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.
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