The best songs of 2008
Katy Perry and Duffy may have topped the charts, but the daring and wi
tty Estelle, Dido, MGMT and co made 2008's best tracks
Although lacking a song quite as year-defining as Rihanna’s Umbrella in 2007, the past 12 months saw three singles by female artists dominate the airwaves. Duffy, Katy Perry and Estelle all released records that topped the charts, each of them examples of just how skilful and precision-targeted contemporary songwriters and producers are, and each testament to the power female artists currently enjoy as names above the title, if not — still — behind the scenes. Musically unalike they may be, but Mercy, I Kissed a Girl and American Boy share some significant characteristics. What these tell us about commercially high-achieving music in 2008 — and where it’s headed in the coming year — is instructive, if mostly depressing.
Nobody — not least the dependably candid Estelle herself — would deny that American Boy’s progress up the charts was aided by the presence on the track of Kanye West. Or that Perry’s I Kissed a Girl didn’t gain vital commercial traction from its lyrics’ explicit flirtation with what might be termed safe Sapphism. Nor would any but the most wide-eyed fan pretend that Duffy’s breakthrough hit wasn’t a beneficiary of the appetite for repro Motown created by Mark Ronson’s increasingly ubiquitous supermarket soul. Packaging and marketing, the making of useful alliances, the focus on specific demographics: these are scarcely new developments in pop.
Nor are the convoluted journeys the three singers undertook before striking gold especially remarkable. The record business may still know how to position then promote the hell out of a new artist, but it is also a deeply cautious and slow-moving beast. Perry was a Christian singer who made a gospel album, jumped ship for the manufactured-pop scene in America, changed her surname and image and, after several false starts, finally hit pay dirt. Duffy is a failed Welsh X Factor competitor who was taken under the wing of a management company, which apparently required a bewildering three years to hone its new signing’s sound before she was deemed fit for public consumption. And Estelle was briefly hailed as the queen of British hip-hop in 2004, had a couple of hits, fell out with her label and had to cross the Atlantic to achieve the sort of success many felt she so richly deserved.
Look at our selection of 2008’s best songs (below). It is, inevitably, subjective, but our conviction, based on 12 months of close scrutiny, is that this year has been one that fizzed with creativity, daring and innovation — and authenticity. On all 20 songs, you can hear the artist: they occupy their creation and you have faith in it, and them, accordingly. That isn’t to say that every track represents confessional catharsis. Elbow’s Weather to Fly is undoubtedly autobiographical, imbued with nostalgia and alive with emotion; Ladyhawke’s Dusk Till Dawn is comparatively lightweight and trivial. Yet the latter is no less genuine as a document of its creator’s passion and commitment.
The only one of our trinity of chart-toppers to make the list, you will notice, is Estelle. That is not just because American Boy is a sensational song. It is also, crucially, because the singer is absolutely in the thick of it: she may have packed her bags for New York, but, within the superfly grooves of will.i.am’s arrangement, her real voice, her gobby, take-it-or-leave-it, wilful west London personality, isn’t just present and correct, it’s all over the track.
Contrast that with Perry and Duffy. The former can’t be blamed for opportunism — what is the pop business, after all, but a stage for people who are prepared to grab the main chance and hold on to it for dear life? And I Kissed a Girl’s bubblegum techno/glam-rock is (thanks, surely, to Cathy Dennis’s typically astute contribution) an addictive sonic brew, bristling with sass and swagger, albeit so closely modelled on P!nk’s brand of sexually ambiguous porno-pop, it’s practically cohabiting. But the overriding impression is of a singer who, rather like Nicole Kidman’s gimlet-eyed, morally flexible weather girl in the film To Die For, will try just about anything to become a star. You can’t deny the gambit succeeded. Listen to I Kissed a Girl, then to MGMT’s Time to Pretend. Both are songs about fantasy scenarios, tongue-in-cheek projections of one existence onto another. Both use bracingly eccentric pop music to get their message across. Only one is a humorous, satirical burst of social commentary, and it isn’t Perry’s.
Duffy, in terms of image a wonderfully brassy-looking, fag-ash bottle blonde, as a singer comes across as someone with a voice to launch a thousand cruise ships, not tear at the emotional fabric of a song. This is most apparent live, where her strange tentativeness seems less to do with a naturally shy demeanour than with an artistic detachment. But it’s there on disc, too. Her songs are superbly designed but stubbornly motionless vehicles for her foghorn rasp. Mercy needs to be messy with longing, lust, confusion and tear-drenched mascara. But it’s immaculate, not a hair or emotion out of place. Looking for a masterclass in the classic soul-music mix of restraint and urgency? That’ll be Al Green’s All I Need.
When Estelle sizes up all those American males, there is a sense that, the minute she stops scoffing at the less prepossessing among her suitors, she’s going to wrestle one of the prize specimens to the floor. She’s not playing at it. One of these three songs will stand the test of time. Two of them will be influential in the short term: expect to hear lots more sexless retro soul and innuendo pop in 2009. So, Estelle is the odd one out here. What else sets her apart? Oh, she made one of the songs of the year. DC
1 TIME TO PRETEND — MGMT
The year’s most memorable synthesizer line, lashings of brass, cymbals and drums, a giant psych-pop of a tune, a lyric that seemed both to satirise and aspire to the rock-star lifestyle, and a wonderfully shambolic payoff (“I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah!’ ”): the American duo reminded us just how classic but cussedly individual singles should be made.
