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Top Fifty Songs of 2008

Holy moly, I think I’m finally there! I limited my revisions to ten thousand.

The usual apologies for not having been able to include literally every song I liked last year are in order. Had the list been allowed (by the gods) to run a little longer, such diverse and talented artists as Hercules and Love Affair, Crystal Castles, Sigur Rós, Frightened Rabbit, Dodos, and Amadou & Mariam might have enjoyed inclusion. It was not to be, alas. Here are the real winners.

  1. M83: Kim & Jessie
  2. Cut Copy: Out There on the Ice
  3. Vampire Weekend: M79
  4. Deerhunter: Nothing Ever Happened
  5. Fleet Foxes: Drops in the River
  6. Vampire Weekend: Oxford Comma
  7. Femi Kuti: Tell Me
  8. Beyoncé: Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
  9. Jay Reatard: Always Wanting More
  10. Portishead: Silence
  11. TV on the Radio: Golden Age
  12. Q-Tip: Gettin’ Up
  13. No Age: Teen Creeps
  14. Santogold: L.E.S. Artistes
  15. Women: Shaking Hand
  16. David Byrne and Brian Eno: Strange Overtones
  17. Gang Gang Dance: House Jam
  18. Bon Iver: Re: Stacks
  19. No Age: Cappo
  20. Beach House: Gila
  21. M83: Couleurs
  22. Deerhunter: Never Stops
  23. Fuck Buttons: Sweet Love for Planet Earth
  24. Dragging an Ox Through Water: Houses and Homunculi
  25. School of Seven Bells: Half Asleep
  26. TV on the Radio: Love Dog
  27. Fucked Up: Black Albino Bones
  28. Fleet Foxes: Blue Ridge Mountains
  29. High Places: From Stardust to Sentience
  30. Lil Wayne: Shoot Me Down
  31. Beach House: You Came to Me
  32. The Walkmen: In the New Year
  33. Deerhoof: Offend Maggie
  34. Harvey Milk: Motown
  35. No Age: Sleeper Hold
  36. Empire of the Sun: Walking on a Dream
  37. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Night of the Lotus Eaters
  38. Cut Copy: Lights and Music
  39. Passion Pit: Sleepyhead
  40. Telepathe: I Can’t Stand It
  41. The Laughing: Canopy
  42. Death Cab for Cutie: Cath…
  43. Lykke Li: Little Bit
  44. Fleet Foxes: Ragged Wood
  45. M83: We Own the Sky
  46. Jay Reatard: See/Saw
  47. Kanye West: Love Lockdown
  48. Atlas Sound: River Card
  49. Max Tundra: Number Our Days
  50. Crystal Antlers: A Thousand Eyes

Now I can go get the new Animal Collective!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 9:59 pm and is filed under List, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Top Fifty Songs of 2008”

  1. Luc Perkins Says:
    January 14th, 2009 at 5:50 pm

    Great lists, as per usual. The yawning chasm in my soul mentioned in a previous wall post has been erased :) But in all honesty I really do look forward to the lists because there’s always great for recommendations. In both NC and here in Germany I feel completely alienated from music in general. If there’s anything that could get me to move back to Portland, it would be the opportunity to live somewhere where people share music with each other, make music together, etc. Living in a community that so strongly supports that it more rare than I ever realized, particularly having grown up in the Portland area…

    Anyway, I won’t make too many comments on either list, but one thing I’d like to get from you is a basic characterization of 2008, and even of this decade in general. This decade has really just floored me musically. Thinking back on the 90’s and all the formative things I listened to, I looked forward to this decade with foreboding: nothing was going to replace grunge, alt-rock, brit pop, etc. I looked around for “replacements” and found British electronic music (Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, etc….ugh), hip hop (which I still can’t get in to outside of a song here and there), the dying embers of alt-rock, nu-metal, and the like. Then Kid A and Sigur Ros and Yo La Tengo’s “And Then Nothing…” and Mogwai and a whole lot of things really just kicked my ass in all the right ways. I also remember both of us agreeing that when we first got into post rock (including of course that Godspeed show in Fall 2000) we felt like no other music had ever mattered. And then it sort of disappeared by late 2002. Then the Rapture and Q and Not U and Liars came along and really just injected this stream into everything that’s still going strong (despite major differences, I think Hot Chip, Cut Copy and others are part of it). Then came the freak folk explosion, which gave us Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, and tangentially you could say Animal Collective.

    Then there was the “the band”/hipster craze earlier in the decade (remember that, anyone?) which produced a lot of garbage but also gave us the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Strokes, Interpol, and others. God, this decade just gets weirded and also more awesome the more I think about it. And Canada, Jesus H. Where did y’all come from? The Broken Social Scene constellation, the Arcade Fire, the New Pornographers. Four Radiohead albums. Lots of crazy good electronic music (remember Mum?). Sufjan and Antony and Andrew Bird. And somewhere in there Death Cab and the Shins got huge and also did some good things.

    Okay, I’ll stop before I get too rhapsodic. But I feel like 2008 is when a lot of these strands sort of matured in a way. Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes might be inconceivable without freak folk (maybe Beach House too), M83 and Fuck Buttons without melodic electronica, TV on the Radio and the Walkmen without the NYC explosion earlier in the decade, etc. I beyond eagerly look forward to all the best of the decade lists that we’ll be seeing before we know it….

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