These are my 25 favorite songs of 2009:

25. David Guetta feat. Novel – Missing You
I discovered Novel this year and I think he’s the best in his field. What that field is called exactly, I am not sure – contemporary soul? I’d link him to Trey Songz and the like, but he is so vastly superior in both talent and intelligence that it seems silly to make comparisons. He has one of those ridiculously strong voices that makes controlling a melody as he does seem effortless. On “Missing You,” and perhaps more clearly on his unforgettable cover of Kid Cudi’s “Sky Might Fall,” I get the sense that he understands the technicalities behind crafting a memorable track as much as he feels the emotional components necessary to making it a personal triumph for both creator and listener. This is a piece of the What It Is About Justin Timberlake puzzle, the main reason why I think he is the greatest. True pop artists believe in manipulation – of both sound and emotion – as much as they believe in purity. They are not mutually exclusive, a pure sound can come from the twisting of something organic, and this is what I think Novel does perfectly. His voice is the most natural of gifts, but on a track like “Missing You,” he runs it through varying forms of anger, arrogance, and detachment to produce a pop song that creates as much technical texture as it does emotional depth: emotions are not just expressed through the music, they are seemingly purposely chosen to create rhythm and texture.

24. Thom Yorke – Hearing Damage
I didn’t like the New Moon soundtrack, which this song was written for. I think it’s dumb and completely missing the point of your film to contract all of these fantastic artists into composing songs that, although dreary, certainly display a level of emotionality entirely absent from your accompanying narrative. Instead of adding legitimacy to the project, it takes it away, because using songs like this presupposes a kind of organic quality that is the ANTITHESIS of the entire Twilight saga.

“Hearing Damage” is so good, my god this man cannot make something that is not entirely perfect. It is defined by its urgency and anxiety, heard in the skittery rhythm that darts across the bassline, and the remarkably plaintive confession that is the refrain: you can do no wrong in my eyes. This song is so nervous, so romantic – Bravo, Yorke.

23. Monsters of Folk – Whole Lotta Losin’
NGHHHHHHHH – it builds and builds and builds and builds and builds and ARE YOU JUMPING ON YOUR BED BY THE TIME IT’S DONE OR NOT?!?!?!?!? I am. That or burying my head in my pillow to keep from screaming with extreme joy. Look at me, I’m leaning out apartment windows singing ‘I still miss someone.’

22. Deadmau5 – Ghosts N Stuff
There is something so irresistible about the melding of badass club worthy techno with that kind of really naked emotionality present in the hook. The drawn out “Iiiiiiii” every time it comes around is killer – if you’re lying down while listening your back might arch. Also, when some of the instrumentation drops out towards the end and it’s just him wailing (2:08) – LORD HAVE MERCY ON MY HEART, there is nothing I could want but that.

21. Fabolous feat. Keri Hilson – Everything, Everyday, Everywhere
aldkjglaskg staccato rhythms and cadences!!! There’s something about them that make whoever’s rapping sound infinitely more amused and self-aware than they otherwise would. Fabolous is smart and creative anyway, but with a fluttery beat like this and the help of the incomparably self-assured and smooth-voiced Keri Hilson, this becomes the kind of rap song that is as full of lightness and beauty as it is packed with swagger. An unbeatable combination – the softening of the genre at the hands of collaborations like this (and the entire catalogues of artists like Drake and Cudi) is making the most coherent argument I’ve heard for rap being the superior form of pop.

20. Chiddy Bang – Kids
I don’t think it’s possible to stuff more pure FUN into a song than the amount Chiddy Bang injected into this three minute piece of candy. Tell mama I’m sorry / this life is a party / I’m never growing up. An unrelenting bright pink and blue carnival ride (and the cheap country fair kind – this isn’t some smooth overproduced headtrip) that has exactly what it says it has: the kind of flow to make a bitch do a cartwheel.

19. La Roux – I’m Not Your Toy (DatA Remix)
No artist this year excited me more in terms of releasing a steady stream of fiercely focused bursts of pure pop. Christ, LISTEN to this. It’s a remix, but it does what a remix should do – tease out the genius parts of the original and supplement it with things that make it even better, call even more attention to its wonder. It twists, it sparkles, it creates a vortex of synths for itself to fall into and expand within.

