ILM’s Top 77 Tracks of 2018

btw have they 19 new live albums out yesterday

they really don't half-ass anything, huh

i would have voted for Raveena's "Honey" if i'd heard it in time, wtf omg

Yeah, people started hyping that one after I'd voted, and I was mostly happy with my ballot, so I didn't resubmit.

^the repping for Raveena just caught me in time for my ballot to include it. This was very nearly exhibit A as to Why Campaigning Works; one more vote would have done it.

But then, Kali Uchis would've been 78'd and that would never do.

The 1975 watch: for those keeping score, I managed 1'33" of Love It If We Made It.

your credibility is in tatters

you didn't even make it to the worst part!!!!!

(xp to jeff re: 1'33")

i can't believe anyone can start listening to "make me feel" and not want to immediately turn it off and put on "kiss"

"screwed" is easily the best song on that album to me

extremely otm re: Make Me Feel

what if "kiss" was a little bit more like "stuck in the middle with you"

I also preferred Screwed, but thought it didn't have any traction, otherwise would have voted for it instead.

she definitely walks a tightrope with that stuff but given 1) the fact that her and Prince were buddies 2) Prince's recent death and 3) Janelle being an equally electric performer I think it gets a pass. I don't think it's inferior to "Kiss"...just, sorta the same. Ditto for "Americans" and "Lets Go Crazy"

it's definitely inferior to kiss, but it's a good imitation

A good 95% of recorded music is inferior to "Kiss" so I don't really hold that against "Make Me Feel"

J0rdan otm, yes. Make Me Feel makes me feel aggravated.

Personally, I am surprised that people like "Boo'd Up" that much. Like, it's fine. That's about it.

Also this thing where everyone has decided Lana Del Rey Is Good, Actually is just embarrassing for everyone involved

Boo’d Up is sublime. It’s also a very fun thing to say and sing.

"Boo'd Up" is competent.

ultraviolence was a great record

counterpoint: nah

LDR rules and I love that she did so well with what seeem to be just digital loosies

make me feel doesn't quite aggravate me, i like it well enough when it comes up in the wild, but i would definitely rather just listen to kiss if it's me picking a song to listen to

Personally, I am surprised that people like "Boo'd Up" that much. Like, it's fine. That's about it.

I agree w/this (and have assumed I must be missing something).

feels weird to say it but Neil Cicierega ruined "Kiss" for me, every time I hear the original I just hear this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zXCh816pj4

To me "Kiss" is the funk "Yesterday": wonderful song, world-historic classic, I never wanna hear it.

Took me about 5 or 6 listens over a month to really get into Boo'd Up, it's that sort of slow-burn summer hit, also the video version doesn't have the sub-par spoken outro which kind of sours me slightly on it.

i give "boo'd up" extra points for sounding distinctly like a huge R&B hit circa 2005. i thought it was telling that mariah basically repaid the homage by getting dj mustard to produce the same sort of glassy R&B song for her own album. the emancipation of mimi influence snake eating its own tail.

but i also think "boo'd up" is a pretty incredible piece of songwriting... the phrase "boo'd up" is a new way of saying a thing a million songs have been written about and then rendering that phrase into a very literal onomatopoeia as a hook is just genius to me. overall just a really smooth super fun song to me.

I think it's fair to say that "Make Me Feel" is Janelle Monae doing a Prince pastiche; that doesn't make "Make Me Feel" a bad song, it doesn't mean Monae does a bad job of it, and it doesn't mean that the structural similarities between "Make Me Feel" and "Kiss" go beyond the superficial "they are both sparsely arranged songs that use a blues progression" (which, in fairness, may be all that people hear when they play them next to each other).

xp: "boo'd up" isn't a new phrase, though; iterations of it pop up on Urban Dictionary (of all places) dating back 10-11 years.

This is reminiscent of when white people discovered twerking

yeah im not saying ella mae invented the phrase just that as a the name/central phrase of a song i think it gave a very wide audience something to latch onto that helped it break the glass ceiling typically placed over R&B songs in the last half decade or so

Monae has a number of songs like that doesn't she? "Take a Byte" sounds a lot like "Africa" and I remember "Cold War" supposedly being a rip-off of some Gnarls Barkley thing. "Dance Apocalyptic" feels like a homage to something very specific but I don't know what

yeah it's significant than an R&B song sung and co-written by a woman hit the top five in 2018

Significant of what? Lowered expectations?

There's something about the beat of "Boo'd Up" that slightly puts me off... as if it's quite the right fit for the song or something (obviously, though, it didn't hurt its success!)

I mostly just think it's a bland, safe-sounding Starbucks-corporate-soundtrack-approved song and I'm surprised that people are finding any hook in it on which to hang emotion.

(xp) Like I want the song to "glide" a little more, following the melody; and the beat feels slightly too heavy, holding it down. idk

Significant of what? Lowered expectations?

― GDPR vs GAPDY (DJP), Friday, February 1, 2019

In a way. R&B women w/out hip-hop accompaniment don't generally make the pop top ten these days.

well the subtext of my point is that there was nothing viral about the success of "boo'd up"... it's actually a song several years old that managed to find an audience which slowly gathered until "boo'd up" was one of the most omnipresent songs of the year. so as opposed to the way a lot of big hits happen now -- preordained in a lot of cases bcuz of the way streaming allows fanbases to immediately mobilize around a new release -- there is something about "boo'd up" as music qua music that really resonated with people, and i personally get it when thinking about the songwriting

I think it's fair to say that "Make Me Feel" is Janelle Monae doing a Prince pastiche; that doesn't make "Make Me Feel" a bad song, it doesn't mean Monae does a bad job of it, and it doesn't mean that the structural similarities between "Make Me Feel" and "Kiss" go beyond the superficial "they are both sparsely arranged songs that use a blues progression" (which, in fairness, may be all that people hear when they play them next to each other).

― GDPR vs GAPDY (DJP), Friday, February 1, 2019 4:10 PM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark

idk there's something more specific about it to me sonically and structurally especially going in and out of the chorus

bland, safe-sounding Starbucks-corporate-soundtrack-approved song and I'm surprised that people are finding any hook in it on which to hang emotion.

btw, this is kiiiiiiinda how I feel about the Kac3y Musgrav3s tracks... (but, you know, it's all good).

I mean you could safely play at least 3/4 of the 77 in a Starbucks

you could play mo bamba at a starbucks if you wanted to tear the fucker up

2018 was the year where I kissed a girl in March and moved in with her in September, and 'Boo'd Up' was the one song that felt like that. Like, really getting caught, trapped, and loving every moment of it.

To test the song, you should kiss her in a Starbucks.

the starbucks on 43rd and madison by my old office was always playing R&B from like 98-06 and "boo'd up" could definitely have gotten some burn in there

I mean you could safely play at least 3/4 of the 77 in a Starbucks

Hmmm...

I'd like to point out that being Starbucks-worthy isn't in and of itself a bad thing; my issue/point is that I don't have a place for this song in my life aside from ignorable background wash and I'm surprised that others do.

timewise, half of the 77 is that one autechre track

that's how i feel about "trip" which is just a transparent rewrite of "boo'd up" but which seems to have established its own independent popularity nonetheless xp