Top Ten Songs of 2014 According to Complex

For those not familiar with the concept: I am in the middle of retrospectively compiling my top ten songs of each year of the 2010s. Afterwards, I compare it to the top ten picks of three very different publications: Rolling Stone, laut.de and Complex. Rolling Stone is probably the biggest music magazine worldwide and focuses on mainstream opinions, laut.de is a well known German music critic website who claims to have a good taste in music, and Complex is a former magazine, now website, who focuses on youth culture and music, and writes their lists subjectively.

So, what is to say about what Complex picked for their 2014 list?

It is clear where the magazine has its comfort zone: hip hop. Like always, they have a well balanced mix of well known mainstream jams and some more obscure tracks. What makes their list more interesting than the others is that it's 100 percent subjective. You can tell from the texts. These are intelligent people with passion for what they do, and when they chose "No Flex Zone" as number seven, which is often cited on TTT as a bad song that just somehow got popular and therefore gets positive professional reviews, you can be absolutely sure they ranked it so highly not because of its success but because they really like it. And I can understand because in its subgenre of trap, this is absolutely fun and well done - it has a perfect flow and is unusually energetic (and yeah, I considered it for my personal list of the year, but then, there were simply more mind blowing songs). I am not such a fan of songs number two and five, though. To me, they just lack anything that makes such tracks memorable. The beats, lines and flows are nothing more than basic to my ears. Nevertheless, you can tell how much fun the Complex team had with them. Especially with their number two item, since the text written by one of their authors is as long as that of all the top ten items on Rolling Stone's list combined.

So, in conclusion, much like the last time: Complex may not have my favorite picks out of the three magazines, but by miles the most interesting, honest and passionate article. And that is something the other two sites completely lack (Rolling Stone more so than laut.de).

Source: www.complex.com/music/2014/12/best-songs-2014/, Created on 2/7/2018

The Top Ten

1 0 to 100 (The Catch Up) - Drake