Decade Songs - 100 to 91

After a couple of previews, my top 100 songs of the last decade (2010 to 2019) can begin in earnest.

100. Garfunkel and Oates - The Loophole 
YouTube (NSFW WARNING)// Spotify
Track length: 4:41
UK release date: 25th June 2013
UK chart position: N/A
Listens as at 8th October: 9

Off to a nice gentle start, aren't we? Kicking things off with an absolutely filthy peon to Christian abstinence from two character actors you're never quite sure if you recognise or not. No bones about it, this is not the sort of song to play out loud around...anyone, really, and one of the worst songs to get stuck in your head. It's also fun! 

99. Avril Lavigne - Here's To Never Growing Up
YouTube // Spotify
Track length: 3:34
UK release date: 9th April 2013
UK chart position: 14
Last decade's chart: 35
Listens as at 8th October: 15

Like Peter Pan, Avril never grows up. She's found a niche that works for her and is loathe to deviate from it (until she does, and you end up with the bland mush of her last album). Bratty pop punk works for her, even in her late 20s, and I'm still hoping that in 2027 we get a Best Damn Thing 20th anniversary tour where she plays the album in full!

98. Now, Now - Oh. Hi.
YouTube // Spotify
Track length: 3:29
UK release date: 6th March 2012
UK chart position: N/A
Listens as at 8th October: 14

A long standing joke of mine (which is probably getting a bit wearing on Dana now) is to deliberately confuse two similar artists, e.g. Boyzone and Westlife, N-Sync and Backstreet Boys. This occasionally backfires on me, as Now, Now are a band who I continually confuse with Oh Wonder - both being boy/girl duos with a similar sound. Now, Now have the sonic edge, with their wide sweeping sound, and this is the best example. 

97. Cherri Bomb - Shake The Ground
YouTube // Spotify
Track length: 2:40
UK release date: 1st May 2012
UK chart position: N/A
Listens as at 8th October: 20

A band that filled the "Donnas" shaped hole in my life, between Pretty Reckless albums. They later renamed themselves Hey Violet, and the two sisters took over the band, leading to a drop in the maturity of their sound, but for a time they had the potential to be the next big all girl rock band.

96. Florence + The Machine - Shake It Out
YouTube // Spotify
Track length: 4:37
UK release date: 14th September 2011
UK chart position: 12
Last decade's chart: 22
Listens as at 8th October: 10

"Redhead who sings big epic songs while wearing floaty dresses and boots" is a genre that ticks an awful lot of my boxes, but I've never clicked properly with Flo. This is the first song - but almost certainly not the last - that I initially ignored, then revisited after hearing it on Glee and appreciating the original more. It's a huge song, one that needs you to sit for a bit and catch your breath after listening to it.

95. Melissa Benoist & Grant Gustin - Super Friend
YouTube // Spotify
Track length: 2:14
UK release date: 21st March 2017
UK chart position: N/A
Listens as at 8th October: 7

And from a song I heard in Glee, to two Glee cast members proving that life after the show is possible. It's almost like I planned this! With most of the cast of your superhero shows having a musical background, and a canonical music related super villain to draw from, it's practically printing money to have a musical episode. Throw in the song-writing talents of Rachel Bloom (who we will revisit later in the countdown) and you get this duet that allows the charm of the two leads to properly shine through.

94. Bon Jovi - Saturday Night Gave Me Sunday Morning
YouTube // Spotify
Track length: 3:23
UK release date: 31st July 2015
UK chart position: N/A
Listens as at 8th October: 7
Gigs this decade: 1

There's not a lot of male vocalists on this list, reflective of my tastes over the last decade, and the majority of blokes I've listened to have been from the classic rock genre. Not a lot of them have released songs this decade but New Jersey's favourite sons came through with this proper, arms in the air stonker.

93. Selena Gomez & The Scene - Love You Like A Love Song
YouTube // Spotify
Track length: 3:08
UK release date: 28th June 2011
UK chart position: 58
Listens as at 8th October: 69 (nice.)
Gigs this decade: 1

Aha, the first song that I've used a loophole for! Selena started the decade taking a small step away from her Disney career, and releasing music with her backing band. (If only Bruce Springsteen gave the E Street Band more credit, he could get more entries in this clearly prestigious list.) A fun track, the video hints at the 80s revival that would kick into gear later in the decade. 

