Exist Yesterday.

Not because posting them publicly will make me any likelier to do them, but because the best face forward they put on my ambitions is a sop to my ego.

• Make a schedule. Stick to it.
• Put away the devices and pick up a book.
• Read, and listen, and watch, without planning to write about it later.
• Spend money in a manner consistent with my income.
• Get rid of stuff. Throw it away, sell it, put it in storage.
• Talk to mental health professionals rather than to the Internet.
• Exercise. Sleep. Eat food.
• Take walks.
• Dress well.
• Write creatively.
• Make a new friend.
• Talk to the friends I have.
• Smile.
• Shit or get off the pot.

In the interests of total transparency, this is a notice that I’ve called a mulligan on my 100 favorite songs of 2011 and swapped out three or four songs for ones I realized too late that I liked more. But obviously, nobody who is not me should care.

That’s right, jesus christ not another one of these things. Nothing very surprising if you’ve been following along. Still wanted to do it.

This was both one of the best years of my life and one of the worst. I have zero perspective on important things about the year, much less on its music. These are a hundred songs I liked listening to while it happened, and which I haven’t got sick of yet. I’ve linked to where I’ve written about them, if applicable. Have a great day.

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WALE FT. RICK ROSS & JEREMIH “THAT WAY”

If there are horns in the arrangement, I’m probably going to overrate the song unless I spend enough time with it to move past them. Even the limited fanfare here seduced me into thinking warm thoughts about the song, even as I acknowledged in my blurb that the sentiments being expressed were sociopathic. Jeremih’s sighing mellifluity and a leftover affection for Rick Ross can make it easy to ignore, but the core of the song is still “I don’t recollect your name” and “girl can we get that way.” At least act like you’re putting some effort into your seductions, dude.

WILLOW “21ST-CENTURY GIRL”

I still kind of like this. It’s no “Whip My Hair,” but little is; it would be too much to hope that a ten-year-old would be able to produce more than one major viral hit within the space of a year. “21st-Century Girl” doesn’t have the gleefulness or the insouciance of Willow’s debut, and it suffers for it: it’s a generic one-size fits all production that could have been written for anyone and probably was. Still, her gift for imitation is beyond her years — few singers twice her age could manage both a Ke$ha sneer and a Rihanna belt (regardless of the digital assistance), and the moment when the actual enthusiastic child breaks through on the bridge forgives a lot. It’s still nothing like a good song — it could be salvaged by a strong personality, but she’s a child: she doesn’t have the resources to construct the kind of personality that could sell it. Which is no bad thing. I’m much more interested in what she’ll do five, ten, fifteen years from now, once she’s accumulated those resources. Assuming she hasn’t moved on by then.

WONDER GIRLS “BE MY BABY”

I keep listening to everything else on today’s entry, and listening to it again, and writing about it, and listening to it again, but there’s still only one song that spins in my head when nothing else is playing. As related elsewhere, I’ve trained myself to think that this is somehow significant. At the very least it tells me what my subconscious thinks I should be listening to; and judging by my biggest earworms over the last month, my subconscious really likes idols from the worlds of K-pop and J-pop. And it really loves it when they sing phrases in English. (Although the English-language version isn’t quite as good; unsurprisingly, Koreans singing in Korean hit their marks harder than when they sing in English.) It helps that “Be My Baby” has a lovely melody, and that the Wonder Girls who sing the chorus (Yeeun and Sunye, says the Internet) exercise that lovely trick of jumping up the scale and letting their voices flutter the second time round. Rhythmically, the song’s a throwback to the 60s, a sleeker, more mechanized “Baby Love” (the title’s a bit of misdirection: there’s no Spector whether Phil or Ronnie here) with blown-out synths that could recall RedOne but remind me instead of the gossamer webs of Cocteau Twins. I can hardly speak from a place of authority about K-pop (what I’ve talked about this month is pretty much what I’ve listened to with any care), but “Be My Baby” strikes me as attractively lighter and more syncopated than the average. As a big fan of both lightness and syncopation, I’m sold.