2 GRAFTON STREET — Dido
No more coffee-table music for Dido. Her album Safe Trip Home was a giant step forward, and Grafton Street — a song about the death of her father — was its sad but beautiful core. Empathetic keyboards by Brian Eno and an unlikely recorder solo frame the acceptance of loss: “Nothing’s left that’s safe here now, / Nothing will bring you home, / Nothing can bring us the peace / We had in Grafton Street.”
3 WEATHER TO FLY — Elbow
Inducing festival audiences to cry, the Mercury judges to make good past mistakes and — hallelujah — the British public finally to reach for their wallets, the Bury quintet showed on this sublime, rumbling Seldom Seen Kid standout that when it comes to combining unblinking lyrics with emotionally electrifying dynamics, nobody does it better.
4 ALL I NEED — Al Green
With a stunning band driven by the Roots’ ?uestlove on drums, Green recaptures his finest form. This unhurried groove is decorated by delicate guitar lines from Spanky Alford, subtle touches from the Dap-Kings Horns and Adam Blackstone’s yearning bass. A lot of stuff gets called “soul” these days — here’s the real deal.
5 UNFORGETTABLE SEASON — Cut Copy
“Australian indie-electronic trio,” says Cut Copy’s AMG entry. Funny, that sounds like a wall of guitar. And one of the year’s greatest bass lines. Bar one wheezing synth, the instruments that underpin Dan Whitford’s searing vocal about romantic misunderstanding, loss and nostalgia are rock staples. Wielded by indie-electronic geniuses.
6 SINGLE LADIES (PUT A RING ON IT) — Beyoncé
Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce album was a mixed bag, but once you’d waded through the dreary ballads, you were rewarded with this superbly produced and admirably direct piece of advice to the playas.
7 AMERICAN BOY — Estelle featuring Kanye West
Four years after missing out on her expected British breakthrough, Estelle Swaray re-emerged in New York, packing a formidable pop-soul punch in the company of Kanye West, just one of many American boys queuing up to work with her. This fabulous song provided her with her first No 1.
8 WHEN THEY COME TO MURDER ME — Black Francis
The Pixies may have split up again, but the artist formerly known as Frank Black has reconnected with the fierce, weird creativity that sparked his old band’s best songs. Reclaiming the “Black Francis” name is entirely appropriate for this twisted gem.
9 SEE THESE BONES — Nada Surf
The New York power-pop trio came up with 2008’s most overpoweringly propulsive and gloriously euphoric song. If you aren’t shaken, stirred and devastated by this, you need help. Fast.
10 LOUISE — Tony Christie
When you think of the trashy cash-ins Christie could have made after Amarillo’s success, his decision to turn to the songwriters of his hometown for his fine Made in Sheffield album is to be applauded. This stripped-down rethinking of the Human League classic is eerily wonderful. Guy Barker’s trumpet solo will haunt you.
11 WAVING FLAGS — British Sea Power
An open invitation to eastern European workers to surge through our customs controls, stimulate the economy and drink heroically. “Are you of legal drinking age?” asked BSP, “On minimum wage? Well, welcome in from across the Vistula.” And an amazing tune.
12 MAKE MY DAY — Common
Fans of Gnarls Barkley disappointed with their second album can turn instead to this track, on which Common’s elegantly crafted rap is augmented by a pretty hook from Cee-Lo and a thumping beat courtesy of Mr DJ. It would have been a great summer soundtrack, if it hadn’t come out in December.
13 DUSK TILL DAWN — Ladyhawke
A great big Frankie Says Relax of a bass line, the cool-as-a-cucumber, jaw-droppingly pop-savvy Pip Brown promising to “Bang, bang, bang on the wall, from dusk till dawn” — you get the overpowering sense that with a song this good as its soundtrack, that would be a party you’d kill to attend.
14 SUN IS SHINING — The Fireman
The latest collaboration between Paul McCartney and Youth invokes the “anything goes” spirit of the White Album, while never forgetting that McCartney’s specialist subject is the Melodic Pop Song. If the lovely chorus doesn’t get you, the infectious enthusiasm in the vocal will.
15 I CAN’T STAY — The Killers
For a synth-pop band, the Killers did a mighty poor job of sticking to the script here. They veered thrillingly off-menu, with harp, sax, castanets, a steel band and bossa nova beats replacing electro-disco ones, and one of Brandon Flowers’s most beautiful melodies and personal lyrics.
Related Links
16 LIKED YOU BETTER BEFORE — Little Jackie
Just think Macy Gray, back when she was good. This friendly slice of pop R&B challenges Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain for lyrical complexity: “I liked you better before you knew me.” Huh?
17 BRUISES — Chairlift
Many found this Young Folks-for-2008 debut single by the Brooklyn band maddeningly arch, and its use in an iPod ad didn’t help. Less uptight folk just listened to its child-simple bass, cheap drum-machine beats and girl-boy two-hander lyrics, and thought: “I want to hate this, but I’m in love.”
18 DADDY’S GONE — Glasvegas
The lyrics, about a father walking out, are a mix of denial and defiance — “I won’t be the lonely one / Sitting on my own and sad / A 50-year-old/ Reminiscing what I had” — but the music, emulating Spector’s Wall of Sound, is glorious.
19 DID YOU MISS ME — Lindsey Buckingham
Presumably he can’t still be singing about Stevie after all these years? Whoever this is about, it’s a classic Buckingham double-sider: it glides along on a sea of pop perfection and only later begins to seem the work of a tormented obsessive.
20 CALL ME — Merz
There are few more exquisite sounds in modern music than when Merz starts layering his voice, and this reworking of the You’ve Got a Friend theme — “When your grip on life has all but gone / Call me and I’ll come” — allows him to build to a huge layered chorus, then cap that with the dreamiest of lingering fade-outs.
Credit:
The best songs of 2008 - Times Online