Best of 2016: 50 things that make sounds
The 1975, Kanye West, and Radiohead
You didn’t miss anything—back to the regular format soon!
Welcome to the Best Of series, presented in preparation for the best of 2021 playlist. There are some new rules:
playlists are twenty five songs long, instead of the usual ten;
ordering is by rank, rather than for the sake of transitions;
all songs must have been released in the year in question.
You might be wondering, isn’t it awfully early to be counting down to the end of the year? And the answer is yes, but I’ve been making playlists since 2016 so we’ve got to start in November to finish in time.
I still stand by a lot of these Best Of playlists. Their limitation is that the music released in a particular calendar year is not necessarily the music I’m listening to most, and it’s frustrating that I can’t include tracks that shaped me—but I guess that’s what Spotify wrapped is for. Often songs closer to the middle of the list have stuck with me more than those at the top, strangely.
For instance, “Mistakes” by Lake Street Dive barely made the cut. It’s preceded by tracks I haven’t listened to since 2016; I was obsessed with “Woke the F*uck Up” by Jon Bellion for a minute at the end of the year, but can’t remember any of the lyrics now. “Ivy” isn’t the song I’d pick from Blonde (2016) if I did this list over again. “Closer” is too high on this list, but it’s still a good song despite all the hate it’s received in the years since the peak of its popularity.
I still love “Somebody Else.” The 1975 hit a home run with I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful but so unaware of it (2016) and ever since then they’ve pretty much only made unimpeachable bangers. The production on this song is so tight; there are full seconds of silence between hits on the verse and chorus. The vocal sampling used as a pad is ahead of its time, and yet it places itself squarely in the late 1980s with its Tears for Fears production style. Lorde cited “Somebody Else” as a main influence on her album Melodrama (2017); it was her most-listened-to song of 2016.
Nothing can really touch this song for me: the warm 808s, Matty Healy’s desperate voice, the funky bass, the enveloping backing vocals, the iconic bridge. I still return to it often, although it’s utterly devoid of associations I had with it in 2016. To this day, it’s my favorite song to play in the car at full volume.
One of my most surprising musical opinions—most surprising being that I will say with my whole chest that Carly Rae Jepsen’s EMOTION (2015) is the most perfect album of all time—is that I think The Life of Pablo (2016) is actually quite a good record. In particular, “Ultralight Beam” is a banging tune; Chance’s verse goes absolutely off, the gospel vocals are nothing short of beautiful, the spoken samples are quite effective, if disconcerting at moments.
The SNL performance is mysteriously absent from most of the Internet, but I found a full version on dailymotion. Kanye West lays down on the stage at the end, inexplicably. All of the features perform their parts live, each with varying degrees of accuracy and precision. The album had only been out for maybe a week at that point, and it had gone through many iterations. I was a fan of the “living record” approach, and I think it might have gained traction had Kanye not shown his whole ass in his grab for the presidency and fallen from grace with his subsequent support of Donald Trump.
The story of how “Ultralight Beam” came together is wild. Kanye is known for his eccentric recording practices, like camping out at the studio and calling anyone and everyone to show up and write, produce, or feature. This track in particular features Kirk Franklin’s gospel choir, who arranged, rehearsed, and recorded the vocals you hear on the record all in a couple of hours while Kanye was shooting a magazine cover.
I’d give just about anything to be a fly on the wall for a Kanye West studio day. I find him endlessly fascinating, a prodigy-turned-pariah. I think his outbursts are, while deeply inappropriate and harmful, signs of an underlying mental health crisis that’s been long stigmatized by the media. I’ll keep listening to everything he puts out, even if just once (Donda (2021), I’m looking at you).
Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch” turned the indie world on its head when it dropped in early 2016. I remember vividly watching the music video, a nod to The Wicker Man (1973):
It’s creepy and beautiful. It came out of nowhere and signaled the beginning of a new era, fully formed. It was the first anyone had heard from Radiohead (save for “Spectre”, but I’ll save that story for another issue) since The King of Limbs (2011) five years prior. With the lush “col legno battuto” string arrangement and the unsettling lyrics, it’s a departure from the electronic sound the band had favored across its most recent albums, but a reflection of Jonny Greenwood’s work scoring films. The rest of the record leaned in this same direction, favoring pianos and orchestras to synths and samples.
“Burn the Witch” is probably the song off this list that I listen to the most. I like to revisit these Best Of playlists sometimes, but often I get lost in judgement of myself or distraction by the records represented. It’s interesting to see what’s stuck and what hasn’t, given how much new music I consume.
I’ve always been drawn to this format because it’s a slice of life, a journal entry, a time capsule. The Best Of playlists in particular seek to capture the whole year, and fail spectacularly every time. But that’s what makes them interesting; I’m not Pitchfork or Billboard or Rolling Stone, and I don’t endeavor to be. I just love music and like to catalogue, curate.
See you next week for the Best of 2017.
Please comment your favorite songs of 2016—I’m dying to know what I’ve missed.