WRETCH 32 FT. L “TRAKTOR”

Really? I gave this a high score? I have no idea why, unless it’s that I was feeling particularly generous in a post-holiday haze. I remember the song, and trying to find my way into it, and never succeeding. I guess I decided to act as if I had. Wretch 32 is not a particularly grimy rapper — he’s so street he compares himself to Barbie dolls and Charlie’s Angels — which would be okay if he were ebullient or self-aware enough to make his pop-rap status work for him. Instead he cops a borrowed gangsta lean and has a guest spot from a vocalist who’s under the impression that he’s here to play Matthew Santos to Wretch’s Lupe Fiasco. (Okay, the surf/spy guitar sample is pretty neat. If only it went anywhere.) I didn’t like much UK hip-hop this year, and I liked this less than a lot of stuff I gave lower scores to. Maybe I’ve just become more of a curmudgeon over the past year. Or maybe with the end of this too-exhaustive survey in sight, I’m ready to reject anything I can find an excuse to.

XIMENA SARIÑANA “DIFFERENT”

There’s nothing like the disappointment of partisan hopes. By now you’re tired of hearing me talk about how much I root for Latin music — and you’d think I’d have pushed for more Latin music to be included in our regular schedule if I love it so much — but Latin music that doesn’t sound particularly Latin is often the hardest for me to defend even to myself. Ximena Sariñana is a Mexican singer/songwriter whose debut, Mediocre, did well in both the Mexican and the U.S. Latin market — the obvious next step was to try to cross over to the English-language market. A child of privilege (both her parents work in the Mexican entertainment industry), Sariñana spoke English already, and was largely influenced by Anglophone acts in the first place — she cites Paul Simon and Tracy Chapman as early influences. Which means, of course, that “Different” isn’t terribly different (ha) from the work of, say, Cobie Caillat or KT Tunstall — it’s more layered production-wise, in T-Bone Burnett’s or Jon Brion’s chamber-baroque style, with echoed whistles that inevitably recall Foster the People, but there’s nothing particularly Latin about it. There doesn’t have to be — Latinos have every right to be just as middle-class and boring as Anglos — but by the same token I don’t have to love it. I tried to love it, for policy reasons, and I succeeded in enjoying the production, but her songwriting, and her performance, are ultimately just too colorless and half-assed to adore. (Lana Del Rey with better production? Maybe?) There are better songs on the album, though nothing on it is as good as the better songs on Gloria Estefan’s new album, or even Natalia Jiménez’s.

YASMIN “ON MY OWN”

One of the best things about the emergence of a talent like Katy B is that it focuses both critical and music-production attention; a genre begins to coalesce around her. Not that Yasmin’s doing anything particularly new, or that she’s imitating Katy B in any particular respect — dance music is dance music, and this could have been made in 1992 as easily as it was made in 2011; but Katy B’s relative success has created a context in which Yasmin is heard as part of a loose coalition, even perhaps a movement. This is all of course in the context of my own American ignorance — I’m sure UK people attuned to their more granular scenes would be able to provide greater corrective detail — but it’s also to explain why I would pay attention to Yasmin, rather than dismissing her as another shallow-voiced UK diva over lightly funky bass music. “On My Own” is no “Katy On a Mission,” but it does provide a baseline narrative for Yasmin’s own brittle, high-sweeping music (brought to earth only by the Junior Walker sample best known from House of Pain’s “Jump Around”) — she’s doing this on her own, against the advice of reasonable people, do or die, putting everything she has into it, you only get one shot do not miss your chance to bow, etc. It’s a standard self-esteem anthem, and if it weren’t so gorgeously produced (by drum ’n’ bassman Shy FX), her thin voice would be overwhelmed by the sentiment and it would be the merest treacle. But despite yourself you believe her. And by you of course I mean me.

YASMIN FT. SHY FX “LIGHT UP (THE WORLD)”