18. Ellie Goulding – Starry Eyed (Jakwob Remix)
Ellie Goulding is one of my favorite discoveries of 2009 – she is maybe the best artist to emerge from the year’s trend of British female electro-pop singers (or is that La Roux? Hmmm…). There is a melancholy whimsy to her delivery that makes her take on the genre entirely unique. Her voice has an ethereal quality that is wonderfully juxtaposed with the more electronic elements of her music – a fairy in industrialized wonderland. Future epic (and epically famous) artist, I’m calling it.

17. The Temper Trap – Fader
!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So standardly fantastic it almost hurts. This kind of song is timeless – can you imagine ever feeling unhappy to hear it? It sounds completely contemporary and yet entirely independent of this era’s trends. Euphoria. Pop wins, again.

16. 50 Cent – Baby By Me (Remix feat. Ne-Yo)
THIS SONG HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH 50 CENT AND EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE HOOK BY NE-YO, HOLY MOTHER OF EVERYTHING THAT HAS EVER BEEN AND EVER WILL BE GORGEOUS, DO NOT MISS THIS SONG. Why does Ne-Yo not make more stuff that sounds like this? I swear all I’ve ever heard by him are boring ballads. Though that could be my bias against R&B speaking.

15. Wild Light – California On My Mind
This is like Frightened Rabbit with brighter colors. It’s so alive.

14. Kid Cudi – CuDi Zone
I talked about Cudi a lot last spring, to the point where I expected his debut album to be very high on my Top Albums Of The Year list. It’s not anywhere close to that, but I ain’t mad, just kind of confused, because he kept saying he was going to do something totally different and then he just made an album that sounds relatively similar to a lot of other stuff going on in his field lately. It also sounds unsure of itself, and is lacking in energy – sometimes he mistakes lethargy for steadiness.

But this. OH THIS SONG. This is the acted on potential I heard the first time I ever heard him. It is a love letter to the most abstract and deeply felt of emotions, the kind that reduces you to a lyric like this: In my mind, it sounds like ooooooooooooh. It soars and keens, an oceanographer could study it as if it were a pattern of waves. This song is an accompaniment to Cudi’s early message: It’s okay to like spending time by yourself and turn your confusion and insecurity into rap. The genre isn’t limited to posturing, it’s also a perfect form of the medium of music with which to shape your fears and failures. Cudi seemed to understand this, but it was pushed to the backburner in favor of the vaguer sentiments that populate the rest of the album. Oh well, we have Drake.

13. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Hysteric
This is my favorite song on one of my favorite albums, and it feels to me like a near direct lifting of the unlocking that occurs in the moment that you realize love is TOTALLY a real thing that doesn’t just happen to other people. How it manages to sound both innocent and wise is beyond me. This is one of the most romantic, beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. A shimmering love letter to love itself.

12. Ke$ha – Tik Tok
I listen to this song at least once a day, and sometimes I put it on repeat for like 25 times. IT. DOES. NOT. GET. OLD. It is the pioneer of a new, awesomely tacky genre of pop: minimalist trash (term is my own, I don’t know what other people are calling it). The spareness of her songs makes it impossible to ignore both how much fun she’s having and how debauched that fun probably is. But Ke$ha should succeed more than her peers because she is smart enough to know that this kind of sound can’t succeed unless the artist laughs while she makes it. Where Uffie sounds insufferably bored, Ke$ha sounds like she’s having a blast, and it turns the song from just a flash in the pan to one of 2009’s most explosively riotous downright JAMS. This is an absolutely fantastic song, I cannot believe there are people who think she is the bane of pop’s existence. A++++

11. Major Lazer – Hold The Line (LehtMoJoe Remix)
This remix makes me feel infinite. It almost feels like it’s happening in slow motion, if only so you can savor every second that much more. How incredibly COOL do you feel while it’s playing?! God damn. It’s actually a mashup of some old 80s song I forget the name of and then this new stuff from Diplo and Switch, two of my favorite DJs (though I actually hate the original of this, it’s too ska). Beware though, the last 30 seconds are just a telephone tone, I apologize, it is awful.

