The 14 Best Music Moments of 2019
Like our list of the best albums of this year, The Atlantic’s roundup of 2019’s notable songs results from some combination of our writers’ personal obsessions and a sense of what mattered in popular culture. We’ve taken a yearbook-superlatives approach to describe what sounds will come to mind when we think back on these 12 months.
Best Bad Single: Taylor Swift, “You Need to Calm Down”
This song sounds so simple and satisfying—all bumps and burbles and uh-ohhs—that it should brighten up any bar it’s played in. Instead it starts chair-smashing fights about where allyship ends and appropriation begins. Swift could have gone all in with her Pride-month advocacy and just written a series of vignettes about her queer friends. Or she could have scrapped the social content and sung an ode to her cat. The in-between zone, using other people’s political struggles as a metaphor for her PR problems, doesn’t work. That’s tea, hunny! — Spencer Kornhaber
Beyoncé, “Before I