On her third single, Shy FX gets a feature credit for producing (one of the trends in 2011 music that I’m most conflicted about — on the one hand it’s good to see producers get credit outside music-nerd conversations since modern music is so producer-dependent; on the other hand it’s still kind of weird and I keep waiting for a guest verse that never drops) (though the video has a Ms. Dynamite guest verse! which doesn’t add as much to the song as I’d hoped). It’s a better production than “On My Own,” too, thicker and fuller, with a reggae undertow anchoring the drum ’n’ bass clatter to earth. (Compare with Emeli Sandé’s “Heaven,” which really does take off for the stars.) Yasmin’s voice is stronger here too, riding the beat rather than floating atop it, and even as a statement of purpose I prefer it to “On My Own,” because I like idealistic twaddle about interconnectedness and making the world a better place more than idealistic twaddle about self-sufficiency and making it despite the haters. And then, of course, there’s the horns: very nearly a second-line combo moaning and smearing across the track, more dub than jazz, and more “The National Anthem” than either. 2011 has become, here at the end, and for me, as much The Year I Learned To Love UK Bass-Music Divas as The Year I Learned To Love K-Pop, or indeed any other Year — between Katy B, Emeli Sandé, Delilah, and Yasmin, I’ve got enough gorgeous, glittering dance to pretend it’s a bona fide movement.

YELAWOLF “DADDY’S LAMBO”

I’m kind of ambivalent about Yelawolf as a critical project (as distinct from a commercial or artistic project; neither of those are my call) — seems to me a large part of the goodwill towards him (not all of it; see below) is critics’ and fans’ desire for another Eminem, a white rapper who can claim a certain amount of authenticity due to growing up in poverty and trading off liberal fascination (even unto fetishization) with uncomplicated blight (Detroit’s ruin-porn, Alabama’s ranks-50th-in-Everything status). Nothing’s uncomplicated, of course, which is why it grates to have Yela shout in practically the second bar that “nobody got that kind of money in the boondocks” — he’s inviting a class-warfare reading that doesn’t hold up, since he seems more eager to join the ranks of the privileged than to, for instance, puke all over their shoe collection. “Daddy’s Lambo” is frustrating all round — Yelawolf’s an undoubtedly talented rapper, but he takes this song at a remedial speed, fills it with dumb posturing that doesn’t even have any entertainment value, and most egregiously of all, doesn’t even provide a solid chorus. If this is chart fodder — and he explicitly tells us it is (“Drama made a beat that’ll climb the chart”) — it’s too moody and monochrome to make a dent in pop listeners’ ears, and not angry or engaged enough to win over hardcore fans.

YELAWOLF FT. TRAE THA TRUTH “SHIT I SEEN”

But when he wasn’t aiming for pop, he shot straight into transcendence. “Shit I Seen” never saw an official release of any kind until it showed up on Trae’s mixtape King of the Streets, Vol. 3, which I guess makes this misfiled. But while Trae is the track’s secret weapon, his dark-smoke patter fast and hard throughout the second verse, the song really belongs to Yela, who sounds far more elastic and alive than he did on “Daddy’s Lambo” (and, predictably, I’ve heard almost nothing else by him), switching up his flow to match his thoughts as they come spilling out of his head, by turns reflective, scared, angry, and threatening. But it’s the chorus that’s most powerful, acknowledging the ways in which street life, the basic cornerstone mythology of hip-hop, can fuck a man up. Even the dumb reiteration of the premise — “What used to be strange to me/Just ain’t strange to me no more” — speaks volumes in its inarticulacy, halting reflectiveness in a voice unused to considering consequences. But it’s the production that pulled me in, a creeping, jazzy score that sounds to me as though pulled somewhere from the nueva onda of Venezuela (a cousin to bossa nova) that allows both for smoky trumpet solos and a chorus building up to a frenzy and a dying-away sigh. It’s a great song, one what I wish wasn’t buried the way it has been, and it’s pretty much my only reason for trusting Yelawolf to make good music. Suppose I’d better listen to Radioactive at some point.

ZOLA JESUS “VESSEL”

My blurb here was one of the worst and most cowardly of my Jukebox career. I was mostly trying to atone for my dismissal of “Sea Talk” the previous year — not that I’ve listened to it since; for all I know it could be just as aimless and pretentious as “Vessel” undoubtedly is. I was in fact shocked when I listened back to “Vessel” today. I’d been hoping to wrap up this entire list on a grand, or at least memorable note — instead there’s a weedy clank-churn, and Nika Danilova honking cryptically above it, and to be honest I’m feeling a little depressed because well of course I am it’s the week after Christmas we all are, but also because all this ridiculous work and what do I have to show for it? Just a bunch of songs I can’t decide whether I like or hate, and I’m not sure I ever want to listen to music again. Of course I will — I haven’t forgotten my promise to go through Perpetua’s 2011 mix, though my reactions are going to have to be more abbreviated than what I’ve been doing here, and I have about four or five other projects — all music-related — I want to finish before 2012 hits. So without further ado: and to all a good night.

