Top 10 Greatest Songs of the Second Half of the 2010s (2015-2019)
Pretty self explanatory, every decade has a ton of great music released. And, like it or not, the 2010s are in many ways really awesome. Pessimists may focus on the downsides, but believe me, every decade is panned until the next one is dawning, then the infamous rose colored glasses are put on. I always try to understand the premises of every current movement, and see that every era works differently. The 2010s are much more experimental than the 2000s when it comes to mainstream music, and independent artists have equal chances to big labels, due to the increasing importance of the internet. This is why the sound is much unlike everything heard before - or, as a counter movement, very nostalgic.As I write this, we have December 2017. There are still two more years to come to qualify for this list. Nevertheless, there have already been more than enough songs that I regard as great in the second half of this year to justify creating it.
Miley Cyrus becomes transcendental. There is no other way to describe it. And whoever doesn't see the avantgardish nature of her "Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz" project, which was released for free and fully independently (she stated she made enough money, now she can do whatever she likes), is just trying way too hard to avoid the truth. Cyrus fully understood art pop, with a well balanced amount of meaningful experimentalism (she spreads ideals and thoughts throughout the album, and she's not unlike rebels of the 60s, but with modern characteristics) and pop catchiness. On "Dooo It! ", we hear rough and crudely executed distortion, drowzy spacey synth lines and lines about being part of the universe, but it's done to a tune that will ring in your ears for hours to come. The video... is pure fluxus. Don't measure it on the same scale you used for her previous videos. This Miley here... is not a pop star. She is a performance artist.
With such a triumphant, pompous beat backing him up, "der Boss" can give us a glorious sample of his masterful art. The production is as big as his ego, but so is his lyricism, and at such a level of rhetoric figures and such a massive vocabulary (studies say he has a wider vocabulary than Germany's most famous poet and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) the sheer amount of royal fanfare is more than justified.
Skrillex, Diplo and Justin Bieber's electro-trap ballad is one of the oddest and most unlikely enchantments of this decade, and it was probably a wake up call to many who underestimated what all of them are capable of. Justin Bieber's writing is a sensitive poem about having to face ungratefulness, his performance emotive and heartbroken. It was clear that Skrillex and Diplo could deliver astounding club tracks, but how they blended the nuances of their styles into the former piano song without destryoing, but instead enrichening its mood, was something no one could foresee. Instead of a drop, we hear a foreign sounding flute-like melody, and not at one point do they try to steal the spotlight from Bieber during his singing. That it harmonizes so well and on top creates a new sound that fits on both the RnB singer's and the dubstep duo's albums was one of the most positive surprises of the second half of the 2010s.