If you want to understand what 2016 felt like, you could do worse than just sitting down and listening to its music. It was a year when several of the biggest artists in the world released some of their most ambitious work, while a second tier of artists was quietly making records that would age just as well. The result is a body of music that holds up not because it captured a singular mood, but because it didn’t — it scattered in a dozen different directions at once, and that tension is exactly what makes it interesting to revisit.
The blockbusters were genuinely good. Beyoncé’s Lemonade arrived as a cultural event, and “Formation” was its defiant opening statement — grounded in Black Southern identity, uninterested in making anyone comfortable. Rihanna and Drake’s “Work” was inescapable in the best way, a dancehall-inflected earworm that somehow felt both effortless and precise. Drake also appeared on “One Dance,” a song that helped bring Afrobeats to mainstream Western audiences in a real way, with Wizkid and Kyla doing a lot of the heavy lifting that often went uncredited. Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” opened The Life of Pablo with a gospel choir and a Chance the Rapper verse that became one of the most talked-about moments in rap that year. These were pop and rap operating at a high level, and they knew it.
But some of the year’s most lasting music came from artists working in a quieter register. Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky” approached anxiety and avoidance with a kind of elegant restraint that her sister’s more maximalist work doesn’t always make room for. Frank Ocean finally released Blonde after years of anticipation, and “Nights” — with its midpoint beat switch — felt like the whole album in miniature. Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” packed more emotional complexity into three and a half minutes than most artists manage in an entire record, and Angel Olsen’s “Shut Up Kiss Me” was a shot of pure guitar-rock energy from an artist who could do pretty much anything she turned her hand to. These songs didn’t dominate the charts, but they dominated year-end lists for good reason.
2016 was also a year when the world outside the speakers kept bleeding in. A Tribe Called Quest came out of a long hiatus to release We Got It from Here, and “We The People….” was an explicit, unambiguous political statement made by veterans who had earned the right to make it. YG and Nipsey Hussle’s “FDT” was rawer and angrier, a West Coast rap track that said plainly what a lot of people were thinking during a particularly ugly election season. ANOHNI’s “Drone Bomb Me,” from her album Hopelessness, took a different approach entirely — a beautiful, devastating song sung from the perspective of a bombing victim, using the form of a love song to make its critique land harder. And then there was Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker,” released just weeks before his death, which felt less like a goodbye than a reckoning. David Bowie’s “Lazarus,” similarly, arrived as part of Blackstar and took on a different weight entirely after he died in January. Not every year loses two artists of that stature within months of each other.
What ties all of this together isn’t a single sound or theme, but a kind of seriousness of purpose — even in the party songs, even in the straightforwardly fun ones. Justin Timberlake’s “CAN’T STOP THE FEELING!” was designed to be a piece of pure joy, and it succeeded. “Broccoli” by D.R.A.M. featuring Lil Yachty was loose and goofy and charming in a way that didn’t need to be anything else. Car Seat Headrest’s “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” captured a specific kind of young-adult exhaustion with more precision than most rock music manages. Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch” was tightly wound and anxious. The xx’s “On Hold” was cool and minimal and aching. These songs don’t belong to the same world, and yet they all came from the same twelve months. That’s not a contradiction — that’s just what a genuinely good year in music looks like.
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