Top 50 Singles of 2005

10: Kanye West
"Heard 'Em Say" / "Touch The Sky"
[Roc-A-Fella]

Purportedly, making Adam Levine sound like Stevie Wonder is tough work. Couldn't tell from this end because B-Side Wins Again. The one track where Kanye completely released the reins on Late Registration , is, in fact, the most vivacious. Just Blaze, in a quiet year, needed just Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up", already a triumphant horn-fest, and tweaked the levels just a bit. Now that brass is fuming. West, flipping off critics and magazine editors who want to give him money to appear in their magazine, wisely recruits a kid named Lupe to punch up the gags. Now don't ask about that summer night in Brooklyn when that DJ played Curtis' version into Kanye's. We almost died that night. --Sean Fennessey

09: R. Kelly
"Trapped in the Closet"
[Jive]

It's a song cycle! It's a rock opera! It's a radio drama! It's a one-man play! It's a cultural phenomenon! It's also the most adventurous musical recording of the year-- the found-sound and performance art undergrounds be damned.

After "Trapped in the Closet", making fun of R. Kelly just isn't fun anymore. Because no matter what punchlines are zinged at him, Kells has proven that he will always, always hit back with something more hilarious, more insane, and more outrageous than could ever be cooked up in the mind of a mere mortal. We can only bask, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, in the glow of the man's cracked genius, and rejoice in the fact that R. Kelly has nothing but time and money on his hands. --Amy Phillips

08: Lady Sovereign
"Random"
[Casual]

Lady Sov deftly stuck it to U.S. rappers by using their own prejudices against them, calling out Aphasia-smitten lyrics. Lines like "Right hurr, Na' right here/ Now get off your churr, I mean chair" attest to this termagant's cutting wit, but start ruminating and you'll be sucker-punched by the bawdy: "My words hurt you jus' like loosin' ya virginity (owww!)". No matter if her slam fell on deaf ears, "Random" cemented S.O.V.'s status as the brat-princess of Grime while also garnering an Island deal and U.S. tour. Hey, if Americans will pay to be insulted, more power to her. --Adam Moerder

07: Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley
"Welcome to Jamrock"
[Universal]

His pedigree proceeding him, you almost had to snoot at the notion that a Marley was supposedly responsible for the dancehall anthem of the year. Doesn't their post-Bob legacy represent everything wrong with the Grammy-baiting mainstream of modern Jamaican music? But the first time you actually heard "Welcome to Jamrock"-- the hypnotic righteousness of the voice; the oddly slow, apocalyptic digi-skank groove; the accumulated hip-hop feeling-- knowledge was immediate, physical.

"Jamrock" had little to do with 2005's roots reggae revival, with its endless parade of weepy dreads singing sickly love songs. Marley's nagging, head-nod flow rattled off a state of alert for third and first world's alike, as he strode purposefully through grainy Jamaican hood life in the video, a hallucinatory late-night blip on BET amidst all the flossing. In a year where outright political comment was thin on the ground in popular music (for better or worse), "Jamrock" offered some very broad shoulders for armchair enemies of Babylon. --Jess Harvell

06: The Game [ft. 50 Cent]
"Hate It or Love It"
[Interscope]

That buttery soul beat, the way the arrangement perks up on "I wanna live good ", 50's nana telling him she'll buy him a sheepskin coat if he does well in school-- man, how many "Candy Shop"s is this worth? At this advanced stage of the year, I'm thinking three, but that's only cause it's December, and "Hate It Or Love It" is about as useful to me as a ball glove. (Back in June, when this was broadcast-mandated to sizzle aside Ciara's "Oh", I probably would've gone as high as five.)

Pedants reading this are probably wondering why I'm doing 50 contra when it's technically a Game track. Well, bullshit, it's not, and if 50 running rings around rap's MVP isn't enough to compel you to swap custody, at least you've got a solid lead for Game's best ever single ("300 Bars" doesn't count). Funny thing: this was held off the Billboard #1 by a song about lollipops. You shouldn't be able to call yourself an underdog when you can win with that --Mark Pytlik

05: The Futureheads
"Hounds of Love"
[679]

Twenty years ago, the hounds of love were in the trees, and Kate Bush stumbled wide-eyed through a Tim Burton backlot while her Walkman played "In the Air Tonight". Flash forward to recent times, and the Futureheads are in their garage-rage confusing the pursuer with the pursued. These chaps hit the ground running with their steady-cam, stabbing at the titular beasts with their guitar picks and hate-it-or-love-it harmonies. If these boys don't know what's good for them, it's because they're too busy being gloriously obnoxious to bother with being scared. --David Raposa