92. Iggy Azalea ft. Charli XCX - Fancy
YouTube // Spotify 
Track length: 3:19
UK release date: 4th June 2014
UK chart position: 5
Listens as at 8th October: 17

Of course, the 80s weren't the only decade shamelessly stolen from in the 2010s, as this video inspired by the 90s film Clueless shows. This track launched Charli XCX into the mainstream, great for her career but perhaps not for the music she actually wanted to release (she's since disavowed the entire era), and was a surprisingly early high-water mark for I-g-g-y. Her career's never really hit the same heights, even with including Britney Spears and JLo on her songs, and now if you mention her name to the average member of the general public they'll just reply "who dat?"

91. Machine Gun Kelly ft. Camila Cabello - Bad Things
YouTube // Spotify
Track length: 3:59
UK release date: 14th October 2016
UK chart position: 16
Listens as at 8th October: 6

Wow, I probably should've spaced this list out a bit better so that I don't get three blatant loophole abusing songs in a row. A newer version of Eminem ft. Rihanna's "Love The Way You Lie" (a song that just missed out on this list) the counter play between the two voices works really well, and hints that Camila's decision to quit Fifth Harmony and work from home might not have been as short-sighted as many people expected. (I shouldn't make jokes based on Fifth Harmony song titles, but that was worth it. (So was that one.))

Decade Songs - Mistakes

A lot can change in a decade. I'm now married, living in a completely different county and with a motorbike that I didn't have ten years ago. 2009 James would've scoffed at the idea of running for fun, eating significantly less meat and drinking beer instead of sugary ciders. I'm a different person - not just legally, after changing my name in 2016, but mentally. I've also stopped giving as much of a toss about what people think of my tastes in music - and so here are a list of corrections to the 2000s countdown I ran. I'm not going to edit those posts as they serve as a good time capsule of my thoughts at the time, rather this is a list of amendments I would make to the list after evaluating it ten years down the line. 

Beyonce ft. Jay-Z - Crazy In Love
I know, technically, this song made it into the list last time round. But as a throwaway track at no. 93, in the ten described as "filler". It's a cracking pop song that deserves to be higher (and that's a line that'll be reused frequently throughout this piece), a guaranteed floor-filler from the moment the horns crash in. The song advances and recedes, teasing you musically and leaving you craving more. 

Kylie Minogue - Can't Get You Out Of My Head
Another song that past-James described as "filler". While my current views are obviously clouded by having seen Kylie performing live twice in the last year, I had a crush on her when I was tiny. I shipped Kylie and Jason back before I knew what shipping was. She's been around for years. Add to that the quality of the song itself, the fact that it was the first UK number 1 after the September 11 attacks and the catharsis it provided to the world being rocked on it's axis, and that it sparked Kylie's second renaissance, this deserves to be far higher in the list than ninety-bloody-five.

Britney Spears - Oops!...I Did It Again
The penultimate (at time of writing) UK number one single to include an exclamation mark, this song was so huge during my teenage years that I'm disappointed in musical snob past James for ignoring it completely. Britney's Imperial Phase, where she's at the top of her game and top of the charts. The confidence to include a spoken word interlude in the song that only makes sense in tandem with both the music video and a then three year old film (which, admittedly, would have a lot of crossover with Britney's demographic)...to leave it out of the list completely was just clumsy. (Oops.)

All Saints - Pure Shores
I was always more on the All Saints divide of the Girl Band wars of the late 90s. They had a coolness to them that the Spice Girls seemed to shy away from (and later clones like Atomic Kitten, B*Witched etc never even neared) and the music seemed to be more adult than pure bubblegum pop. At the time they hit big (with their first two albums) I was heading down an indie route, musically - my tastes were mostly all male groups like Oasis, Manic Street Preachers and Pulp so All Saints were definitely an outlier. Even now revisiting this track and the layers of production, it sounds so modern for a song that's nearly twenty years old. 

