As of late, I’ve been more intrigued by picking a random topic I’m interested in and making pieces about those, rather than only making reviews for recent movies, ranking filmographies, and whatever else was filling up my website before this summer. I’m sure I’ll release singular film reviews when inspiration strikes, but today, I wanted to do a fun little writing challenge. Could I make a list of the best hit songs in a year that was basically a nonstop slog on the Billboard Hot 100? I could try, at the very least.
The rules for what counts for this list are the same as the list I made for the year 2007. Any song that made it onto Billboard’s Year End list in 2013 that wasn’t on the same list the previous year has the potential to make it onto this list. And I’ll be honest, even though I indeed found the Year End Hot 100 to be chock full of boring, tedious, obnoxious tracks with little to no redeeming value (I’ll consider making a worst list for 2013 as well if it seems like as much of a challenge as this was), I think I was somehow able to compile a solid list of ten great songs. So without further ado, let’s talk about….
NUMBER TEN
Ask any music critic or historian, and they’ll probably tell you that one of the most embarrassing trends in popular music from the 2010s is bro country. Thankfully, I think we’ve gone long enough without a bro-country hit to say that we’ve officially escaped the trend. The most recent bro-country hit I can think of is the abysmal “Body Like a Back Road” by Sam Hunt.
If you asked me to pin down when it started, I might point you to “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line. An easy target for a worst list if ever there was one. Honestly, I think that song is pretty decent. It’s fun, it’s corny. It’s nowhere near this list, but it’s a solid six or seven out of ten. However, yes, I get the hate. Why can’t we have a nice country hit in 2013? Oh, I don’t know, how about…a cover of a song from 2004 based on a song from 1973? I mean, if it counts. We have to get good country music from somewhere.
10. “Wagon Wheel” by Darius Rucker.
If you would have told me before I started working on this piece that the lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish made one of my favorite hit songs of 2013, I don’t think I would believe you. They were a fine band and all, but they operated in that sort of nineties adult alternative that I can’t relate to to save my life. This is partly why I’m so shocked to say that, as a country singer, Darius Rucker is honestly pretty good.
It certainly helps that he seems to have cut it out with the unintelligible, crooning vocal style he used to be obsessed with. At least for his cover of “Wagon Wheel,” he’s retired that for a generic country voice with just the right amount of twang, and it really works. It works so well, in fact, that I went back and listened to the original Old Crow Medicine Show rendition of the song, and I’m shocked to say that Darius Rucker’s performance is one thousand times better. It should also be acknowledged that this song’s hook was written by Bob Dylan who is, of course, basically just a cheat code. It makes perfect sense to me that “Wagon Wheel” would be the love child of several talented people, one that highlights all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses.
NUMBER NINE
Todd in the Shadows, a music critic whom Austin and I both talk about and lift from frequently, used to talk about a phenomenon he called the Fluke Indie Hit Sweepstakes. On most of his best lists for the early to mid-2010s, you could expect to see at least one indie hit from a band that you were extremely unlikely to ever hear from again.
In 2010, his pick was “Animal” by Neon Trees. In 2011, he used “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People. For his 2013 list, there were actually three fluke indie hits that he included either on his actual list or his honorable mentions. None of them wound up on my personal list, but I did end up including a song from a different indie band that most people haven’t heard from since 2013. Just not the song I wish I could have.
9. “Little Talks” by Of Monsters and Men.
I like Of Monsters and Men, and I would have liked for them to stay famous. Every song I’ve heard from them tells me they’re quite talented and deserved more time in the spotlight. But honestly, if I could have chosen something from their debut album “My Head is an Animal” to become the hit, I would have greatly preferred “Mountain Sound,” a rich little indie pop darling that scratches the perfect itch in my brain. If I could have included it based on the arbitrary rules I set for this list, I probably would have ranked it very high.
I don’t want to discredit “Little Talks” too much, although I’ve never liked the brass section on this track. It just explodes at the very beginning and between every chorus and verse, and I’ve never quite known what to do with it. But lyrically, “Little Talks” works exceptionally well. It might be even stronger than “Mountain Sound,” thanks to the picture it paints with its words being so palpable and mesmerizing. As the co-lead vocalist tells it, “Little Talks” is about a widower trying to have a conversation with his wife who may or may not actually be there in spirit. It’s a very nice story that Of Monsters and Men are able to pull off quite well, and it’s enough to elevate “Little Talks” above your average love song.
NUMBER EIGHT
If you didn’t notice, the tide really shifted on Miley Cyrus in 2020, right around the time she released “Midnight Sky,” a Stevie Nicks-interpolating flashdance masterpiece. It was the lead single for the equally impressive Plastic Hearts, an album absolutely worth checking out if you’re interested. Many people saw it as Miley Cyrus finally coming into her own, stumbling upon a sound that actually fit her.
