These days, I can’t write. I’m overwhelmed by a growing pile of unfinished ideas, and I can’t decide where to focus my energy. So let’s lower the stakes and do something a little more spontaneous: in late 2019, I assembled a 100-song playlist to wrap up the decade in music, with all my personal classics from that era. As a list lover—check out Vulture’s 101 Best Movie Sequels!—I can happily elaborate on all of these songs. But to keep things manageable, I will only pick five at a time, randomly, and just go for it. Let’s see how far I can take this.
09.
James Blake - The Wilhelm Scream (2011)
In the early 2010s, James Blake was emblematic of a new generation of artists who blurred the lines between genres and hierarchy in pop music. Was he a mournful R&B singer, a left-field pop balladeer, a rebel choirboy or an electronic conductor obsessed with distortion and texture? The British creator, to put things simply, made labeling difficult, in a similar fashion to Drake, who also released a genre-defying opus in 2011, months after James Blake’s self-titled debut. A few years later, all of this seems trite—influence-melting is standard pop and James Blake is pretty much music royalty after he received co-signs from virtually every major star under the sun (he crossed paths with Drake, and Beyoncé, and many more throughout the decade). Yet, going back to “The Wilhelm Scream”, the warm magnetism of his sound remains as fascinating as it was back in 2011. Though his silhouette never quite came into focus in the video, James Blake’s vision was crystal-clear. His influence, just like his odd drum effects, hasn’t stopped reverberating ever since.
86.
Frank Ocean - Nights (2016)
On Twitter, there is a great monomaniac meme-account called “Winnie The Pooh Transcends”. The concept is a 12-second clip of Disney’s own Winnie sleeping his way into an out-of-body experience, synced to trippy song moments curated from contemporary hip-hop and R&B. Like all good memes, the idea nails a very intimate feeling—the way certain songs can open a trapdoor that takes you into a zone where gravity can’t seem to apply anymore. When I started thinking about “Nights”, that meme came to my mind immediately. It’s the perfect representation of the mesmerizing mood flip at the heart of the song, a pinnacle in Frank Ocean’s now classic album Blond. I have to admit, I can’t really tell what the song is about. It all exists in the blur of that perfect moment, around the 3:25 mark, when the second verse glitches into a vacuum, before revealing an entirely different landscape, where each element, from this weightless piano to that bass drop, seems so organic it’s hard to imagine the whole thing was ever planned and produced. Turns out, “Nights” was the very first entry in that Winnie account, which now exists in at least two incarnations. As he took off with “Nights”, the Internet’s favorite bear probably never landed back.
29.
Julien Doré - Mon apache (2013)
First discovered as the proverbial oddball who finishes on top in a popular singing competition on French TV, Julien Doré became in the late 2000s one of France’s most reliable providers of elegant and quirky pop music. “Mon apache”, from his third album Løve, is the kind of lonely-at-the-piano ballad that is the ultimate pressure test for singers with a higher purpose. Like many of his counterparts in millennial pop, Julien Doré generally operates with a kind of ironic detachment—one of the songs in Løve recounts a dreamy encounter with an overweight Michel Platini, the French football legend. But when he keeps self-consciousness at arm’s length, he has much more to offer. Choke-full of mythic hallucinations and dead-serious heartbreak, “Mon apache” is proof that, in French chanson, unhinged romanticism remains the surest path to timelessness.
01.
Sampha - Plastic 100°C (2016)
When Kanye West produced Common’s Be in 2004, he had the idea of replacing the lead single “The Food” with a live recording of the song, taped during the Chappelle Show. The decision gave the album an interlude of raw spontaneity, anchored in a cherished cultural moment. It made perfect sense. There’s a part of me wishing that Sampha, the English songwriter and an A-Lister’s go-to guy for soulful elevation, had done the same with the piano version of “Plastic 100°C”, the poignant opener of his debut album, Process. The clip was shot on the rooftop of his label Young Turk’s London office, in April 2016, for a cover story in Fader Magazine. It remains one of Sampha’s signature performances, and a visual marvel. “Plastic 100°C” is a graceful song that blooms out of fears and anxieties. The details in the video, from the quiet wind in the ferns to that perfectly-synced London tube wooshing in the background (was it intentional?), offer a sense of awe, as Sampha sings about the beauty of a sunrise while awaiting a nerve-wracking diagnostic in a hospital lobby. The performance—in front and behind the camera—is as close a masterpiece as media content can offer, and still the main justification I can find for the entire existence of YouTube.
18.
Mohini Geisweiller - Raw Forms (2011)
Event Horizon was a curious album, a radical oddity released on a major label (Columbia) with little fanfare back in 2011. Built on crude synths and droning melodies, it was a record made of angular patterns—no curve, little comfort. The album felt like it was battling conflicting impulses about pop music, with cold arrangements meeting surprisingly sweet hooks. Its architect, Parisian singer-producer Mohini Geisweiller, was the beating heart in the machine. She offered sparse and moody verses, sung in English but signed with an unmistakable Frenchness. With its grand organ, the opening track “Raw Forms” had a liturgical quality, while Ms. Geisweiller murmured lines that sounded like an S.O.S. broadcasted from a spaceship adrift. A brilliant display of songwriting pared down to essential components, Event Horizon seemed designed for aimless traveling, the soundtrack of interchangeable landscapes and power lines spiraling to nowhere.
Full Playlist on YouTube
Also on Spotify and Tidal (with a few missing pieces)