10
Rina Sawayama — XS
It’s baffling that this track didn’t reach the Top 40: XS is one of the most wildly catchy pop songs this year, layering nostalgic references — Neptunes guitar lines; the purring Just a Little by Liberty X — into a teetering whole. That sense of being overstuffed, heightened by blurting power chords, is cleverly satirical: Sawayama’s persona is a vocal-fried Calabasas sybarite buying “zip codes at the mall,” someone for whom consuming is living. XS’s grotesque arrangement suggests that there is something horribly wrong about this, but its allure acknowledges the urge to give yourself up to capitalism.
Photo: AP
BBT
9
Perfume Genius — On the Floor
Mike Hadreas animates shame like nobody else, stringing it up like a puppet and making it dance to show its weight and its absurdity. Here, it duels with desire as he crystallizes that recurring moment in a young queer person’s life where the thrill of a crush clashes with fearful internalized prejudice. As the flinching Herbie Hancock-indebted funk traces the battle writhing within, Hadreas is coy at first. Then, he swoons, his choral harmonies asking “how long till I walk in the light” so on the nose they seem to parody the bigots who think you can pray such feelings away. Instead, it’s rhythm that offers divine intervention, the irrepressible vigor of On the Floor exorcising the anguish.
LS
8
Dua Lipa — Physical
It’s aptly named: compared with fleet-footed Lipa singles such as Don’t Start Now and Levitating, Physical has a glorious heft. Over the kind of synthwave bass line best deployed in an 80s sports car on a deserted urban motorway, Lipa is almost embarrassingly forward. “Let’s get physical!” she demands, as if grabbing you by the collar and hauling you down a hotel corridor. Apparently, Flashdance was a touchstone when writing it, but surely it was Olivia Newton-John, underscored by the workout-themed music video.
BBT
7
Waxahatchee — Fire
On the lead single from her sublime fifth album, Katie Crutchfield sings in an unusually high register, the reach in her grainy twang in piercing contrast to the softly rumbling toms and thumbed guitar. The discomfort is the point. Fire documents the change in Crutchfield’s life after she took a break from touring and learned to sit with her feelings, becoming “wiser and slow and attuned” as she did so (not to mention making the best album of her career). You have to tear the muscle to build it — plus her younger self lives on, her voracious spirit traced in Crutchfield’s gorgeous vocal arcs across the sky.
LS
6
The Weeknd — Blinding Lights
Blinding Lights, which was actually released late last year cruised up the UK charts for two months before spending 14 weeks toggling between No 1 and No 2, and almost the entire year on the Top 40. It’s the year’s biggest song both in terms of sales and size, a titanic pop production from backroom genius Max Martin, who seems to pay homage to his fellow Scandinavians a-ha with the peppy gated drums. (It also works as a companion piece to Lipa’s Physical.) And Abel Tesfaye himself shows he can slip between genres as casually as he does the lovers in his songs, notching up another inappropriate wedding disco classic — if there had been any wedding discos to play it at.
BBT
5
Sault — Wildfires
Like new shoots coming through stubble burned off a field, the mysterious UK neo-soul group consider the transformative effect of fire as they face the pain of police brutality with a determination to survive and indeed thrive. Over a rhythm section pitched perfectly between a boom-bap hip-hop break and a 60s pop-soul beat, there is a profound intimacy to the arrangement: you can feel the fingers on thick double bass strings and the echo of a piano in a room, giving the sense of a group huddled together. The vocal, drifting into the red, also feels scorched but tenacious.
BBT
4
Megan Thee Stallion — Savage feat Beyonce
J White Did It’s chiming production on Savage hits like sunlight in a swimming pool, the rays refracted and glinting beneath the blue. That sound is as prismatic as the personality traits that Megan coolly ticks off in the chorus, one inscribed in rap legend even before Beyonce joined her for the remix. A production this perfectly balanced could easily have been crushed by the kind of ungainly, all-star streaming bait that has proliferated in recent years, but Beyonce’s playfulness and the duo’s kindred Houston spirit keeps things hummingbird-nimble. Brimming with the sense of two titans sparking off one another, never burdened with the weight of legacy, Savage becomes a constantly renewing source of freshness.
LS
3
Christine and the Queens —People, I’ve Been Sad
Well, haven’t we all? That wryly understated admission in the title sums up the candor, humor and acute feeling that defines Heloise Letissier’s pop project, and they’re words that many of us needed to hear this year as weeks of physical disconnection turned into months. “If you disappear then I’m disappearing too” is a helpless yet comforting chorus, sung as a duet between two versions of herself that desperately want to become one. It’s also one of her funkiest performances, recalling the way Michael Jackson would place gasps, hisses and monosyllables exquisitely on and around the beat, but done at a measured tempo.
BBT
2
Cardi B (feat Megan Thee Stallion) — WAP
The Republicans got it all wrong: the real transgressive delight of WAPwas how Cardi and Megan reveled in bodily fluids during a year of (admittedly justified) paranoia about the minutiae of droplet transmission. Indeed, their cups ranneth over so much that the noise from prudes losing their minds over WAP (the imagined damage it might do to kids’ ears receiving noticeably more airtime than the actual trauma Megan sustained after being shot) threatened to overshadow the duo’s phenomenal performances. It’s a timeless two-hander, Cardi gruffly indomitable as she demands due respect for her right to pleasure; Megan spinning heads until the hapless man in her grip can’t remember the excuse for his lackluster loving either. The only downside to their gleeful slip’n’slide is that you’ll never look at mac and cheese the same way again.
LS
1
Lady Gaga (with Ariana Grande) — Rain on Me
Rain on Me is technically a breakup song: “At least I showed up, you showed me nothing at all,” Gaga sings in the opening verse, scorning a lover who has fallen short of expectations. But it’s not really about that at all — for anyone who has listened to it, it’s about how bad 2020 is. “I’d rather be dry / but at least I’m alive” runs the chorus — being thankful for not being dead was where we reset the bar this year, and it was thrilling to hear someone sing it so honestly. Instead of trying to shelter from the storm, Gaga and Grande ask for the worst thing to happen so they can be delivered from it; Grande also calls for the rain to wash away her sins. It’s that sense of transcendence that makes it such a potent song in 2020, by acknowledging the rain and dancing through it.
BBT
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
RSS