Spiller - Groovejet (If This Ain't Love...)
Another example of me taking the alternate, indie-ish side in a manufactured chart war! This song infamously kept Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham from her first solo number one. Featuring vocals from Sophie Ellis-Bextor, then best known as singer for indie band Theaudience (sic) it was presented as the cool alternate single to the Spice Girls' reign of terror, both solo and group efforts. It was released on my 16th birthday, and it takes me back to that summer, free of my GCSE burdens and legally an adult. Fun fact: it's also the first song played on an iPod.

Eminem ft. Dido - Stan
Eminem's laddish attitude never clicked with me. Working at Burger King at the time of The Real Slim Shady's release, with its line about "spitting on your onion rings", got incredibly wearing after 427 times hearing it from teens finding it amusing. This was a different, darker vibe entirely. It launched Dido into the mainstream. It's not just a story driven video (a particular favourite of mine) but a story driven song too, something I'd come to appreciate in a New Jersey blue-collar songwriter and a country barbie with greater depths than first thought. Plus, it's become a codeword for those hardcore, Annie Wilkes-esque fans who perhaps ought to learn the etymology behind the moniker.

Sugababes - Freak Like Me
Mash-ups! Another time capsule, from the time when file-sharing and guerrilla mixes were hot on the internet, before record companies cracked down in response. This was one of the few to make it into the mainstream, a conglomeration of a Gary Numan track and Adina Howard's lyrics. Sugababes were the ideal band to launch the idea of mash-ups onto the public conscience, given how often they seemed to remix their own line-ups. This was version 2.0 of the band, which has now split into two trios - Sugababes 4.0, and Mutya/Keisha/Siobhan, a splinter trio featuring the original members. Come 2030, the entire world's population will have either featured in a Marvel movie or a Sugababes-related band. Or both.

Evanescence - Bring Me To Life
A few years ago I decided to catalogue some CD-Rs I'd had knocking about the place. All audio, from that awkward time when I had access to downloading mp3s but no portable device to play them on, I'd burn roughly one CD a month with what I was listening to at the time. There's some stuff on there I was pleased to rediscover, others that were obviously cool at the time but no longer, and quite a few metal songs with female vocals that even Shazam shrugged at identifying. After Googling the lyrics they would almost all turn out to be obscure Evanescence demos and b-sides. This band were huge to me in the uncatalogued period after I started downloading mp3s (so, not having a physical copy to dig out and listen to) but before I started using last.fm, which has become my go-to site for refreshing my memory musically. I've only scrobbled them 33 times since 2005, nestling them behind Fire Inc - a band from the film Streets Of Fire who have only ever released two songs.

Bruce Springsteen - literally anything off The Rising
I had a Bruce track on the last rundown. It was the opening track from his then most recent album. The Rising was the album that got me listening to The Boss (a consequence of Dad playing it on repeat during a holiday in France) and it's still my favourite of his. Any track from the album is better than Outlaw Pete, a song I suspect made it on there because the riff sounds like I Was Made For Loving You.

Brie Larson - Finally Out Of PE
The final two songs on this list are ones I discovered retroactively, into the 2010s. Indeed, it wasn't until late July 2016 that a wiki wander led me to discover Brie's proto-Avril album release from ten years prior. An actress I'd come to admire, releasing an album sounding similar to (and featuring a writing credit from!) one of my favourite guilty pleasures? It was always going to be a hit! 

Aly & AJ - Potential Breakup Song
I'm fairly certain that I didn't know who Aly Michalka was until autumn 2010. After a role in Bandslam that I didn't appreciate properly, it was either her supporting role in Easy A, or her lead in Hellcats (RIP Hellcats) that brought her to my attention; another wiki wander made me aware of her musical career with her sister, and this pure pop banger. 

Decade Songs - Missing Out

As a prelude to the countdown of my favourite songs of the 2010s, have a short piece on tracks that almost but not quite made the shortlist, for various reasons. Some of these are notable because they're strong enough to have made the list, were it not for the artist releasing a better song, but I still want to bring them to your attention (and preserve them for posterity); others are great songs hindered only by time being measured in a linear fashion, while there's a third category for "songs which made the list because the video featured a cameo from someone I like but it's not really a track I listen to often".

