ILM's Top 77 Tracks of 2014

i think it's funny to contrast the reactions rebecca black's "friday" initially got from pop fans (at the very beginning before it reached wider more contemptuous circles). also strange deformed pop that subconsciously said a lot about the music industry and pop songwriting and yet so many reactions were "yasssss queen of pop best music ever", like totally being in on the joke and enjoying it as a collective experience, acknowledging and treating it as camp. pop fans totally take the piss out of pop all the time! we don't need pc music garbage to try and overtly make a statement.

legitimately shocked this has shown up

PC Music is super-clean post-vaporwave cutie pop.

Yes! Love this song. My second favourite song of hers behind Last Friday Night.

dawn richard's version >>>>>

https://soundcloud.com/dawn_richard/dawn-richard-dark-horse

Yeahh fuckkk the concept, the tracks make my extremely happy.

Paging DJP, DJP to thread.

Dark horse is the only Katy perry song I like but I don't really like it

"dark horse" is a comfortable middle ground katy perry song for me -- she has a handful that i love unconditionally and a bunch that i think are wack ... very few that kind of sit in between, this is one of them

prolego otm

lol, i'd managed to avoid "dark horse" til now, it's not that bad and coming after qt is probably the only context in which katy perry isn't grating

i meant prolego otm about qt but also dawn richard, yes

katy perry is extremely bizarre whats her deal

I'd actually like this more without the Juicy J verse :/

on Hey QT...

there's something about the chord progression in this track that keeps me coming back to it... You can clearly hear the germ of a traditional pop/trance song in the breakdown in the middle - but that's both hidden within and played off all these seemingly random chromatics, transitional chords, and the twisted vocals. 4 minutes might be too long but this has definite replay value.

she has a handful that i love unconditionally and a bunch that i think are wack

― J0rdan S

Is this a pun on which songs of hers you do love or is it just accidental?

The gulf between how much I like "Dark Horse"'s verses vs how much I like the chorus is remarkable.

it was hilarious when she inadvertently burned the word "allah" into ashes the video too

does anyone actually love "unconditionally" unconditionally lol xp

in the video*

loooove dark horse

why are the only people who like "hey qt" etc. the same people who h8 the music 'qt' is trying and failing to comment on tho

― dyl, Tuesday, January 20, 2015 12:59 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol what this is bs dude

does anyone actually love "unconditionally" unconditionally lol xp

― dyl

I think Katy did say it was her favourite on the album at some point. Proof that artists often don't know what their strongest material is.

i don't know how anyone can love a katy perry ballad

she's stuff on songs like "california girls". the more anonymous the better. preferably with a guest rap so she has less time to sing.

*she's best

katy perry is extremely bizarre whats her deal

I guess I find the scale of her success bizarre for such a basic blaring bag of BS (altho I do dislike Dark Horse far less than anything else she's done)

Amazed Nicki beat her to the so-accidental N4zi imagery video punch also

As somebody who mainly hears contemporary anything only from our monthly car rentals and my kids' demand for KISS FM - that station is so repetitive that from month to month, I hear nearly the identical playlist from the last time - I became a big fan of "Dark Horse". I think it was on all year long.

"teenage dream" is and maybe always will be her best

Both are taken from "It's So Hard" by Big Pun, who had recently died at the time of the MOP track and grew up in the Bronx as did J. Lo and French Montana.

― The Reverend, Tuesday, January 20, 2015 10:54 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wow. Thank you! Always wondered what the Ante Up shift was all about given how abrupt and seemingly random it is.

Hey QT was the only PC Music song besides AG Cook's remix of Repeat Pleasure I could get behind this year. Didn't vote for it, but it'll be a nice artifact of 2014 ten years from now.

Love Dawn Richard's "Dark Horse"; Katy Perry's is fine.

dark horse was one of the only remotely good songs on prism but didn't the single version come out in 2013?

"california gurls" is perry's best imo though it's sort of hobbled by her vocals are near to their most irritating on it

Dark Horse is the #2 song of 2014 according to Billboard...

just stopping by to point out tuomas had a delicious truth bomb re: qt

Wow. Thank you! Always wondered what the Ante Up shift was all about given how abrupt and seemingly random it is.

Feels so weird to me that someone would be familiar with the "Ante Up" remix but not "It's So Hard".

Perry's performance of Dark Horse at the Grammy's really soured me on that track.

Dark Horse is one of the few Katy Perry that can truly sustain repeated listens.

Also, Alvvays <3.

she dropped "dark horse" as a promo song in 2013 and it just completely took a life of its own, in a way that was almost unprecedented. it never left the itunes top 20, staying there for months, and was nearly always selling more than the single "unconditionally". they had no choice but to release it.

taylor swift's "style" is currently doing the same thing.

Katy Perry's wild success is or was a sign that we were lacking pop stars with personalities / anything to them, although yes there's a point to a bland anonymous artist doing pop songs sometimes.

was there a more dour huge hit in 2014 than Dark Horse?

yeah i'm not ~offended that it's mocking me or my purported taste, i just think it's a lazy and basic way to parody pop that's ultimately pretty pointless and way less interesting than the ways in which pop already parodies and satirises and comments on itself. and it doesn't sound strange, just garish, though not all that much more garish than any given bottom-tier calvin harris production

― lex pretend, Tuesday, January 20, 2015 6:08 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think it's funny to contrast the reactions rebecca black's "friday" initially got from pop fans (at the very beginning before it reached wider more contemptuous circles). also strange deformed pop that subconsciously said a lot about the music industry and pop songwriting and yet so many reactions were "yasssss queen of pop best music ever", like totally being in on the joke and enjoying it as a collective experience, acknowledging and treating it as camp. pop fans totally take the piss out of pop all the time! we don't need pc music garbage to try and overtly make a statement.

― prolego, Tuesday, January 20, 2015 6:11 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imagining an alternate universe where we later found out "friday" was some conceptual artist's troll record and imago became it's biggest fan.

*its

I think there is a version of this somewhere with the vocals slowed to a normal pitch.

Basically confirming its Hannah Diamond. PC Music seems an insular world of anime otaku shutins whose teen social outlet was shopping malls, but that's a growing demographic.

i thought i read in a newyorker essay about popular fm radio formats that katie perry had died some time ago and was replaced by a hologram or a lookalike or a clone or something. anyway cool to see that her simulacrum is still releasing music for people to enjoy

I like the dink-dink-dink bits of "Dark Horse," but lyrically and melodically it's kind of a mess. Part of my problem with her is that she has no dynamic range at all -- everything is sung at the same overbearing level, she is vocally a blunt force.

I don't know what kind of distinction this is, but I'm guessing it's the first #1 hit to namecheck Jeffery Dahmer.

in my car, a teachable moment to explain who Jeffrey Dahmer was to the kids

i just remembered katy perry is doing this year's superbowl. enjoy that americans.

:(

her concert was pretty fun, she'll do a good job

Katy Perry's wild success is or was a sign that we were lacking pop stars with personalities / anything to them, although yes there's a point to a bland anonymous artist doing pop songs sometimes.

― abcfsk, Tuesday, January 20, 2015 6:26 PM (0 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is actually what baffles me about perry though - it's rare that you find a megastar of this level who represents so little. i don't know what her personality is! or what her core points of identification are. yoncé, taylor, nicki, rihanna - you KNOW what they, and their brand, represent instantly. perry...uh? she p much exists as a vehicle for singles of varying quality on a case by case basis as far as i can tell, and her cultural footprint seems very small compared to her sales...

it's too bad bruno mars was last year and not this year though