Singing in an Auto-Tuned monotone with little regard for melody, West sounds ghostly as he recounts his romantic failures in brutal detail. Just when "Love Lockdown" seems too brittle to sustain itself, humanity arrives in the form of an army of Japanese taiko drums. At first it sounds like pop-guns going off, but the drumming gets faster, warmer, wilder, and matched against West's distant vocals "Love Lockdown" turns into a dance song about misery — far closer to "Love Will Tear Us Apart" than any hip-hop ancestor. It's easily the most interesting pop experiment this year, and, if you grant its premise and stick with it, also the best.
#4 - lil wayne 'a millie'
Like all rappers, Lil Wayne rarely lets a song go by without declaring at some point that he's ill. The difference is that he really seems to be. The backing track here — little more than a bass kick, some plastic-y snares and an endlessly looped sample of the words "a milli a milli a milli" stolen from A Tribe Called Quest's "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo" — never coheres into a chorus, and all the elements move in different rhythms. It's like hearing a song through cough syrup — perfect for Wayne, who wheezily declares "I don' write shit 'cause I don't got time," and then conjures up enough crazy, off-balance wordplay to convince you he's either a liar or a savant. Either way, he's definitely some kind of ill.
#7- beyonce 'single ladies (put a ring on it)
People who don't dance usually don't make exceptions, but I saw a man who has abstained from any rhythmic movement for nearly a decade crack within 20 seconds of hearing this ludicrously infectious Beyoncé hit. The rhythm is double-dutch. The lyrics are liberating if your idea of liberation ended with Gloria Gaynor. The melody is — who are we kidding? It's not a melody, just the sound track from the '80s arcade hit Frogger. Still, "Single Ladies" works because Beyoncé cuts through all the racket like a train whistle and she seems to believe every word she sings, while the slightly menacing minor chords that creep in halfway through keep things from getting too repetitive.
#10- gnarls barkley 'going on'
2006's "Crazy" was so convincingly insane that most people were disappointed with this reasonable-seeming follow-up. "Going On" is just a sweet soul song about moving past a relationship without bitterness ("May my love lift you up to the place you belong/ But I'm going on"). Still, it's hardly dull. Danger Mouse fills the track with little quarks and shooting stars that rotate deferentially around Cee-Lo's interplanetary vocals. If that's not weird enough for you, at least they made a strange video.
(via time.com)
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