Crumbler

Pop music this year was filled with strange intersections and worlds colliding. Below is Crumbler’s guide to the year in curious covers, strange samples and unexpected collaborations. My nine favorites:

9. Glee brings mash-ups to the mainstream. (Cast of “Glee,” “It’s My Life/Confessions.”) In “Vitamin D,” the show’s cast moved beyond its usual theater-nerd performances of pop hits to give us something new: an effective, highly original mash-up of Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” and Usher’s “Confessions.” The episode was viewed by 7.3 million people; if we questioned the true reach of Girl Talk and his ilk before, after this there could be no doubting the mash-up’s popular appeal. (Here’s the inevitable dance remix, by mash-up artists A+D .)

8. Radiohead’s ‘Greatest Generation’ tribute. As a piece of music, “Harry Patch” is not among Radiohead’s best — or even better — efforts. But I loved the strange places it took the band — to World War I, and to the writings of a man who had fought a “good” war but who’d hated it anyway. In this, a future-leaning band found a close ally in the distant past. Thom Yorke, in a nice show of humility, simply sang Harry Patch’s words over a bed of soaring strings, and any money they made off the single went to support veterans.

7. R&B act launches career on the basis of Imogen Heap sample. The fact that “Whatcha Say” reveals Jason DeRulo to be a terrible person could not detract from the irresistible catchiness of his song, which is built around a 17-second (!) sample of indie-folk chanteuse Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek.” Take away Heap’s words and the song is nothing; add it and the song becomes weirdly sublime. “Whatcha Say” hit No. 1; DeRulo is poised to become a star. America hasn’t leaned this hard on the British since the last time we invaded Iraq.

6. “Single Ladies” covered by folkies. It isn’t overstating the case to say that “Single Ladies” has become a youth-culture phenomenon. The video, itself a knock-off of a viral mash-up of Bob Fosse and freakin’ Mims, inspired a thousand YouTube cover versions, and “put a ring on it” is among the meme-iest pop declarations since “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” I volunteer with LGBT youth once a week, and each week for the past year, at the end of the evening someone puts “Single Ladies” on and a group of 16-year-old savants do the dance better than Beyonce did. But they’re young, and gay, and it’s to be expected. What I didn’t expect was such a knock-out folkie cover of the song. Grand Atlantic re-conceived “Single Ladies” as a lost cousin to the Shins’ “New Slang”; as I said when I first posted it, they took the song from urban jungle to campfire jangle. Jarring and lovely.

5. Okkervil River and the Wrens cover each other. On one hand, no surprise here: the Wrens’ Charles Bissell occasionally plays guitar for Okkervil when they tour. What shocked me was how much new life Bissell and Okkervil frontman Will Sheff were able to wring out of each other’s material. On a tiny, two-song EP, Bissell transformed Okkervil’s early “It Ends With a Fall” into a Wrens song: mumbled, double-tracked vocals, sour guitars, and an ache that leaves you lying in bed all day. Sheff had the more difficult task; if you’re a Wrens fan, there’s a good chance “Ex-Girl Collection” is among your favorite three or four songs. But it turned out there was something relatively easy Sheff could to do make the song his own: enunciate. The original”Ex-Girl Collection” draws much of its power from the fact that the lyrics are so personal and self-loathing that Bissell has to mumble them; Sheff rescues them from obscurity, and leaves them plain for the world to hear: “Ann, hand on hips, accusing me to the rafters / Words burn and spit and scorch right through to the plaster / I’m called ten kinds of a bastard. Curses come faster.” This EP could have come across as self-indulgent; instead it was transcendent.
4. Pasty English youth become the heirs to Aaliyah. Surely there was no more unexpected debut this year than that of the XX, a pale British foursome whose primary inspiration was contemporary black R&B. Take their searing cover of Aaliyah’s “Hot Like Fire.” The irony of the original — and one of the reasons I’ve never warmed to it — is how cool the song is. Aaliyah’s voice is precise, controlled, detached. Where’s the goddam fire, you know? The XX find it in the hushed whispers between Romy Croft and Oliver Sim. This young couple is in the throes of new lust, and their feelings terrify them. The disorientation, the sense of danger, the knowledge that they have no choice but to keep going — it’s a quintessentially adolescent response to first love, honest and heartfelt, and here it is transforming an old Aaliyah song into something wonderful and new. This band is the truth.

3. Michael McDonald fronts Grizzly Bear. It sounded like a joke, when we first read about it on Pitchfork — the ex-Doobie making a dubious entree into indie rock to cover what was (maybe) the song of the year, Grizzly Bear’s “While You Wait for the Others.” Dan Rossen’s ghostly kiss-off to a pretentious lover is understated and vicious at the same time; the delivery is mellow, the lines are acid. What was the king of yacht rock going to contribute? As it turned out, McDonald did what he does best: sing the living shit out of his material. In his hands, “While You Wait” becomes a perfect vehicle for his brand of blue-eyed soul, somehow managing to avoid the cheeseball power ballad we all feared. While the Grizzlies’ harmonies dance around him, he gradually ratchets up the vocal tension, finally in the closing moments belting it out like it’s the last song he’ll ever sing. The year’s most inspired collaboration.

2. Solange Knowles goes indie. It was barely a month ago that Beyonce’s sister e-mailed Pitchfork an MP3 of herself covering the Dirty Projectors and launched a hundred thousand nerdgasms. It still seems too good to be true: The band’s “Stillness Is the Move” had been pegged as a slow-jam classic-in-waiting immediately upon its release, but who knew a talent as big as Solange would seize the opportunity? Taking a sample most of us remember from Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady,” she invested Dave Longstreth’s Zen koans with verve and wit. Solange’s marvelously eccentric take made me do something that the Bitte Orca version, for all its merits, never did: roll the windows down, turn the sound system up, and drive way too fast.

1. Radiohead and Wilco combine. DUH. Every few weeks I have to watch this video just to prove to myself that it actually did happen. As part of the 7 Worlds Collide charity project, the core of my second-favorite band merged with a portion of my first-favorite band. There was no real larger meaning here, no great import to the near-karaoke version of “Fake Plastic Trees.” But this was the crossover that made my day, my week, my month — some of our greatest pop musicians on the same stage, plainly fans of one another, making melodies together.