"Time" Magazine's Top 10 Songs of 2008

Kanye West and P!nk have topped Time Magazine's list of top 10 songs this year. Though I have to agree that Love Lockdown was a really good song, I don't think it was the best song of the year. That being said, I will be posting my own "End Of 2008" list next week with my picks of the best of the best.

1. Kanye West's Love Lockdown

Singing in an Auto-Tuned monotone with little regard for melody, West sounds ghostly as he recounts his romantic failures in brutal detail. Just when "Love Lockdown" seems too brittle to sustain itself, humanity arrives in the form of an army of Japanese taiko drums. At first it sounds like pop-guns going off, but the drumming gets faster, warmer, wilder, and matched against West's distant vocals "Love Lockdown" turns into a dance song about misery — far closer to "Love Will Tear Us Apart" than any hip-hop ancestor. It's easily the most interesting pop experiment this year, and, if you grant its premise and stick with it, also the best.

2. Pink's So What

Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me a River" remains the greatest rebound song of all time, but at least Pink can say she made a spirited run at the crown. "So What" packs in chanting, hand claps, a nursery rhyme melody and a chorus overdubbed until it sounds like 50 Pinks are calling her ex "a tool." It's the least subtle act of pop vengeance since Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes lit a match. It's also astonishingly fun thanks to the rubber-ball bounce of producer Max Martin's keyboard hooks and Pink's swaggering, emotional vocal. You definitely don't want to break up with her, but no song this year was as much fun to go out with.



3. Ida Maria's Oh My God

4. Lil Wayne's A Milli

Like all rappers, Lil Wayne rarely lets a song go by without declaring at some point that he's ill. The difference is that he really seems to be. The backing track here — little more than a bass kick, some plastic-y snares and an endlessly looped sample of the words "a milli a milli a milli" stolen from A Tribe Called Quest's "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo" — never coheres into a chorus, and all the elements move in different rhythms. It's like hearing a song through cough syrup — perfect for Wayne, who wheezily declares "I don' write shit 'cause I don't got time," and then conjures up enough crazy, off-balance wordplay to convince you he's either a liar or a savant. Either way, he's definitely some kind of ill.

5. Fleet Foxes' White Winter Hymnal

6. Jonas Brothers' Burnin' Up

7. Beyoncé's Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)

People who don't dance usually don't make exceptions, but I saw a man who has abstained from any rhythmic movement for nearly a decade crack within 20 seconds of hearing this ludicrously infectious Beyoncé hit. The rhythm is double-dutch. The lyrics are liberating if your idea of liberation ended with Gloria Gaynor. The melody is — who are we kidding? It's not a melody, just the sound track from the '80s arcade hit Frogger. Still, "Single Ladies" works because Beyoncé cuts through all the racket like a train whistle and she seems to believe every word she sings, while the slightly menacing minor chords that creep in halfway through keep things from getting too repetitive.

8. MGMT's Time to Pretend

9. Duffy's Rockferry

From the way the piano bangs away at the opening chords, it's clear that 24-year-old Aimee Anne Duffy isn't planning on just singing a song: she's going to announce her arrival. Duffy delivers on the fanfare with an audacious vocal test drive that shows off impressive control in the first verse and the full fusillade of her range in the third. She makes pit stops along the way in Memphis and Motown for inspiration — and maybe takes a little too much inspiration — but as debuts go, it's hard to think of a recent one that's as instantly attention grabbing.

10. Gnarls Barkley's Going On

2006's "Crazy" was so convincingly insane that most people were disappointed with this reasonable-seeming follow-up. "Going On" is just a sweet soul song about moving past a relationship without bitterness ("May my love lift you up to the place you belong/ But I'm going on"). Still, it's hardly dull. Danger Mouse fills the track with little quarks and shooting stars that rotate deferentially around Cee-Lo's interplanetary vocals. If that's not weird enough for you, at least they made a strange video. [x]