The 21 Best Tracks of 2016
2016 - you know, it wasn’t great. But it was for music, especially R&B. Presenting my favorite 21 songs of the year.
21. Ariana Grande - Into You
Should reasonably be higher but I wanted to kick this off with a bop. It's pop perfection, just as concerned with the tease and the chase as it is with that utterly satisfying explosion of a chorus. The intro is pulse-pounding and sexy, the lyrics are just inky and coy enough to hint at looming high-speed danger, and Ariana sounds head and shoulders above her peers as she twirls that complicated syntax around the synapses-firing disco squelches on that beast of a hook. It should have been bigger than it was but we can rest easy knowing Ariana and the rest of her wholly solid Dangerous Woman LP gave us the pop star glo-up of the year.
20. K. Michelle - All I Got
Bless K. Michelle for bringing the wedding song back. This year's answer to Calling All Lovers, K. Michelle continued to challenge Tamar Braxton in a battle of "Who's the most extra?" with an album titled More Issues Than Vogue and one particular song that contained the lyric "Save if for The Shade Room!" She's a treasure, a multi-faceted singer who infamously wanted to name her album I Ain't White, But I Hope You Like It after label execs bristled at her love of country ballads. "All I Got" isn't quite full-on country, but there's definitely a hint of her heavy Memphis twang to be heard over those proudly unfashionable throwback keyboard flourishes and canned finger snaps. How starry-eyed and achingly sincere, the type of heartfelt, slightly cheesy ballad that got left behind with the Clinton administration. You might not respect it, but I sure do.
19. Whitney - No Woman
I regret to inform everyone that despite the grave and utter disrespect of trying to record music under the name "Whitney,"No Woman" is a very excellent song. Musical Kodachrome, "No Woman" is wandering nostalgia, a road trip with no set destination and the sound of a man only certain that he loves his own freedom, at least for right now. Warm, lazy, and sublime; a song even more potent when staring down the barrel of a long, dark winter.
18. Maxwell - All The Ways Love Can Feel
R&B mostly poked and prodded this year. It picked at scabs that hadn't even begun to heal. It looked mostly inward as a tool of reflection against crushing external forces. Simply put, it was political, hardly defined by the smooth textures and ear-pleasing harmonies that it typically brings mind. Maxwell, on the other hand, was chill. And that's not a bad thing in the slightest. He was R&B's sexy and stately Romeo, ungodly handsome in a classic black suit in press photos and projecting a sensuous calm when most others grew thorns. Frankly, we needed him, and boy does blackSUMMERSnight sound plush. That's not to say he's simple minded - like Miguel the year before him, manners of love were hardly earthbound. On the standout opener, "All The Ways Love Can Feel" he's smack dab in the middle of examining love in matters of universal law. The band swells, his falsetto soars; it's 5 minutes in a sea of pillows. "Class is in session tonight." Call me Mr. Perfect Attendance.
17. Dawn Richard - Lazarus
The first of two songs with this title on the list, Dawn's take on the biblical figure is the quiet centerpiece on an album built up of tiny rebellions. Once a member of Danity Kane, Richard has now assumed the mantle of R&B shapeshifter, a surprisingly adept creative force who has covertly shaken up R&B formulas and married the genre to emerging tech and an omnivorous sense of musical fluidity. Without a major label, Dawn is free to be as prolific and boundless in following the whims of her vast imagination as she wants to be. The result is songs like "Lazarus" a weird grab bag of orchestral elements, vibraphones, and a kaleidoscope of bubbling synths and breakbeats. It's a glitchy version of Bjork's Vespertine era, recalling the melody of "Heirloom" and placing Dawn somewhere just outside the mortal coil.
My ignorance is a human thing
My ascension is a spirit thing
I can be both in the same
I didn't change, I became
16. Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam - A 1000 Times
Hamilton Leithauser's signature howl has always carried with it a sense of madness. He's perpetually uncorked, a geyser of emotion that strains every note as if he can force his tale of unrequited love into reality by sheer force of will. Here, he's magnified by some unrepentant snare drums and then supplemented with a sense of wistful romanticism via Rostam's trademark baroque plumes. It's a melancholy song, veiled in a little bit of delusion and the pang of an ignored heart. A hill worth dying on.