This is a long one, brought to you by the article The and by sorting in Windows rather than iTunes. Apologies.

TECH N9NE FT. YELAWOLF, BUSTA RHYMES, TWISTA, CEZA, JL OF B. HOOD, U$O, D-LOC & TWISTED INSANE “WORLDWIDE CHOPPERS”

When I’m tagging my hip-hop mp3s, I always want to put the “ft.”s in order of appearance, because if I’m not really familiar with the artists it’s quick way to keep them straight. But there’s a reason Yela, Busta and Twista get top (or second-top) billing here, even though they’re numbers 5, 7, and 6 in the lineup: none of the others hold a candle to them. Certainly not Tech N9ne, who gives himself an equal number of bars but stumbles through them like a patsy being set up for being shown up. Ceza (Turkish) and U$O (Dutch) pop in just long enough to make the boast of the title accurate, and D-Loc and Twisted Insane put a nice bow on it, but really the song belongs to the speed-rap veterans and the young turk gunning to join their ranks. The chorus is awful sub-Godsmack stupidity (though there’s something to be said for using metal as the musical basis for the track, since there’s a long-time association between metal and technical proficiency of all kinds), but I still like listening to it as much as “Look at Me Now,” because at least Chris Brown’s not trying to rap on it. 

THE BAND PERRY “YOU LIE”

“If I Die Young” was one of the highlights of 2010’s country crop, a folky meditation that only sounded better and better the more exposure it got; by the time I heard it playlisted on pop radio earlier this year in between Adele and Bruno Mars, I was ready to call it a modern classic. Any song would struggle to follow up that kind of success, and it’s to the Band Perry’s credit that “You Lie” is neither a carbon copy nor a safe retreat, but its own song, a bullish character portrait sharply drawn (and helped by the video, which puts an infuriating smirk on the jerk being told off), with country’s taste for broad wordplay satisfied by all the things he lies like. If I don’t really believe either Kimberly Perry’s heartbreak or her anger — when she belts the title phrase at the end of the chorus, you can hear the smile in her voice — that’s fine too; kissoffs can be a load of fun.

THE CAST OF GLEE “LOSER LIKE ME”

I’ve never watched Glee, and I’m not exactly itching to start; even if I hadn’t heard that it’s gotten terrible in the later seasons, nothing about the premise (from the high-school setting to the clumsily-arranged and shriekily-sung versions of songs I’d rather hear performed by a wider range of voices) appeals to me. Except for the forehead-L thing I see on the soundtrack CDs; I’m old enough to remember both the novelty and the cutting dismissal of the sign from my own time in high school, and the idea of appropriating it as a sort of theater-nerd gang sign is if not quite heartwarming, aorta-flickering. It was that reclamation of loserdom as a fine thing (as well as a desire to be contrary, and I think an overestimation of the quality of Max Martin’s contribution the song; I was still riding high on Femme Fatale) that led me to rate this highly. Now, though, although I still find a little bit of charm in the plastic, rinkydink production, both Lea Michele’s voice and the anti-hater sentiment grate tremendously, particularly as a full-time hater (i.e., someone who forms his own opinions instead of blindly and enthusiastically endorsing everything he comes across) myself.

THE DIRTBOMBS “SHAREVARI”

I was probably unreasonably harsh on the Dirtbombs when we blurbed this back in January — the 1981 original, by Detroit techno godfathers A Number of Names, is one of my favorite recordings of the era, a remarkable record that brings the coldly glamorous European electronic rhythms of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder into an industrial American context, with dirt under its fingernails and an analog thump in its loins. The Dirtbombs’ garage-rock covers of Detroit techno classics — Party Store is the parent album, and it’s good, if not as good as a compilation of the originals would be (but that can be said of any covers album) — are so faithful as to be almost pointless, except of course that context matters. They’re introducing the music to a new generation, or a different sector of it, joining several Motor City musical traditions together at once, and incidentally adding a modern bass boost and fullness of sound (or is that overcompression?) to the older, more spacious music.

