You don’t come to Swampland for such lists, but it’s Sunday so I am indulging my access to a Time Inc. WordPress account. TIME’s official list of the Top Ten Songs of 2010 can be found here. This is my list of five, plus two.
1. Can’t Cash My Checks, Jamey Johnson
Years ago, the music critic Greil Marcus identified Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska as one of the great punk recordings of the 1980s. Jamey Johnson has done something similar here, updated for a new era and less austere, capturing in one seven minute song the desperation, agony and pride that was America in 2010. “You can bring me down,” he sings, “but you can’t make me beg. You can take my word, but you can’t cash my checks.” This is a working man anthem and a protest song, filled with patriotic pride. It is also, appropriately, an outlaw tale. As the song’s hero explains, “If you go out my back door, just over the hill, you’ll see all the plants that’s been paying my bills.” Then Johnson just jams out, reveling in it all as only country can.
2. Runaway, Kanye West
Kanye West, like most hip hop giants, makes homages to himself. But he is more insufferable, and conventionally less talented, than most. He raps awkwardly. He can’t hold his voice in key. He doesn’t play any instruments. And yet he is still great, and his songs are great, almost by force of will. At the heart of the West genius is a tremendous awareness of the cost of his ambition. He takes narcissism to a new level, and it is a tragic burden. The closer he gets to grabbing the brass ring, the farther away he seems to be. When he tells about scoring a porn star in a club bathroom–in a song called Hell Of A Life–he is at once bragging about living the male fantasy and the emptiness of his quest. (The starlet tells him she won’t do films with black guys because it would lower her pay rate.) This fascinating combination of braggadocio and despair is cast best in Runaway, a meandering 9-minute discussion of what a sad jerk he is. “Look at you, look at you,” runs the hook, condemning the monster he has become. “Runaway from me baby,” he pleads. “Runaway.” But West can’t escape himself. The song ends with an extended auto-tuned solo, which sounds like West playing an electric kazoo. It is beautiful, twisted, dark and stunningly self indulgent.
3. Mermaid Parade, Phosphorescent
The breakup songs have all been sung before, but Phospherent still finds a new way to make a classic tune entirely new. The writing approaches Leonard Cohen perfection, telling the simple tale of a love affair while watching topless girls pass by on a parade float. By the end, when Matthew Houck wails, “Yeah, I found a new friend too, and yeah, she’s pretty and small, but goddamn it, Amanda, oh, goddamn it all,” he pushes the agony of centuries through the tip of his pencil.
4. Rill Rill, Sleigh Bells
Pure pop is, and will always be, about teenage discovery. (Kanye West sneaks through by living in his 30s like a he’s still 17.) Sleigh Bells takes a Funkadelic sample to retell the drama, agony and joy of being 16. “Wonder what your boyfriend thinks about your braces/What about them?/I’m all about them.” It’s hard to know what is really going on in this song, but then that’s exactly how it happens.
5. Ready To Start, Arcade Fire
Perhaps the best rock lyric of the 00′s came in Arcade Fire’s 2005 anthem Wake Up: “Children wake up/Hold your mistake up/Before they turn the summer into dust.” It was a tribal plea for rebellion, for radical honesty and for integrity. This year, the band returned to the same fertile ground with an album about the struggle to maintain sanity and a sense of self while growing up in the suburbs. The second track, Ready To Start, is a declaration of independence. “I would rather be wrong, than to live in the shadows of your song,” runs the cardinal lyric. The fight, in other words, goes on, and the principles remain the same. This plea to stay true is an apt antidote to Kanye West, who revels in his personal bankruptcy. For Arcade Fire, the West lifestyle is without merit. “I would rather be alone,” sings Win Butler, “than pretend I feel alright.”
Two bonus 2009 songs that came of age in 2010.
6. Little Lion Man, Mumford and Sons
This was released in 2009, but it took until this year to jump the pond. Big radio only began playing it a few months ago. It’s classic folk that sounds entirely fresh, with a great base drum.
7. Empire State Of Mind, Jay-Z
Just as Wall Street’s rulers wreaked havoc on the world, Jay-Z steps in to tell everyone who really runs New York, the people who strive through the streets. It’s an homage to ambition. And it’s as classic as anything that Frank Sinatra ever did. The song came out in late 2009, but it made its mark just as much in 2010.