15. Blood Orange - Best To You (Feat. Empress Of)
As lively as the Afro-pop percussion is on this track, make no mistake, this is a sad song. The beat is so frantic, so relentless in its sunny optimism that it almost makes Lorely Rodriguez sound like a tragic heroine instead of just tragic. "Best To You" is about giving everything to a one-sided relationship and losing every aspect of yourself in the process. Conformity and expectation erases identity when it's inconvenient; "I can't be the girl you want but I can be the thing you throw away." There are few moments in music this year as dynamic as Rodriguez on that bridge section, the cadence of "I feel my bones/I feel my bones/I feel my bones crack in your arms" racing ahead of the beat and then eventually finding a home in its tiny pockets. Dev Hynes is the nagging internal monologue here, asking "Do you really want to?" to a person willing to strip herself of pride and self in the name of an unhealthy love. That beat isn't happy anymore; it's a ticking clock.
14. Tinashe - Sacrifices
Tinashe, the world's most misunderstood pop star, is mad. She should be! Clearly trapped in a cold war with a label that sees her as more of a brainless pop vixen than the strange and moody R&B provocateur that she is, Tinashe has been in release date purgatory for over a year now as radio-friendly singles (Chris Brown! Bikinis!) have all failed to make any sort of dent in the charts. Tinashe's having trouble carving out a public persona, her stunning good looks somehow working against her, belying her own artistic ambitions and projecting an unfortunate air of disposability.
Seemingly at a stalemate, Tinashe shrewdly found a solution to her Gordian Knot, releasing Nightride, presumably the dark half of Joyride's forthcoming pop gloss. Billed as a mixtape, Nightride is the Tinashe that exists in the shadows, behind closed bedroom doors, and alongside unmarked highways. It's dark, ambient, moody, aggressive, and above all, arty. There's nary a radio hit here, instead it's an extension of a natural persona that her most adamant fans (ahem...me) have long known is the element she's most confident and ambitious within. It shouldn't have to be this hard.
NIghtride is slick and distant by design. Even on "Sacrifices," which by all accounts is a pure sex jam, she's essentially impenetrable, burying X-rated lyrics underneath a Metro Boomin beat that threatens to swallow them whole. It's not an accident - the pre-chorus boasts, "It's not my M.O. to fall in love/ but fuckin' 'round with me is dangerous." Eventually the veneer cracks; to love her is to maybe never really know her.
13. Bon Iver - 29 #Strafford APTS
The patch of static that obscures the delivery of "alimony butterflies" is reason enough to include this song. Combining the intimacy of For Emma, the robust and dense instrumentation of Bon Iver, Bon Iver, and the fearless experimentation that defines 22, A Million, "29 #Strafford APTS" finds Justin Vernon exploring a new kind of austere beauty, one that weaves in an out of clarity and hides as much as it delineates. It's another instance of Vernon coining his own phrases to convey feelings and thoughts that could only exist in clouds before. The track is a sensory bubble and a personal mythology that unravels with decay. It's faded paper, burnt embers and chalk dust; really just a flicker that burns bright and then extinguishes.
12. Rihanna - Woo
Many were disappointed in Anti the night it dropped unexpectedly and unceremoniously free to download. I was not one of them. In the grand scheme of female pop star deconstructions I knew instantly that it would be iconic. It was messy. It pissed people off. It was an artist statement that spat on almost everything that came before it. Rihanna was sad, disorganized and maybe a little pretentious. It felt like American Life, an album that practically begged to be misunderstood the second it dropped. On a macro-level, it was also easily the best thing Rihanna's ever done, the type of next phase re-imaging that pop stars can start to build legacies on. To be universally loved from the start honestly would have meant failure.
"Woo" was my favorite. Perhaps the most aggressively anti-pop on the album, the entire song is see-saw nausea, a lumbering lead foot of a beat, and atonal guitar chords stretched to infinity. There's no hook, outside of some Travis Scott "woos" but it's completely captivating for its 4-minute run out of something like sheer hypnosis. Rihanna's filtered vocals are devastating, all stone-faced resentment and clenched teeth anger. Most singers (the technically "good" ones) can't do this. It's brazenly defiant; a bloodshot eyeball of a pop song.