I’m not going to tell you that Miley Cyrus was always a great musician. She’s had several extremely rough patches in her discography leading up to Plastic Hearts, and 2013 was definitely her toughest. Not even necessarily just the music, but by that year her reputation just had never and has never since been worse. Bangerz, the album she released during the year in question, is far from great. I struggle to even call it good. But this song is proof that even in her worst moments, she can sometimes strike gold.
8. “We Can’t Stop” by Miley Cyrus.
I’m aware that this is probably the most unpopular opinion on this list, and I understand why. Every negative review I’ve read about “We Can’t Stop” points to the same thing being the song’s fatal flaw. The way the song’s lyrics are meant to depict a fun, drug-fueled party, but the production and Miley’s delivery both make it sound so dour and depressing that there’s no way any reasonable person would play it at a house party. And my argument is not that this is an incorrect reading of the song.
My argument is that all of this is true, and that’s why I enjoy it. Party songs that are secretly about the first steps toward horrible drug addiction are absolutely my jam, and “We Can’t Stop” is one of my favorite examples of that. It might not be as strong as, say, “Chandelier” by Sia which would drop the following year, but it’s so paradoxically delightfully downbeat and depressing. It’s possible that Miley, in addition to her six co-writers, didn’t shoot for this reading, but that analysis makes “We Can’t Stop” a fascinating take on a party song, and one that I appreciate a lot.
NUMBER SEVEN
In addition to Of Monsters and Men, there will be more artists on this list that haven’t made real waves since 2013. Charli XCX, who appears on my pick for number seven, is actually not one of those people. Aside from the fact that she didn’t really break into the mainstream until 2014 when she released “Boom Clap,” featured on the Fault in Our Stars soundtrack, and “Fancy,” where she was an assist to Iggy Azalea, much more recently she’s carved herself a niche in the hyperpop genre.
Hyperpop hasn’t really found its way into the mainstream yet. Music fans probably know about 100 Gecs, you might have even heard their song “Money Machine” get some radio play. But in terms of actual Billboard numbers, I suspect it’ll be a while before hyperpop has a real crossover hit. This is probably the closest we’ll get for a long time, so…whatever, it’s fine, I’ll take it.
7. “I Love It” by Icona Pop feat. Charli XCX.
I feel as though on every Top Ten Songs list that I make, I end up including one song that I enjoy primarily because it’s just a great-sounding pop song that I have astonishingly little to say about. I’m tempted to use that excuse for “I Love It,” but if one was to use the argument that it sounds bad, I don’t think I could argue against it. The song begins with an absolute jackhammer of a synth line, one that’s fairly consistent throughout the song’s entire runtime, and the production, in general, is pretty ragged.
But I compared it to hyperpop a second ago, and if I use that logic I can explain why I actually enjoy this song a lot. I don’t have much of a gage for how fondly people remember this song if they remember it at all, but coming back to it almost a decade after its peak, it still hits just the same as when I first heard and loved it. I do note that this is only one of two songs that both Austin and I chose for our respective best lists for 2013. He describes it as “pulsing with punk joy” and specifically a track that sounds like it fits right into Charli’s canon, and that’s certainly true. Slides into her canon better than “Boom Clap” or “Fancy,” I can tell you that.
NUMBER SIX
Part of the reason I wrote my piece on 2007 was so I could celebrate the pop-punk hits of that year. There were quite a few, in fact. I included a song by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. I talked about Avril Lavigne. My Chemical Romance topped the list. And I was able to fit two songs by Fall Out Boy on that list. Possibly just to keep with tradition, I was hoping I would be able to include another song from a pop-punk legend on my next top ten list.
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and My Chemical Romance haven’t sniffed the Year End Hot 100 since 2007, so they’re out. Avril Lavigne did have a hit that year, if only it made it to the Year End. And Fall Out Boy…woof. I mean, I like Save Rock and Roll and all, but “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark” is one of the three worst songs on that record. So in terms of all of those artists, I’m completely out of luck. At least I’ve still got Paramore.
6. “Still Into You” by Paramore.
If pop punk fans were disappointed by Fall Out Boy’s output during the 2010s, and I know an awful lot of people were, they can take solace in knowing that Paramore had an incredible decade. They only released two albums in those ten years, but they were both stone-cold masterpieces, blowing every record they had released prior out of the water. My personal favorite was the self-titled record they released in 2013, a seventeen-track opus that also contained two major radio hits, “Aint it Fun” and “Still Into You.”
Paramore’s self-titled record was recorded in the aftermath of major drama within the band, and it reads like a complete purge of every emotion felt during the entire process. Within the mythos of the tracklist, “Still Into You” acts as a celebration of Hayley Williams’ relationship with her then-boyfriend and future husband, which was more than likely one of the only things keeping her sane. “Still Into You” loses a little bit of power when you remember that the couple divorced a few years after the album’s release, but in the moment it’s nothing if not a pleasant little love song reflecting a small flicker of light in what’s otherwise complete darkness.
