Fighting crime in the streets together

And another one. Absolutely no apologies for including Tyga and Ace Hood songs in my top five.

1. Adele: “Someone Like You”. I am a person who voluntarily watches American Idol every week. I get paid to make jokes about it, sure, but I’d probably do it anyway. And so when someone roll through and does one of those gut-busting, heart-stomping piano-ballads to absolute perfection, it hits me hard in a very deep place. And “Someone Like You” is a rare and powerful example of the form. It renders some pretty nuanced and volatile emotions in grand cinematic style without losing the trickiness of it all: Adele is the girl who got left behind, who still painfully misses the person she’s singing to. But she’s also a grown woman, and she understands that this guy has a life after her. She wishes him well. She wishes both of them well. But she can’t let it go, and she has to tell him. That’s not an easy position to capture in a song, but she does it with these simple conversational verses and then this huge lung-wrecking chorus, all over a simple piano line that, when I wrote about this song for Pitchfork, I compared to that skeletal backing guitar line in “Maggot Brain”. That’s probably a few steps too far, but as I said, I’m a sucker for this stuff when it’s done right. Side note #1: Adele’s performance of this song at the Brit Awards was a serious star-crowning moment, the kind of thing we don’t get to see often enough. Side note #2: The guy from Semisonic is the fucking man for helping this song happen.

2. Jamie Woon: “Night Air”. I’m cheating a bit here, since this was a late 2010 single, but I never got around to doing one of these for fourth quarter 2010, and sometimes you have to bend the rules to rep for a perfect pop song. For me, this is immediately the best thing Burial has ever done, though the Burial co-production credit is a bit of a red herring since there’s not a damn thing dubstep about this. Instead, it’s dark, slick synthpop, resting somewhere on a continuum that stretches between late-80s Depeche Mode and mid-00s Justin Timberlake. The track is a rainy, insinuating thump, and Woon’s delivery is this bell-clear tenor that somehow communicates the state of being trapped inside your own head. “Night Air” beautifully conjures the feeling of walking by yourself through a city in the middle of the night, when that weird sort of peaceful purpose surrounds you: “Night air has the strangest flavor / Space to breathe it, time to savor.” And more relevant to my life now, it’s a great fit for the feeling of being up in the middle of the night and trying to lull your kid back to sleep, happily resigned to the fact that it’ll probably take a while. I don’t remember ever hearing another song address that particular feeling, and certainly not this well. Woon probably isn’t going to be the pop star I want him to be; thus far, he hasn’t proven himself very good at performing or making videos. But there are about four songs almost as good as this one on his album Mirrorwriting, and that is a thing worth noticing.

3. Tyga: “Really Raw [ft. Pharrell, Snoop Dogg & the Game]”. A very encouraging sign that the Neptunes could recapture whatever it was that they had in the late 90s and early 00s. It’s hard to say quite why the “Really Raw” beat kicks so hard. It’s all simple stuff: bendy guitar note, well-placed horn stabs, slow-roll bassline, live-sounding brush-snares that skitter through the beat rather than punching through it. And none of these rappers has set the universe on fire lately. But good lord does this thing come together. It’s simple, alchemical rap menace, the same atmospheric dread that makes something like O.C.’s “Time’s Up” sound so perfect. None of the rappers let off any great quotes, but they all sound tough and stick to the beat, and that’s all they need to do for this to work. Even the dumbest lines come out sounding awesome: “I got the blueberry on deck, but not muffins”. And on that hook, Pharrell just gets it: “Gargling with champagne, that’s really raw / Classic millionaire frames, that’s really raw”. He’d know better than me. I could probably sit for an hour and listen to him list off things that are really raw.

4. Ace Hood: “Hustle Hard Remix [ft. Rick Ross & Lil Wayne]”. Lex Luger strikes again. I am still nowhere near sick of this current wave of eerie minor-key bangers, and I’m not sure I ever will be. But “Hustle Hard” stands out even further because it uses those Lex sonics for something other than Ross’s kingpin grandeur or Waka’s wild-out energy. Instead, “Hustle Hard” is a song about hungry desperation, something that comes across way more on the chorus than on any of the verses. But for one verse and that great chorus, I am absolutely on board with Ace Hood; he seems entirely convincing as someone who needs recognition so badly that he’s near the edge of his sanity. Of course, Ross and Wayne both completely throw the song’s central idea in the garbage, but that’s fine with me as long as they’re delivering Rick Ross and Lil Wayne verses. I love the way Wayne delivers that final chorus; everything sounds better in that dude’s voice. So far, this has been a great year for random-ass three-rapper tracks. See also: The Chris Brown song below.

5. Lady Gaga: “Born This Way”. She’s about the least subtle pop figure imaginable; I’ll grant you that. But nothing about this track moves you, I don’t know what to say. It’s a euphorically ridiculous and blatant Madonna bite with at least five gigantic hooks, an annihilating whump-whump-whump beat, and lyrics that deliver that inclusive message in the most transcendently goofy language imaginable. And that’s it. That’s pop music in 2011. It doesn’t get a whole lot better. One thing about this song: In the past three years or so, almost every massive crossover hit has been built on the same pitched-up Europop-house foundation, but there’s been something bloodless and controlled about most of them. When you look at the pop-house of the early 90s— Ultra Nate, say— there’s this gospel-informed reaching-for-transcendence emotional force that doesn’t exist in something like Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite”. Lady Gaga brought that back for this one. You can’t just sing along with “Born This Way”; you have to yell along.

6-10. Cut Copy: “Need You Now”; Chris Brown: “Look at Me Now [ft. Busta Rhymes & Lil Wayne]”; Tyler, the Creator: “Yonkers”; EMA: “California”; Glasser: “Mirrorage (Lindstrom Remix)”