11. Miranda Lambert - Highway Vagabond
Those thinking Miranda Lambert would approach her first post-divorce album with a sledgehammer and a handful of sequels to "Gunpower and Lead" will be sorely disappointed. Instead, Miranda gave us a 24-track double album more concerned with resignation and growth than spite and vengeance. It's a thoughtful rebuke to expectations, one more concerned with sending a "fuck you" to modern country radio than to her ex-husband. There's plenty of self-deprecation, plenty of good old-fashioned country weepers and plenty of showstopping moments and career-defining fits of songwriting. Stunning opener "Runnin' Just in Case" could have been plucked off Joshua Tree. A smattering of tracks have a ethereal gossamer coating that recalls Daniel Lanois' work on Emmylou Harris' renaissance album, Wrecking Ball.
It's an abundance of top-shelf material, but it's oddly enough the breezy road trip stomper "Highway Vagabond" that emerges as the standout. Speaking the the album's theme of restlessness, "Vagabond" puts Miranda as the enthusiastic nomad over a lively drum groove, reverb-heavy guitars and a thudding bass progression. It's the odd duck track, a little taste of pot smoke experimentation in a genre that tends to villainize renegades far more frequently than it claims to revere them.
10. Chance The Rapper - Same Drugs
Chance was joy in a year where there wasn't much of it. Coloring Book was a spiritual experience, an album that surrendered in helplessness to a higher power and basked in the exaltation of it. It's rarer that I don't get choked up watching one of his live performances - there's just so much excitement in the mere act of existing. His ESPYs tribute to Muhammad Ali damn near destroyed me. Frankly speaking, Chance is as good a reminder as any of why we should actually want to be alive.
"Same Drugs" isn't really about drugs. It's about growing apart, the sense of loss that comes with growing up, and the enduring legacy of things that were. It's simple in sound compared to some of the other more ecstatic tracks on the mixtape - a simple acoustic piano carries him most of the way before a swelling, rewinding midsection sends the song to the heavens - but it's also, in its own quiet way, the most affecting. There's inherent sadness of display, but Chance finds something achingly beautiful in something difficult and confronts a challenge with a compassionate embrace. "Don't forget the happy thoughts/all you need is happy thoughts," he sings right before its climax. It's not an easy sentiment to model yourself after these days. He keeps finding a way to maintain the beaming smile you see on his album cover and I'm grateful there's that.
9. David Bowie - Lazarus
That first Friday of January when Blackstar came out I had a lengthy conversation with a coworker about how terrific it was. Amazing that an artist a year shy of 70 was still creating music that didn't sound like anything he'd done before. I listened to it all weekend. On Monday he was gone. I don't have anything to say about Bowie that hasn't been said by people far more knowledgeable and encyclopedic about his career than I have already said. I knew him simply as a genius, someone who was unapologetic in his creativity and oddness, one half of the greatest celebrity couple of all time and someone who in his own way paved the way for me and what it meant to exist as a man in the modern world. I, weirdly, consider 1995's "Strangers When We Meet" to be one of the most beautiful songs ever written. He was cool in a way cool typically wasn't, at least not before.
When I brought myself to watch the "Lazarus" video a few days later I cried. It was his goodbye, at least to a mortal plane. The first line is "Look up here, I'm in heaven" and it only gets more poignant and haunting from there. The jazz instrumentation shuffles forward in noir shadows, his voice creaks and crags with weathered intensity, and the end explodes into an harmonious cacophony, a final fireworks display of noise and life. It's scary, in the way that death probably is. It's also beautiful, an elegiac confrontation with a final chapter that finds solace and pacification in the end with a rapt bluebird metaphor. "Ain't that just like me."
8. Frank Ocean - Ivy
Like a thumb scrolling though an iPhone camera roll, Frank's long-awaited Blonde was somehow rooted in both memory and short attention spans. An interrupted mind, Blonde is almost always painfully nostalgic, painting three dimensional portraits of lost loves and hard lessons that end up seemingly tossed away at random by new distractions and new tangents. You can see it working as it moves, his voice and instrumentation just following the impulses of the brain and that tricky way the mind processes complex thoughts with no concern for narrative through-lines. Even at his most fluid, Ocean is still quite the scene setter. "Ivy" is a dream-like diary entry, all California beach haze and faded sunsets. Reflecting on early love and heartbreak, Ocean paints in broad strokes and details alike, reconciling raw nerve hurt and misery with the wistful Telephoto lens of time. "Ivy" snaps out of its navel gazing with a distorted squeal and a rejection of complete thoughts and resolute process. On to the next mini universe.