THE GOOD NATURED “SKELETON”

I’m not sure I hear as much uncomplicated Joy of Sex as my distinguished peers do; the conceit of the chorus, that Sarah McIntosh is stripping down so intimately and vulnerably that even her flesh is flayed from her bones, strikes me as leapfrogging Hot and landing in Distinctly Queasy. Which doesn’t make it bad! On the contrary, her acknowledgement of the scariness and even in a sense the depersonalization of really intense physical intimacy undercuts the cutesy plinkiness of the chorus’s arrangement, and gives the powerful drumming on the verses more urgency. I compared it to the Pipettes (I compare a lot of things to the Pipettes, at least in my head; at one point ca. 2007 the only music I wanted to listen to was them and Tom Waits), but that was primarily due to McIntosh’s performance (her Hampshire accent’s close to Rosay’s and RiotBecki’s Brighton ones) — the production’s beefier and the lyrics are more personal than sassy.

THE JANEDEAR GIRLS “MERRY GO ROUND”

I said, possibly hyperbolically, in the comments that this was a [10] for me (which would have pushed the total all the way to 6.00 if I’d gotten it in on time), and it’s still one of the most flat-out fun songs I’ve heard all year. Your definition of fun may vary, of course: my appetite for silly juxtapositions and the trolling of authenticity-mongerers is higher than average, and I genuinely like the effects of AutoTune. The JaneDear Girls update John Rich’s hick-hop for the Ke$ha generation, and their combination of party-readiness, hip-hop slang, and classic rock (quoting the drum line of “We Will Rock You” and the woozy bit of “Dream On” in the bridge) plays as a cornpone, popular-girls version of Ke$ha’s slacker-weirdo dance fuel. Their other singles have been more straightforward country-pop (and have been rewarded with higher chart placements), and I’m sadly sure that they’re ahead of (or possibly beside, in a much cooler dimension) their time with “Merry Go Round” — but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to crank it up every chance I get.

THE JOY FORMIDABLE “CRADLE”

I feel bad about how ambivalent I always am towards new shoegaze bands — or, more to the point, bands that are heavily influenced by My Bloody Valentine — because — to completely misapply something Ian said that’s been floating around Tumblr for a while now — I keep thinking “didn’t we deal with this years ago?” Which I know is ungenerous of me, and just because shoegaze was a historically bounded movement doesn’t mean that new and interesting things can’t be done with its sheets-of-guitar-noise-plus-pretty-singing aesthetic, and is it really all that retro if it never really went away, and anyway, I like shoegaze, so what’s the problem? I’m not sure. It might just be that guitars increasingly sound like a category error to me in the 2010s, the way that when someone asks you to talk about Sixties pop you don’t generally jump to Henry Mancini and Tony Bennett first thing off the bat. The Joy Formidable do what they do, and it’s lovely and everything, but… I mean, we have dubstep now. All that noise, and you’re not even going to strobe it?

THE LONELY ISLAND FT. AKON “I JUST HAD SEX”

My two previous stabs at writing about “I Just Had Sex” pretty much get at my reasons for giving it a [9] first time round (I’d give it lower now, but not because it’s gotten any less great; it’s just that more stuff is better). The one thing I didn’t say: the first half-dozen times I watched the video, I actually choked up at the big key change, when everybody starts singing along. I’m a sucker for sentiment, sure; and people coming together over the most ridiculous, naïve, and basic of concepts still gets me. I barely even hear the jokiness anymore when I listen to it: sex is something which deserves to be celebrated, damn it.

THE STROKES “UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS”

“Everybody singing the same song for ten years.” Well, one person has been. Don’t get me wrong — I like Julian Casablancas, and I like the Strokes, and I was glad to hear Angles return to the template, if not to the standard, of their first two albums. But it has been ten years, and while I still rock out to this in my car like the old, out-of-touch, not-as-cool-as-he-thinks-he-is white dude I am, the valedictory of the lyrics are almost as good to hear as the lockstep rhythms. It’s not quite going out on top — Pitchfork (who were the ones that got me all excited about them back in two thousand and mumble) didn’t so much as glance in their direction come year-end season — and I’m certainly aware of the irony of my affection for an unchanged Strokes when I’m uncomfortable loving the Joy Formidable, but then again it is my own personal history I’m stuck dealing with. I can’t borrow anyone else’s. And man did I love the “rock saviors” of the early 2000s, even if I’ve ended by loving the overthrowers of rock more.