NUMBER FIVE
Bruno Mars has yet to “wow” me with a full project. I mean, I like him. He’s good. He’s definitely tapped into things on some occasions. However, even with the critical darling An Evening with Silk Sonic, which at half an hour I still felt was too long, or the Grammy award-winning 24K Magic, whose title track is still my favorite of all of his songs, I can’t really muster up the unconditional love for him others seem to.
That said, it’s impossible for me to deny how much better he’s gotten from his debut album Doo-Wops and Hooligans, which for the record I think is terrible. Awful, corny piano ballad after awful, corny piano ballad, except for the exceptionally tedious and smarmy “The Lazy Song,” which would immediately top my worst of the year list if I were to make one. I don’t think it’s a hot take that he only really got good once he became one of the faces of the eighties pop revival, or that this is one of the best songs of his career so far.
5. “Locked Out of Heaven” by Bruno Mars.
There were a few songs that I enjoyed off of Doo-Wops and Hooligans, being the charismatic and sweet “Just the Way You Are” and “Marry You,” but they both fail in comparison to “Locked Out of Heaven.” This was the very first Bruno Mars song where I feel like he really came into his own. Or…not his own, I guess. I’m far from the first person to note that Bruno Mars instantaneously got better when he started ripping off other musicians with his own work. Mars himself admitted to channeling The Police specifically with “Locked Out of Heaven,” which makes enough sense.
I can’t help but feel as though “Locked Out of Heaven” is a lot groovier than most tracks by The Police, though. On the flawed but solid nonetheless Unorthodox Jukebox, there are quite a few tracks that groove pretty hard, including the other big hit from the record, “Treasure.” But “Locked Out of Heaven” is without a doubt my favorite song on the record, partly just because of how fun and fresh it is. There were signs on Doo-Wops and Hooligans that Bruno Mars might eventually turn into a really suave retro singer, but based on that debut, I couldn’t expect anything close to the heights he would reach with this single in particular.
NUMBER FOUR
If I ever do a list like this for 2012, I can already tell you that my pick for number one will be “Some Nights” by Fun., an absolute behemoth of a song. When I was counting down my favorite songs of 2007, I called “Welcome to the Black Parade” the “Bohemian Rhapsody” of the 2000s. Well, “Some Nights” is that but for the 2010s. A wonderful anthem for millennial angst that shouldn’t be forgotten.
Aside from Jack Antonoff, who went on to have a very prolific career in music that continues to this day, Fun. is another band that general audiences haven’t heard from since their peak. Which, you know, that’s a shame. Their commercial breakthrough album was far from perfect, but I would have liked for them to continue as a band and become one of the great indie acts of our day. I mean, if the singles they already had were this good.
4. “Carry On” by Fun.
“Carry On” slots itself nicely between the other two big hits off of Some Nights. Not expansive enough to be on par with the title track, not simple enough to be down there with the still-lovely “We Are Young.” Instead, “Carry On” is an indie pop anthem just heartfelt enough to leave a spark. I’ll admit that I don’t always understand what Fun. is saying with these lyrics, I’ve asked some of my friends to try to decipher lines like “your head in the curtains and heart like the Fourth of July” to no avail.
But like all of the best anthems, it doesn’t really matter if any of the individual lyrics in “Carry On” make sense, because what matters is that the song still conveys some sort of message beautifully due to how all the lyrics work together. The entire Some Nights album seems to be about the inherent restlessness that comes with being in your twenties and having no idea where you’re going, and “Carry On” is one of the best songs on the album thanks to both how well it fits with the theme, and how well it still sounds separated from the full experience. I don’t know if it just hits particularly hard because I’m also in my twenties and I also have no idea where my life is heading, but I have a feeling this will keep working for me for quite a long time.
NUMBER THREE
It’s dishonest to say that EDM started anywhere close to 2013, but I think it’s fair to say that that genre absolutely defined the mid-2010s. The people behind the song “#SELFIE” had seven major hits during that time, a lot of them actually pretty good, and then they quickly and quietly got booted out of the limelight. The Chainsmokers released an album just a few days ago. Did you hear it? Did you know about it? I’m guessing not.
And yeah, this is all to say that I like plenty of The Chainsmokers’ major hits. I also like plenty of songs by Marshmello, who has since replaced The Chainsmokers as the EDM bane of music critics’ existence. And as much as I enjoy a lot of songs by both of these artists, I get it. The production is often bland, and the drops are pretty much always just weak synth riffs that have no meaning. Didn’t drops use to mean something? Aren’t they supposed to hit you like a bag of bricks? We need more songs like that.
3. “Clarity” by Zedd feat. Foxes.
