something instead, but for this year . . . well, I had already starting writing my responses to this one before I thought to look up the Billboard chart or a local LA station.
Even once I worked through this list, though, I think 2012 was better and refreshingly different than the two years previous. There was still plenty of the same crap, but there were a lot of novel gems and some genuinely talented artists landing big hits.
As always, a disclaimer that these are
my personal opinion and you are welcome to disagree and express your disagreement, without getting into generalized attacks of taste. So without further ado (and in two parts, because these are massive), my thoughts on the Top 100 Songs of 2012.
( 100-50 CountdownCollapse )Continue to 50-1.
nostalgic
amused
dorky
accomplished
frustrated