I'll leave it to you to decide who is who.

Katy Perry - Roulette
YouTube // Spotify
Length: 3 minutes 18 seconds
Release date: 9th June 2017

My opinions on Katy have changed over the last ten years. Without wanting to spoil too much of the forthcoming countdown, I loved Teenage Dream, was unimpressed by Prism, fell for a calculated teasing comment in Rolling Stone intended to stoke flames between two female artists, was perturbed by the single Bon Appetit, and then was drawn back in by a combination of Witness being better than expected and the Witness tour featuring a strong support act. This track is one of the deeper cuts on the album and it's bloody stupid that it was never released as a single as it's one of the better songs she's done since Teenage Dream. (That said, the tour visuals featured more dice and playing card motifs than a James Bond credit sequence, so it's possible Katy doesn't know what the game of Roulette actually is, and that's what hindered the release).

Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness (Cedric Gervais remix)
YouTube // Spotify
3:34
11th June 2013
UK chart position: 4

Again, another person on whom my views have changed over the last ten years. Previously having described her as dull and dreary, this remix caught my eye (/ear) after it introduced some pep into the song. It cropped up on a random running playlist and made its way onto my own running playlists, and then onto the longlist for this decade. It was earmarked for a place in the 60s or 70s, position-wise, until a run-through of Lana's newest album at the end of August changed my view on her completely, and made me view her discography in a new light. This track dropped out purely by virtue of a single from the new album shooting Lana way up my charts - even if you think of her as music for basic white people to be melodramatic to, it's still worth giving this a listen.

Metric - Black Sheep 
YouTube // Spotify
4:57
10th August 2010

A band from whom I've drifted over the last decade, this track made the list purely because of a cover by Brie Larson from the movie Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. While that's the only officially released song by Brie this decade, I've found a better song with an excuse to sneak her in the top 100, so this track - rejected by Metric for being too Metric sounding - misses out. The video for Brie's cover can be found here and is worth watching to see just how many big name stars were in this small Canadian comic book adaptation.

Desire - Under Your Spell
YouTube // Spotify
4:56
30th June 2009

This was well on the way to having a great chart position in my top 100 until I checked the date of release. While it came to my attention on the Drive soundtrack - one of the few good parts of a film that I found disappointing - it had been released six months prior to the cut-off date for this rundown. I allowed myself a three month grace period (so October - December 2009) to cover any songs released while running down last decade's countdown but I couldn't squeeze this in. Shame though, it's a great song to listen to while playing GTA!

The Joy Formidable - Whirring
YouTube // Spotify
6:47
May 2009

Another song released just too early to make it in. An argument could have been made that as it only came to my attention (and more widespread attention) with the 2011 re-release then it could've been justified - but the rules for this countdown are mine and mine alone, and if I don't stick to them then nobody will! Another great song, that builds and builds to an epic finish. Sadly there are fewer of those songs about these days, a downside of the streaming bubble - with artists being paid per stream, you'll get twice as many fractions of a penny for someone streaming two 3-minute songs than one 6-minute one!

Lady Gaga - Edge Of Glory
YouTube // Spotify
5:20
9th May 2011
UK chart position: 6

Here we have a pair of songs that made the list for spurious reasons. I've never been a Gaga stan - while The Fame Monster is an album that still holds up, most of my brushes with her over the last decade have been casual, either from songs appearing on Glee, her (impressive) SNL appearance, or this track. The saxophonist is Clarence Clemons, who sadly suffered a stroke and passed away about a month after this track was released. He's better known (to some) as a member of the E Street Band, the backing group on all of Bruce Springsteen's better albums - it's his saxophone that plays out the coda on Thunder Road.


The Rolling Stones - Ride 'Em On Down
YouTube // Spotify
2:48
25th November 2016

Included purely because the video has Kristen Stewart, one of my favourite actresses, dancing around in a t-shirt and jeans. Couldn't tell you what the song sounds like. There's a better song in the rundown featuring Kristen - as well as two other big name actresses - in the video, so that made the cut instead of this one; when you see who that song was by, you'll realise that Kent's biggest band were never going to beat it!