If having to admit that I like a fair amount of music by The Chainsmokers and Marshmello means I have to do it with reluctance and caution, admitting that I love the music of Zedd ultimately comes very easily. In preparing for this piece, I listened through a decent amount of the songs on the Zedd Essentials playlist on Apple Music, and I was reminded how much I love basically all of them. “The Middle” featuring Maren Morris. “Stay” featuring Alessia Cara. “Starving” by Hailee Steinfeld. These are all just fantastic EDM tracks that never get old for me.
But none of them match up to the very first song I heard from him, “Clarity” featuring English singer-songwriter Foxes. This is another song where I can’t quite decipher all of the lyrics, but I figure they might have been chosen based more on how the words sound as opposed to what they mean. It’s a love song about two oddballs who’ve found a perfect life with each other. Frankly, I don’t need to understand much more than that, especially when the EDM production does so much to support it all. Dear God, this song is great. If there’s any justice in the world, Zedd will outlast all of his producer peers and keep making incredible tracks for decades to come.
NUMBER TWO
As I scanned the Billboard Year-End list for 2013 in search of contenders, I found myself thinking about how many major pop stars came out of this year. Even on this list so far, Darius Rucker will never be as popular as he was in 1994, Fun. was 2012, Paramore was arguably 2009, and some of these people weren’t famous before or after the hits I’ve included here.
Of the people I haven’t included here…I don’t know, you could argue Macklemore and Florida Georgia Line got their fame in 2013, but they felt…pretty useless by the decade’s end. This next entry is, I think, the big outlier of that year. This is an artist that made a huge smash with one incredible song, kept the momentum going at least for a little bit, carved out something of a niche for themself in an art-pop arena, and changed the face of popular music for all the time since. And if you know the tiniest bit about the popular music of 2013, you know exactly which artist and song I’m talking about.
2. “Royals” by Lorde.
If you didn’t know that “Royals” by Lorde changed the cultural landscape of music forever, it might strike you as little more than a simple, if catchy pop song. I can see how someone could have that assessment of it, but even separated from historical context, I think it’s a great track. If a three-minute pop song can still be this catchy nearly a decade after it was released, if I can still remember every single word and have the time of my life singing along every single time, I think that’s a good sign that it’s just a great track from an art pop goddess.
That said, as someone who was there, there’s no way that I can talk about “Royals” without talking about what popular music was like that year. Two of the biggest rap hits of that year, “Started from the Bottom” by Drake and “Holy Grail” by Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake, were all about celebrating success without having to talk about the journey of getting there, which is…you know, generally the most interesting part of the story. “Royals” generated thinkpiece after thinkpiece about whether or not it was racist or putting out a good message, but it seems clear to me that Lorde wasn’t attempting to take down the musicians making these songs, but the actual boring tracks that they were. And she did take these songs down, all in one beautiful, three-minute fell swoop. God bless her for it.
NUMBER ONE
If it wasn’t a spectacular song anyway, the fact that “Royals” by Lorde basically changed the landscape of popular music for a long time means it probably would have ended up on this list anyway. But in terms of Lorde herself, I don’t think she’s half as important an artist as the one who made my number one pick. I mean no shade to Lorde in this statement, her second album is a magnum opus that I hope to cover in full sometime in the future.
I said that purely as proof of how influential, important, and wickedly talented the mastermind behind my number one pick truly is. This artist is only in his mid-thirties, and he’s already released four of the most critically acclaimed rap albums of the last ten years. I saw people calling him one of the best rappers of all time by the time he dropped his second album. In most cases, that’s way too early to call things like that, but with this artist, I don’t know who could possibly complain. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Kendrick Lamar.
1. “Swimming Pools (Drank)” by Kendrick Lamar.
When I was defending my choice to include “We Can’t Stop” on this list, I mentioned that it felt like Cyrus was trying to make a party song explicitly about the dangers of drug addiction. Maybe I was wrong about that, I don’t know, But if you want to hear about a song that’s actually about the dangers of addiction, you can have Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank),” my favorite song on the 2013 Year End Hot 100. For those unaware, Lamar is a terrifically beloved conscious rapper, known for tackling issues ranging from racism to the pandemic to, more recently, LGBT issues.
None of those have much to do with “Swimming Pools (Drank)” which is an exceptionally dreary depiction of one man’s descent into alcohol addiction. Even from a conscious rapper, I don’t really expect this sort of subject matter from a popular song, but Kendrick Lamar absolutely pulls it off. This is the darkest song that I’ve chosen for this list by far, and on top of that, it’s arguably the very strongest. Certainly one of the strongest on Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, the album that immediately cemented Lamar as one of the most important rappers of our day. I don’t know if many people can throw “Swimming Pools (Drank)” on for pleasure, or how often, but I do know that it’s easily one of my favorite singles of 2013, and that it’s definitely worth checking out at least once.
The Plath Sierra 