THE TING TINGS “HANG IT UP”

I didn’t pay enough attention to the Ting Tings’ 2008 moment to become annoyed by them, though I’m pretty sure I would have been if I’d stuck with it — “That’s Not My Name” was skeletal in all the wrong ways, and “Shut Up and Let Me Go” was if possible worse — so I was pleasantly surprised when I watched the video for “Hang It Up” and found it full of life, color, rocking funk, and shouty performances that had dropped the ironic remove of their early work and were instead just bugging out because it was fun to do so. But I was cautious; I hadn’t listened to “Hang It Up” since, and was afraid I’d overrated it because the colorful video had fried my pleasure receptors — no one else seemed to be as taken with it. So I dutifully playlisted it and prepared for disappointment. Instead, I’m loving it even more; they’ve added a low end, and the hyper mosh now features a modicum of Sleigh Bells squall (but only a modicum; they’re still more ESG than Jesus & Mary Chain), and Katie Ting’s shouting is more rhythmic, and more dynamic, than wearying. And the video’s still great: she’s wearing possibly the best ensemble a b-boy nostalgist could dream up. Apparently this is a “new direction” inspired by moving to Madrid; with my predilections, could I do anything but love it?

THE-DREAM “BODY WORK/FUCK MY BRAINS OUT”

I missed out on this one when we covered it, so I’m a little puzzled about how everyone else reviewed it; by the time I got around to looking it up, I couldn’t find a copy of “Fuck My Brains Out” which wasn’t the second half of a two-song suite. There still hasn’t been an official release, and if all the DCMA-complaint results that Google informs me have been removed from my search pages mean anything, Def Jam has been actively scrubbing it from existence. So my thoughts here can only be mitigated, even provisional; and take them with the further salt that I’ve never dug into The-Dream’s previous body of work the way that pop-oriented critics are supposed to have in the last several years, so I only have secondhand affection for his persona, filtered through others’ enjoyment of his audacity and ambition, and my own enjoyment of his production/writing work for other artists. That said, of the “Body Work/Fuck My Brains Out” suite, the latter half is definitely better fodder for critical hosannahs, a Prince sex jam with half the cleverness and about a tenth the funkiness. Which still leaves plenty of cleverness and funkiness intact; but a pale imitation’s a pale imitation, and I’m not invested enough in the “Amazing Stallion” trope that undergirds the porny narrative to find it either erotic or comic. It’s still better than “Body Work,” which marries an intricate, flowing production to a weak-ass seduction lynchpinned by the refrain “let me see that body work.” I can’t help hearing Beyoncé’s “Dance for You” instead (“I wanna make that body rock, sit back and watch”), and maybe it’s just that I’m too flamboyantly heterosexual, but B actually seduces where T just whines. The whole thing still works, both as individual songs and as a suite, and I’d need to live with it for a while longer before actually dismissing it.

THE-DREAM “FORM OF FLATTERY”

After half a year and a lot more listening to gushed-about music, I’m shocked that none of us on the Jukebox read “Form of Flattery” as a direct call-out of the Weeknd, Frank Ocean, and Drake. I namechecked Drake, and Katherine alluded to Ocean, but it sounds so much like the Weeknd (specifically, like “Loft Music” — there’s even the drifting, wordless-falsetto end) that I smacked my head when I realized what the first half of the cliché referenced in the title is. I can’t blame Terius for being pissed that these young kids are getting column inches (and, in Drakes’s case, sales) for essentially plowing the same “meticulously-produced, moodily conflicted R&B asshole” furrow that he’s mastered over the past several years — and that they’re doing so without ever having unveiled a second trick, unlike him (let’s see any of them try to write “Single Ladies”), is I’m sure even more galling. He can take comfort in the knowledge that his pop instincts make “Form of Flattery” a better song, even if it is just a half-finished sketch, than anything the Weeknd’s done — and yet the hype machine continues to churn away from him for no discernable reason.

