We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 Daft Punk: "Get Lucky"
02 Kanye West: "New Slaves"
03 My Bloody Valentine: "Only Tomorrow"
04 Chance the Rapper: "Juice"
05 A$AP Ferg: "Shabba"
06 Justin Timberlake: "Pusher Love Girl"
07 Darkside: "Golden Arrow"
08 Volcano Choir: "Byegone"
09 Deerhunter: "Monomania"
10 Beyoncé: "***Flawless"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
02 Kanye West: Yeezus
03 Danny Brown: Old
04 Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
05 My Bloody Valentine: mbv
06 Earl Sweatshirt: Doris
07 Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe
08 Paramore: Paramore
09 Jai Paul: Jai Paul
10 Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels
Most Played Song of 2013: Easily Daft Punk "Get Lucky". There was a two month stretch where I would listen to "Get Lucky" on repeat on the way to a party, then get to the party and hear it two or three times, then head home from the party at some ridiculous hour, zombified and moving at half speed in the light of day with parents and their children carrying out their sensible people normal activities, listening to "Get Lucky" on repeat again self-satisfied and reminiscing on what a great night (slash morning) it turned out to be. The song was versatile like that; you can hear it as anticipatory or participatory. I’m usually some level of averse to the major pop movements of every year just on account of how bloodless and infernal a song usually has to be to appeal to literally everyone, but between "Get Lucky" and "Blurred Lines", summer 2013 was the moment where I could snap on the radio and actually enjoy myself for a few minutes.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: Daryl Hall's Sacred Songs. I’m a big prog fan, and I especially favor the exchange of players and ideas that happened between the King Crimson, Yes and Brian Eno braintrusts in all of those acts’ prime ‘70s incarnations. I’m also majorly into heart-on-sleeve early ‘80s pop, because I was raised on the stuff. So when I found out that Daryl Hall from Hall & Oates did a whole album in collaboration with Crimson’s Robert Fripp (two, really, if you count Hall’s scrapped vocals from Fripp’s Exposure album) it was one of those moments where you feel like this improbable curio can only have been made in anticipation of your own eventual discovery of it. Sacred Songs is one of those great albums that slips between the cracks of our shared music nerd canon, and I spent the summer on a campaign to fix that, at least in my circle of friends. There’s never a more perfect synthesis of the Hall & Fripp union presented there than "Babs & Babs", which is your typical wistful Hall pop number until Rob’s signature Frippertronics dump acid on the thing midway through and it starts to unravel.
Musical Highlights: That moment in Paramore’s "Ain’t It Funny" when the choir pops up unannounced and slays, the horns that catch you unawares in King Krule’s "Neptune Estate", Despot’s tightly wound guest verse on Blood Orange’s "Clipped On", the post-rock crescendo at the end of the Foreign Exchange’s "Call It Home/Pity", the all-consuming pandemonium surrounding the Beyoncérelease, Bradford Cox walking clean out of the building as Deerhunter charged through the closing moments of "Monomania" on "Fallon", not getting a Future album but still managing to receive a whole album’s worth of quality Future cuts, the overstuffed histrionics of Jamie Lidell’s “What a Shame”, the week we thought we had the Jai Paul album and the time Jai Paul actually had to use Twitter to kill the rumor, the way A$AP Ferg says "They ain’t wanna do that!" on "Didn’t Wanna Do That", every damn last minute of Retribution Gospel Choir’s electric church service "Can’t Walk Out", waiting on Dom Kennedy’s hyped-up summer opus Get Home Safely only for it to drop on a rainy week in mid-October, the orchestral redo of Jay Z’s "You, Me, Him and Her" soundtracking Mack Wilds’ "My Crib", Dismemberment Plan nailing the closer as always on "Let’s Just Go to the Dogs", the part where "New Slaves" explodes at the end that would make me unexpectedly emotional whenever I put on Yeezus on hangover days to defibrillate my spirit.
Musical Lowlights: Didactic pop. Carnivorous pop. Pop that tells you that other pop isn’t good for you. "Royals". "Thrift Shop". "Hard Out Here". Any song that felt charged with telling the listener, "Hey, these other songs are doing you all a grave disservice with their gross materialism and unrealistic premiums placed on looks and belongings. But we’re all just regular people here, and there’s a beauty in that. And I’m here to appraise it for you." Fuck that message. Pop is escapism as much as it’s realism. There’s room, no, there’s a necessity for both, and I could not stand the ideological superiority games those artists played this year. Let me not forget "Accidental Racist" though. Not just because it stumbles onto its slapdash Colors of Benetton message of unity off Brad Paisley trying to explain to Starbucks wait staff why they shouldn’t be offended by his Confederate flag gear, but also because it sticks the landing with endgame do-I-laugh-or-cry horrors like "If you look past my gold chains/ I’ll forget the iron chains" (LL!) and "R.I.P. Robert E. Lee but I’ve gotta thank Abraham Lincoln for freeing me," which... I have nothing.