10. MSTRKRFT feat. John Legend – Heartbreaker (Three Fingers Remix)
I have this really complex and detailed AU universe where Dan, Serena, and Nate are the three main and only characters on Gossip Girl and the whole show is a chronicle of their weird and awesome tri-dependent relationship. This is the song that is used for the promo for the second or third season. I like the way this remix draws circles around the song – doesn’t the background sound swirly? It turns John’s “Oh Oh”s into punches and draws out his verses into thick-like-taffy strings of elastic that alternately hold the song back and throttle it forward.

09. The Hood Internet – Cult Logic Forever (Drake Vs. Miike Snow)
The Hood Internet is so god damn sick, how do they even do stuff like this. They take this great Miike Snow song and use it to COMPLETELY revolutionize what was otherwise a totally slow and boring, inexplicably hit song from Drake. Seriously, this is so. genius. The Snow song emphasize’s Drake’s talent for melodic restraint – his cadence is musical and yet feels casual in the way usually only spoken word can. He is an unrivaled storyteller and, I’ve come to believe, the most naturally talented new rapper this year (and last year, whatever, timelines are shaky). Anyway with “Cult Logic” as the background, as I said, his cadence is sped up and becomes the driving force of the track instead of the thing holding it back (the original “Forever” is so unbearably slow, ugh it’s awful). And Kanye’s best line: I used to want this thing forever but y’all can have it back sounds here as though it is THROWN at the listener, sometimes I feel like I should pull back for fear of getting hit with it. Brilliant.

08. Say Hi – Maurine
I like this song because of its gentle earnestness and the simple, yearning beauty of its chorus. I like how his voice cracks over and over, and I like how the floaty quality of it is grounded by the steady guitar in the background. I like that it sounds sweet. I especially like this lyric: I hope it goes well and I hope you dance good, I hope you got presents that make you pretty happy, and I hope you grow old and I hope that you find…somebody nice, which feels infinitely more poignant when he’s singing it.

07. Freelance Whales – Generator ^ First Floor
The best opening track of the year. So pure, so optimistic, this song is the sonic equivalent of one or all of these things:
1) The brief yet endless lean in before a first kiss, that strange brew of certainty and potential, conclusion and introduction
2) A sunrise seen across a vast field, golds and greens that seep into and crawl across it.
3) The most perfect moment of your life, which could be 1 or 2 itself. Moments simple yet dramatic, sprawling yet perfect. Everything that is the simplest and truest form of the word “good.”

Seriously: perfect.

6. The-Dream – Love Vs. Money (Pts. 1 & 2)
UM. Most of what I have to say about The-Dream I want to say in reference to his entire album, but this is a symphony. This is the most stunning piece of R&B I’ve ever heard. It is ASTOUNDING. It’s in the cosmos, twisting constellations into the DNA that form its backbone and mining the infinite space that defines vast universes: it is its own galaxy. My god, listening to this is akin to floating in the most colorful, texturally complex sonic landscape that is so logic-defyingly awesome that I CANNOT EVEN FATHOM IT, only know that it must exist because how else could this song be here. WHAT. THE. EVERLIVING. FUCK. A new word must be invented to convey to you how genius I think this is.

The other thing I want to say about it is in regards to a comparison of its tone and message to that of Justin’s “What Goes Around…/…Comes Around,” another two part symphony. They are similarly brilliant and epic, but where one trades on anger and resentment (”What Goes Around”), the other employs resignation and acceptance to make its point. “Love Vs. Money” is about how the protagonist allowed his financial goals to overshadow his relationship, and his girlfriend left him for another man because of it. The song concedes that the other man is the better man in this situation, and deserves the girl because he cares more about her than he does money. Find another R&B opus that reveals such vulnerability and willingness to concede to the competition. I don’t think it exists. Not only is this song sonically superior to basically anything else, its MESSAGE is so admirable and odd that I find myself in awe of The-Dream in ways I never thought I would be with an R&B artist (it is my least favorite genre after all). The anger driving “What Goes Around” makes it suspenseful – that song is genius because you’re not sure how far he’s going to take it. “Love Vs. Money” establishes its meaning in the opening minute, ensuring that for the entire duration you will understand that you are listening to a man who knows he is in the wrong. Always startling, never less than entirely gripping.

