1. Halsey - "You Should Be Sad"
I like the weird quasi-country sound Greg Kurstin put together for this song that still feels like it has a light dance music pulse under it and occasionally bursts into this big screaming hair metal guitar leads, by some distance my favorite thing Halsey has done to date. But I think it's kind of funny that she says "I had no warning about who you are," because c'mon, you didn't have a hunch G-Eazy might be a bad boyfriend? That guy dresses like the Fonz. Here's my favorite 2020 singles Spotify playlist.

2. Moneybagg Yo f/ Blac Youngsta - "1 2 3" 
One of my favorite subgenres of southern rap is beats where the keyboard part consists mainly of 3 or 4 keys on the lowest octave of a piano, those tracks always sound hard. I've said before that Moneybagg Yo is my favorite of the current wave of Memphis rappers and Blac Youngsta is my least favorite, but they definitely bring out the best in each other, this might be the best performance of Blac Youngsta's career. 

3. Demi Lovato - "I Love Me"
"Anyone" was a good song for Demi Lovato to tentatively step back into the spotlight with after the dark days of an overdose and rehab, but I've always preferred her uptempo material to her ballads, and "I Love Me" was the kind of song I was hoping for from her, something with a couple of the same co-writers as "Sorry Not Sorry" that has a little more heart in it. But what I really like about this song is this big swinging pivots from a big sound to a spare sound, you don't really get classic quiet/loud dynamics much in current top 40 music. 

4. Harry Styles - "Adore You"
Finally, Harry Styles has a bona fide U.S. radio hit, something that surpassed the perfunctory spins "Sign Of The Times" got 3 years ago, and it feels like he just kinda came around to it when he felt like making one. I think the weird video where he sings the song to a fish makes the song more charming than I initially thought it was. And now when he sings "would you believe it!?" I picture him saying it to a fish while pointing to a taco.

5. The 1975 - "You & Me Together Song" 
The 1975 have a tendency to put scarequotes and meta gestures around their hookiest and most memorable songs, it's one of the things that makes them interesting and one of the things that makes them annoying. And you can see that right in the extraneous use of the word 'song' in this song's title, and the over-the-top nods to mid-'90s Britpop in both the song and the video. But I really dig this one, it's growing on me a lot. 

6. Jonas Brothers - "What A Man Gotta Do"
I'm kind of bummed that this hasn't done as well as the Happiness Begins singles, it's really good (although I think the title/chorus would annoy me less with a more grammatically correct "what a man's gotta do"). The Jonases are managing that balancing act of being a real instrument-playing rock-influenced band in the current Top 40 climate better than, say, Maroon 5, and in this song I feel like they've shrewdly taken cues from George Michael's "Faith" in the taut arrangement of chunky acoustic guitar strums and light clicky percussion. 

7. Taylor Swift - "The Man"
It took 4 singles for Taylor to get to a song on Lover that's actually good -- unfortunately, all the bad single choices have meant she's now falling out of that upper echelon of pop artists where people actually care about your 4th single. Really, this could've been the 1st single.

8. Doja Cat - "Say So" 
I've been kind of quietly confused the last few months as Doja Cat has started to get lumped in more and more with full-time rappers who make hip-hop -- she can rap well, but I look at it as kind of one component of her sound that's slightly more prominent now than it was on her earlier stuff. So I'm kinda glad that a big melodic pop song like "Say So" is becoming her biggest hit, even if it has one rapped verse, it kind of puts her in that Gwen Stefani kind of sound that I associate her with more. 

9. Lady Gaga - "Stupid Love" 
I've been interested to see how well Lady Gaga would return to her old bright loud pop sensibility after the A Star Is Born stuff kind of put her back on top. And while her first collaboration with Max Martin kind of falls short of what I'd hoped for from her at this juncture, it's also her best lead single in a long time, easily better than "Perfect Illusion" and "Applause Plause." 

10. The Strokes - "Bad Decisions" 
One of the things that making a Strokes deep album cuts playlist confirmed for me was that they've made plenty of good songs since the dreaded "Juicebox," but "Bad Decisions" might be the first actually good single they've released since then. And it's still a little goofy, it basically sounds like they wrote "Melt With You" but changed the chorus to "stop the world and melt with you" to "making bad decisions with you," but they've always been at their best when they're stealing a little. 

The Worst Single of the Month: Nicki Minaj - "Yikes" 
I think Nicki Minaj still has a lot of potential to come back and make great music, but this song really was not the move, I'm kind of glad this fell off the Hot 100 quicker than "Chun-Li" or "Barbie Dreams" so she can try something besides a tired trap song. After Rosa Parks didn't like the Outkast song while she was alive, I don't know why Nicki thought "all you bitches Rosa Parks, uh oh get ya ass up" was a good idea.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16, 2020 at 8:20 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.