TOBY KEITH “SOMEWHERE ELSE”

Toby Keith is infuriating. Not for the obvious reason — the disgusting culture-warmongering and resentment-fomenting he’s best known for among the non-country-listening audience could be excused as honest and deeply-held even if misguided, dangerous and stupid beliefs — but for his refusal to maintain any consistency of quality. “Somewhere Else” isn’t an immortal song, but it’s a very good one, which makes his bullshit pandering in “Made in America” and “Red Solo Cup” even more obnoxious by contrast. It’s true that there’s nothing necessarily inconsistent between the three songs’ worldviews — and even if there was, there’s nothing wrong with a songwriter, much less a singer, speaking in multiple tongues — but the warm humanism of “Somewhere Else,” with its sympathetic (or is it sympathy-seeking?) portrayal of a deadbeat drunk lost without a woman, only points out how shallow and characterless the mindless flag-waving and fratty bellowing of his other two Jukebox 2011 singles are. (An opening melody borrowed from Jason Mraz doesn’t help.) At a certain point, even after your cheerfully irresponsible buddy makes a big-hearted gesture that reminds you why you’re friends in the first place, you’re just tired of making excuses for his lazy, self-satisfied ass.

TOVE STYRKE “HIGH AND LOW”

TOVE STYRKE “WHITE LIGHT MOMENT”

If she’d never produced anything but these two songs, she would still deserve a place on the sure-to-be-produced-in-thirty-years Swedish Nuggets: Undiscovered Gems from the Synthpop Noughties box set. In fact, in the age of 45s, these two would have made a great flip, “White Light Moment” the surging, seeking A-side b/w the more melancholy, reflective “High and Low.” As it is, I’m not sure which I like more — though “High and Low” probably makes it on points, as I’m simply more familiar with it, having listened to it more frequently in the time since we blurbed either song thanks to Sally. Together they hit my buttons in a remarkably efficient and, the more I listen, appealing way: the faded electropop of the production, her own diffident-but-strong-enough voice, meditative lyrics which analyze relationships and her own desires from a safe intellectual remove while retaining the impulse to beauty and tiny escapes of emotion through the cracks in her voice. I don’t know — and I’m not looking forward to figuring out — how she stacks up against her compatriots from this year (Little Dragon, Lykke Li, Niki & the Dove), let alone everything else I’ve liked, both immediately and on review. It’s going to take a lot more listening. Ironic sadface.

T-PAIN FT. WIZ KHALIFA & LILY ALLEN “5 (O’CLOCK)”

My blurb for this one was a punt — “Look I just like worlds colliding okay?” — but it’s one I stand behind. Every time I listen to it I think about what a more interesting world it would be if T-Pain and Lily Allen really were each other’s fuck buddies. (For one thing, Lily Allen might make more interesting music. BOOM roasted.) Which I guess would make Wiz Khalifa the creepy friend who writes fanfiction about the relationship, but you can’t have everything. T-Pain’s familiar sculpted-from-sheet-metal vocals and Lily Allen’s breathless hush meld together in uncomplementary ways, but the production (by T-Pain himself) ties it together in an uneasy ribbon with piano and wobbly synths. I still hear it as more of a curio than an actual song — even though it has done well on the radio — but I have a lot of love for novelties anyway. Rebecca Black to thread.

TRACEY THORN “NIGHT TIME”

I already copped to not knowing the xx at all, so I don’t know how Tracey Thorn improves (or, much more difficult to imagine, doesn’t) on the original. Given that the same spectral, watery guitars appear here as do in the one Gil Scott-Heron remix I have heard, I’m starting to suspect that they have about one setting. But this is (once again) me complaining about not knowing context, and there’s a cheap and easy solution to that. So I’ll say that as a piece of music on its own, it’s both gorgeous and slightly too tasteful. “Too” is something of a red herring here; the first music writing I ever published on the internet was on a series of mixes I made between 2002 and 2007, the main throughline of which was: Not Particularly Relevant (Anymore) Musicians Make Tasteful Music For People Who Are Scared Of Modern Pop (Like Me). (I’m not linking because seriously. I’m scared to even look.) Tracey Thorn’s cover on “Night Time” would have fit magesterially into those mixes. If I don’t adore it the way I once would have, that’s because I’m no longer that person. Also I’ve heard a lot more since; none of which makes “Night Time” any worse than it actually is. Just not as stunning as I once would have found it. Non-ironic sadface.