7. Angel Olsen - Sister
No surprise that an album that saw Angel Olsen transform from lo-fi folky into whatever the hell she wants to be has its best moment teeming with existential thumb twiddling. From the shimmering pop star of "Intern" to her stint as as a revved-up Roy Orbison on "Shut Up and Kiss Me," My Woman saw Olsen set her own bar and outright reject any "sad girl" pigeonhole previously bestowed upon her. Also not a shocker that she pulls everything off effortlessly, delivering a pop-rock album that's almost disconcerting in its apparent ease. Credit to Olsen's commanding vibrato that highlight "Sister" makes it about 4 and a half minutes deep until you realize you've kind of just been listening to rambling. Olsen is introspective and longing here, hitting the same notes and shuffling down life's road. Then everything changes. A whirlwind climax arrives without warning and suddenly Olsen finds herself smack dab in the middle of the best Fleetwood Mac song you've never heard, the "All my life I thought had changed' refrain clanking against heartstrings before giving out to a jaw-dropping crescendo of guitar shredding and piano plinks. It's a true rock star moment from someone who could still find a way to slip out a back door unnoticed. It's whatever the non-garish version of a mic drop is.
6. Anohni - Drone Bomb Me
There is absolutely nothing subtle about "Drone Bomb Me" and that's the point. Usually political art is wrapped in allegory but Anohni and the whole of the excellent Hopelessness are fixated on the dangerous weapon known as empathy. There's no wiggle room here, no metaphors there to mask and assuage guilt. It's an album built on disgust for passive politics and a call to arms for compassion. It should be annoying, but the connection is just too strong. Anchored by a devastating music video with a wonderful starring performance from Naomi Campbell, "Drone Bomb Me" provides a chaotic Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never production and forces the listener to hear Anohni sing from the perspective of a 9-year-old pleading to be the next target of a drone bomb after the death of her family by one. With lines like "Blow my head off/ explore my crystal guts/ lay my purple on the grass," Anohini creates an uncomfortable situation for the listener as she puts a distinct character behind an abstract reality of modern warfare. It's upsetting, weirdly gorgeous, and necessary - a form of protest music that goes beyond object reality and into a realm of overwhelming mindfulness. More crucial than ever, even as that Hopelessness alum title feels even more relevant than it did in March.
5. Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker
The thing about "You Want It Darker" is that it's not a question. A month shy of his death, Leonard Cohen released his last masterpiece, a hauntingly sparse and frank exploration of mortality, morality and legacy. On the title track, Cohen remains as weighty as ever, teeing up a direct confrontation with God and questioning a powerful being whom by all accounts has designed and fated man to an unending cycle of decay, entropy and suffering. Cohen's gravel voice is its own kind of death, a force that speaks with authority and a collected sense of calm resignation in the dwindling days of life. There's also a direct link to Cohen's Jewish heritage as multiple lyrics allude to the Holocaust ("a million candles burning for a hope that never came") and the haunting sounds of a Synagogue choir from Montreal. We hear them sing "Hineni, Hineni," which translates from Hebrew to "Here I am." Of course the same can be read as "You want me to die, I'll do it." After all, what choice do we have? Like Bowie, it's the gift of a genius able to reflect and create art around the context of their own last chapters. Not only that, but with the creative spirit and musical approach of someone clearly not creatively tapped. I can't think of anything more powerful.
4. Solange - Cranes In The Sky
It goes without saying 2016 was tough. More than tough, it was psychologically damaging for most of us. From police-sanctioned murders, to the Pulse nightclub shooting to a hellish election cycle that ushered forth a daily stream of unthinkable new realities, 2016 was the year that "self-care" became an actual means of survival.
"Cranes in the Sky" is about the struggle to do the work, the constant obstructions that cloud our pathways to recovery and the endless short-term solutions we find ourselves seeking just to make it through the day. It's one of the earlier tracks on Solange's breakthrough A Seat at the Table, an album that goes on to find power in a black existence currently on the front lines of a cultural war. It's a warm track even as it aches with frustration and exhaustion, its relaxed beat giving Solange all the space she needs to say her peace and to start looking for it too.