04: Kelly Clarkson
"Since U Been Gone"
[RCA]

It's undeniable that, for certain people, a lot of the fun in first hearing "Since U Been Gone" was figuring out the formula. It went something like Pink (vocals) + Interpol (verses) + the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps" (right down to that crunching guitar noise on the bridge) + Max Martin (Swede-pop overdrive chorus). I have my doubts that the Bjorns and Bjornettes who fashioned this Urban Outfitters monster were actually sitting around cherry picking tunes from "The O.C.", but clearly something was in the air. Of course what made this song a massive worldwide hit, aside from the space-age sheen of the production, was the fact that while Karen O was sitting around whining about how she couldn't live without her man, Ms. American Idol was shouting that, now that he had walked on out that door, she would survive. Kinda ironic is all I'm saying. --Jess Harvell

03: Clipse [ft. Ab-Liva & Sandman]
"Zen"
[mixtapes]

"Zen" is obviously a ham-fisted wisecrack. There's precious little time for meditation or self-contemplation on this pulsating career rejoinder. Literally out of nowhere-- fucking Virginia Beach-- this gang of dealers raised the stakes in one banger. Ignore consternation over the state of hip-hop lyricism these days; don't mind the road signs pointing South or otherwise. Now get this: Pusha, scion of greats, found this backing track on an unlabeled beat CD. No need for producer paper, Skateboard Gs, or Just $$$$ when you've got the work ethic to skip around anonymous beat CDs. I can't waste time explaining cocaine punchlines either, it'll never read as good as it sounds. OK, maybe just one: "Turn it, turn it, fire burn it/ Gram weight straight like a nigga just permed it." There, see what we mean? --Sean Fennessey

02: Amerie
"1 Thing"
[Columbia]

It's good to know that during the dark reign of Crazy Frog, a human being pretending to be a doorbell still rocks harder. Okay, so some called it "Crazier In Love", whining that producer Rich Harrison only has "1 Thing" going on: but if that thing is building bulletproof r&b out of crazily canted tumbledown breaks and tightly coiled guitar stabs, I don't see the problem.

Caught in a ProTools hall of multitrack mirrors, Amerie lays out her own ambivalence and desire by singing against herself, but churchy nice girl oohs and ahhs can't fight the sweat and need of that lead vocal. She's more than halfway across the room, high heels clicking across the floor in anticipation of...something. The remixes were sweet and Mara Carlyle's fluttery cover was sweeter, but it was Amerie's original song that ruled the parties of 2005: You heard it at your snobby Sónar Festival aftershow soirees, your beer run to 7-11, at your local gay sauna, your sorority's spring formal, whatever, and everywhere the topic got kicked around: What is the 1 thing? In projecting a hallucinatory, unspeakable core to sexual desire this tune is very Bush era (adios, abstinence education) and you could call its tightlipped stance a cop out, but it's also a pretty fucking smart move to wrap perfect pop around a question that stays open all night. Still, with anything less than a full on vocal performance, this track would have boiled down to a hot beat spiked on a men's magazine sex tip ("The 1 Thing That'll Drive Her Wild"). Instead, Amerie burns this song to the ground. --Drew Daniel

01: Antony & the Johnsons
"Hope There's Someone"
[Secretly Canadian]

Antony & the Johnsons' funeral torch song signals a hopeful resurgence of a New York bohemian scene for the first time since... Paris Is Burning? Or, better yet, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe? "Hope There's Someone", then, sounds like both a revival and a quiet, unself-conscious elegy for that long-lost bohemia, which was eventually decimated by AIDS, drugs, gentrification, and, perhaps, its own success. All that time between then and now hasn't dated the sentiment, though: even 20 years late, it carries the same impact as Susan Sontag's abstracted short story "The Way We Live Today" and Tony Kushner's play Angels in America .

That's a weighty burden for one song, but "Hope There's Someone" shoulders it gracefully. The words and hymnlike melodies are simple and straightforward, as is Antony's soft piano. The only sign of other musicians comes on that ghostly final section, which at first sounds like uninvited psychedelia but actually evokes a soul let loose from a body. Whether it's ascending to the heavens or simply dissipating into the ether is the song's woeful mystery, and it hangs with the unhappy heaviness of a question mark that even that short, hopeful closing coda can't alleviate. More than anything else, the song is a memento mori, a reminder to all of us, regardless of sexuality or geography, to fear the end but embrace the mystery, to hold our loved ones a little longer. --Stephen M. Deusner