

(Unfortunately, “Worth It” is no “BO$$,” and “BO$$” was already on last year’s list.) They say time’s supposed to heal you, and indeed, the 2015 pop mainstream marked a major step up from 2014’s sordid array of appropriation and/or saxophones and/or butts. There were plenty of excellent singles to choose from - so many that Fifth Harmony, whose Reflection I proclaimed 2015’s first great pop album way back in February, couldn’t even land a track on this list.

Consider it my attempt to triangulate the biggest and best hits of 2015, to sum up this year’s most universal music at its finest. Like the parameters of pop itself, the ranking system was difficult to define but intuitive enough. And as always, some of these songs were technically released in 2014, but their impact on 2015 was massive.

Nor is this an objective rundown of the biggest singles of the year - I still hate #1 summer smashes “ Cheerleader” and “ See You Again,” and I’m ambivalent about “ Bad Blood” - though chart statistics, cultural impact, and general ubiquity certainly weighed on my choices.
#List of songs in pop danthology 2015 crack
It is not exactly a list of my personal favorites - you’ll note my own top 2015 track doesn’t crack the top 10 here - but my personal taste certainly shaped it. What do I mean by The 50 Best Pop Songs Of 2015? This list is the 2015 finale of my weekly pop column, The Week In Pop, which means the picks are mine and mine alone, not something the Stereogum staff voted on together. It’s the most wonderful time of the year - year-end list season - and the festivities continue today with the Week In Pop’s second annual rundown of the finest pop singles of the past 12 months. And, possibly, more than it actually was.That tingling feeling in your cheeks is not Abel Tesfaye’s supply kicking in. In the process, Kim makes the mainstream in 2015 sound more eclectic than DJ Earworm does. There is no monolithic beat from beginning to end, for starters, and the music wanders beyond DJ Earworm’s deliberately strict parameters, taking in everyone from Paris electro act Martin Solveig to Sweden’s Tove Lo to German house DJ Zedd. The end product remains technically impressive but admirably idiosyncratic. Part one is positively expansive by comparison, mashing up 37 tracks in just under 5½ minutes.ĭespite using much of the same source material - The Weeknd, Ellie Goulding, Bieber, Swift - Kim takes a broader view, mixing hits with relative failures such as Britney Spears’ and Iggy Azalea’s “Pretty Girls” and Madonna’s “Bitch, I’m Madonna.” He even works in fleeting snippets of his own music as a sort of low-key conversation with the rest of the proceedings. Part one covers 45 songs in under 4½ minutes. This year’s “Danthology,” the sixth annual, has been split into two parts. Taylor Swift looks back on 2015 to find it sounds an awful lot like her. How much of that is a true reflection of the year and how much can be chalked up to a natural bias toward selecting tracks that fit with what you’ve already chosen may not be as black and white as it seems. The end result certainly bears out Roseman’s observation to Billboard that music in 2015 is “going through a softer phase … so there’s that return of adult contemporary.” Nine years in, and the dazzling act of curation known as “The United State of Pop” has attained the status of a party trick that can make you smile while also illuminating part of your world.īegun in 2007 by San Francisco DJ Jordan Roseman, better known as DJ Earworm, the videos extract the essence of 25 of the year’s biggest singles and mash them up into an unfailingly seamless five-minute pop history lesson.įor this year’s entry, Roseman upped the ante, doubling the number of singles and subtitling the resulting “50 Shades of Pop.” In its first six days, it racked up 3.6 million views on YouTube.ĭespite the increase in raw material, the video’s foundation rests on five main ingredients: The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face,” Ellie Goulding’s “Love Me Like You Do,” Maroon 5’s “Sugar,” a dash of Adele’s “Hello,” and lots and lots of Taylor Swift.