05. Zero 7 – Swing
When I first posted this song (on another blog) all I did was spell “Romantic” backwards as an explanation, and I still feel like that epitomizes it perfectly. C I T N A M O R

04. Mike Jones – Next To You
HOW do I explain how much I love this song. I think all I can really do is quote the best, most romantic lyric of the year for me (oh god, haha): that’s why I’m outside her house at 7:45 / that’s why I take pride when I slide up in her thighs

GUYS, HE WAITS OUTSIDE HER HOUSE FOR A DATE ON TIME AND USES REALLY FANTASTIC EUPHEMISMS FOR SEX THAT MAKE ME THINK OF THE INTIMACY INHERENT IN EASE AND COMFORT. I melt over this song, it is 3 minutes and 42 seconds of joyful romance, I mean christ, the hook’s lyric is cause I gotta be next to you. WHAT SENTIMENT IS MORE WONDERFUL, MORE GLORIOUSLY SIMPLE, THAN THAT. Rap songs about girlfriends are where it’s at, in part because the typical misogyny of the genre have trained me not to expect them.

<3 <3 <3, hearts in my eyes for this song.

03. Florence + The Machine – Howl
I love this song in such a way that my feelings on it feel oddly private, perhaps because I’ve tied it to my ideas about Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows and I never talk about how much I love that series with other people.

02. Henok Achido feat. Sophia Somajo – Pusher
This is my most played song ever, I think. You know that Photoshop filter, Gaussian Blur? It’s like blur but more advanced, like if you personified the idea of blurring and it decided to make itself more complex. This song is a Gaussian Blur – filtered through something soft that makes it expand and turn almost into an echo of itself. I am the ultimate high / I am the rush you’ve been waiting for your whole life. Oh indeed.

01. Mike Posner & The Brain Trust feat. Big Sean – Who Knows?
I have loved this song since February and never posted about it and I don’t know why. It’s not like it’s the kind of song that feels private. It does feel personal though, in the sense that this is what I most want from rap and so rarely receive. Perhaps even from this list it is obvious that one of the things I find most exciting in music is the juxtaposition of soft and hard, electronic and organic. Things that seem opposite but work so well together and make each other better. I have always loved rap and found the toughness of it, the self-assuredness and posturing, extremely appealing. Yet I have also always wished desperately that someone would realize that employing vulnerability and anti-social tendencies within a genre almost dependent on self-mythologizing would completely revolutionize the field and pull out of it hidden layers of sonic meaning no one thought were there before. I thought Kid Cudi was going to be the leader of this, instead I am certain now that it is Drake, who has, in an odd way, enough confidence to display his lack of it.

But nothing Drake has ever done even comes close to the perfection of this song, in which Big Sean tells the story of his mediocre middle class life, full of abstract big dreams that ultimately stagnate, even as he asserts that all he and his peers need is a real opportunity. Dreamlike in its instrumentation, “Who Knows” floats behind Big Sean as he explains that “sometimes my mind wanders away from me,” a refrain that anchors his anecdotes of parental disapproval (and this here is so nuanced – he talks about how his mom avoids talking about him to others because he’s not doing anything that makes her proud!) and lack-of-finance-influenced failed romantic exploits. I wish that I could be what I want to / I wish that I would do what I don’t do, he laments, with a cadence so light and irreverent that when I first heard it I thought I was listening to the one who would change the game, because THIS is what the new age should sound like.

Sadly, this track is not even remotely indicative of the rest of Big Sean’s work, which is as mired in rap cliches – materialism, delusions of grandeur, etc. – as the next guy. But for these three minutes, every time I hear them, it seems like the entirety of rap is shifting towards something so honest and vulnerable that none of us can hardly be ready for what is to come, so revolutionary is its intent. Drake, Cudi, Charles Hamilton, Wale, and B.o.B. will do their part, but I wonder if anything they ever make will match this.

(The generalizations about rap that I am making aren’t in reference to the kind of politically-driven/socially conscious music people like Mos Def et. al make – that’s a different field that isn’t really in line with the points I’m making here, I think. But there are people subverting rap tropes already, and there always have been – I know this.)