3. Kanye West - Ultralight Beam (Feat. Chance The Rapper, The-Dream, Kelly Price, & Kirk Franklin)
"We don't want no devils in the house! We want The Lord!" "Ultralight Beam" is gospel turned ghostly. As long as Kanye is on the track it's gospel with its guts scooped out, his presence at the top a mournful benediction that urges us to "Pray for Paris. Pray for the parents" with none of the fervor or deeply felt soul typically associated with the genre. Kanye, in the year of our Lord 2016 where he arguably became indefensible before checking into the hospital for what appeared to a mental breakdown, is mournful, a shell of himself 12 years removed from "Jesus Walks." The choir comes in to raise the rafters and you get goosebumps but then he disappears quietly into one of the many glacial pockets of silence.
It's like Kanye's bowing out for those who deserve a higher power, the three wisemen of featured guests who can actually provide the listener some balm of salvation. Kelly Price comes in and provides a sorrowful pulse, followed closely by scene stealer Chance The Rapper, who sounds like a literal angel form Heaven rapping about the salvation he found in his daughter between Arthur references an a warm brass section that follows him like sun rays into the empty church Kanye started off in. Kirk Franklin appears for the closing prayer and then the choir turns ominous again, possibly a forecast for the war-with-himself conceit Kanye outlines for the otherwise very scattershot Life of Pablo. "Ultralight Beam" is all silence. It offers spaces for doubt and self-hate and dissatisfaction to fester and forces them to be exorcised by glimmers of light. He can't provide those himself. He needs a community. He needs a church outside of himself.
2. Beyoncé - All Night
Of the many (and I mean many) showstopping moments on Beyoncé's monumental, career-defining Lemonade, there are some obvious standouts. The overtly political and controversial "Formation," "Sorry" and its bouncing. detached hostility, and of course, the seemingly stream-of-consciousness peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of the tinkling "Hold Up." But it's "All Night" that my mind (no, my heart) goes to when I think of the project. In the end Lemonade is about forgiveness and "All Night" is the sterling beacon of grounded optimism the album needs to succeed. Multi-faceted in approach, Lemonade turns what could be a simple narrative about infidelity and weaves in an endless array of microcosms related to heritage, familial pathologies, black experience and most importantly, black womanhood and the emotional gauntlet black women are expected to endure in silence. It's heavy stuff for Beyoncé, and while I don't need to write any more on what's been exhaustively covered by many, I still can work myself into tears thinking about the powerful denouement that leads into the conclusion. Grandmother, the alchemist. You spun gold out of this hard life. Conjured beauty from the things left behind. Found healing where it did not live. Discovered the antidote in your own kitchen. Broke the curse with your own two hands.
There's a lot of emotion to absorb from track 1 to 11 and "All Night" is the much-needed release, a stunningly beautiful declaration of love and forgiveness that mends fences and moves courageously forward on leaps of faith and foundations of love built up over time like a fortress. Armed with a "Spottieottiedopaliscious" horn sample, soaring strings and Bey's own songbird falsetto, "All Night" is unapologetically bright, the song that helps transform what on the surface could have been a vanity project into something stunningly vital, complex, and powerful. You can feel the history in it. It may not be the most groundbreaking track on the album but it is unquestionably my favorite. The one that makes my heart swell. "How I've missed you, my love"
1. Mitski - Your Best American Girl
The best song of the year is a cultural and ideological battle over parenting styles! That's simplifying "Your Best American Girl" of course, a track that a clickbait-y site like Vox could reasonably deem "an intersectional pop song." So much of "Puberty 2" is fraught with anxiety, doubt and the constant struggle to just be comfortable with simply being, but it's on "Your Best American Girl" that Mitski illuminates a narrative deeply personal to her own half-Japanese upbringing and manages to craft something universal in its own threadbare honesty and pragmatic acceptance of how the harsh realities of identity politics trickle down into unexpected places. Ultimately, Mitski comes to a realization. The gently strummed verses are all wistful noodling and "what if" daydreaming only to be interrupted by the fuzz-rock distortion of a monster chorus where the true epiphany occurs; "Your mother wouldn't approve/ of how my mother raised me/ but I do/ I finally do." In dramatic terms, it's a reclamation of self, a carefully considered conclusion that makes peace with things that can't be changed, conformed or compromised. On a more base level, it's just one hell of a kiss-off, one that wrings a snarling feedback-filled hook for all its worth and then quietly leaves it lingering with a stiff upper lip. A powerful statement of being and my favorite song of the year.
