The 100 Greatest Songs of the 2010’s

All good things come to an end. The jury’s out on whether the 2010’s – AKA the decade with no name – have been good or not, with the consensus being that if you’re a politician with a chip on your shoulder and a way with populism, you’ll be thinking things have been mighty fine. Everyone else? The back of the queue is over there.

(Hear the full list by clicking this link).

Whether this has meant that there’s been a great schism in music between material from the the pre-2016 part of of these last 10 years as compared to the post is debateable, but there’s certainly an enormous flow of residual anger around now – hear it burning for instance in  Idles, Protomartyr, Childish Gambino and Sleaford Mods, although the latter’s entry was released in 2014.

In terms of the task of compiling what’s been being intermittently posted since March, it’s clearly impossible to track anything more than a tiny fraction of the musical content available to anyone with access to a smartphone, let alone rate it as better than something else. In a sense the numbers in this chart haven’t been strictly meritorious and especially towards the upper reaches, they’re unimportant. Is the #1, Father John Misty’s handsome, mariachi-tinged ballad Chateau Lobby #4 “better” than say for instance Kendrick Lamar’s Alright?PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake? The answer of course is that there’s no objective way to assess the truth of it: this ear-of-the-beholder kismet though is what so many of us love about music as an art form.

One of the reasons Josh Tillman’s alter ego sits astride the pinnacle is that he’s tapped into the prevailing meta; previously a Fleet Fox, this invented persona, with it’s addictions and sobriety, it’s boundless cynicism and vainglorious yet highly appealing complexes has bottled all of our collective sociopathy in one easily digested portion.

This list began in the thinking during late 2017. Like all of these excercises at first it was a carefree trot through the dead certs, the personal favourites and the obscurities, before knuckling down to cover entries you’d probably think of as hip-hop, punk, post-punk, techno, pop, house, trap, black metal, folk, r&b, post-classical, Chillwave, indie rock and all points in between. Gradually the unconscious pressure of both having to come to a conclusion and for it to be reasonably credible took it’s toll, as songs were dropped and substituted, right up until the last moment. It is, for perspective of course, just a list of mostly old songs: All good things come to an end –  and the number below is it.

#1 Father John Misty – Chateau Lobby #4 (In C For Two Virgins)

Released : 2014

Note: The playlist only contains 96 songs as four of the entries weren’t on available on Spotify – Blanck Mass, Aphex Twin, Gus Gus and Blawan.