Two thousand thirteen was the year pop music stopped pretending it needed to choose a side. You could hear it in the way the year’s two biggest radio songs sat right next to each other in totally different moods: “Blurred Lines” leaned on a live-funk groove that Robin Thicke, T.I., and Pharrell built to feel effortless, while Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” also featuring Pharrell, reached even further back — disco basslines, Nile Rodgers on guitar, a chorus built for driving with the windows down. Both songs topped charts by looking backward, but they proved that nostalgia, done well, doesn’t feel like a costume.
Meanwhile, a strange, private kind of pop was pushing forward. Lorde released “Royals” as a teenager from New Zealand and, without trying to sound like anyone else, wrote the year’s most quietly subversive hit — a song about not wanting the diamonds and Cadillacs everyone else was singing about. HAIM’s “The Wire” and Icona Pop’s “I Love It” (with an assist from Charli XCX) carried that same don’t-actually-care energy but louder, messier, more fun about it. Even Miley Cyrus, mid-reinvention, turned “Wrecking Ball” into something that split the difference between vulnerability and spectacle, and people couldn’t decide which one was real. Maybe that was the point.
Hip-hop and R&B spent 2013 getting weirder in the best sense. Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead” was pure confrontation — industrial drums, a vocal that sounded like it was daring you to turn it off. Kendrick Lamar’s “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” did something almost opposite: patient, meditative, letting a single idea breathe for four minutes. Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids” stretched even further, a ten-minute song that changed shape twice without losing the thread. And then there was Disclosure’s “White Noise,” which took house music — a genre that had mostly lived in clubs — and made it sound like it belonged on the radio, a preview of the decade’s growing appetite for dance music with pop bones.
Guitar music, often declared dead around this time, was mostly just changing address. Vampire Weekend’s “Diane Young” crammed baroque-pop cleverness into two frantic minutes; Arcade Fire’s “Reflektor” went the other direction, stretching out into disco-adjacent art-rock with help from James Murphy. Tame Impala’s “Elephant” and Jake Bugg’s “Lightning Bolt” both looked to classic rock without sounding retro, and on the rawer end, Courtney Barnett’s “Avant Gardener” and Deafheaven’s “Dream House” showed just how wide “guitar music” could stretch in a single year — one a deadpan, talk-sung account of a panic attack in a garden, the other a wall of blast-beats and shoegaze that somehow ended up sounding gorgeous.
What’s easy to miss, looking back, is how many of 2013’s songs were quietly about mortality and change. David Bowie’s “Where Are We Now?” arrived without warning after a decade of silence, a hushed reflection from a man looking at his own past. The Knife’s “Full of Fire” and Nick Cave’s “Jubilee Street” both dealt, in very different registers, with reckoning and transformation. Even Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors,” a genuine pop smash, was really a song about time and commitment dressed up as a love song. None of these songs were trying to define an era — they were just being made, by people working in their own lanes, at the same time. It’s only in hindsight, with a playlist like this one, that the year starts to look like it had a shape at all.
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