As we look back at the wacky, let’s also look back at the catchy.
“Pop music is always chasing after the unusual – all hail novelty! Let us praise uniqueness! – but this year was dynamic enough on that front to qualify it decisively as the Year of the Weird.
In the stratosphere near the top of the charts, Miley Cyrus teamed up with the psychedelic rock band Flaming Lips for Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, a rambling, shambling album that nobody would have expected and that gave Cyrus more colour and sass to add to her already phantasmagorical travelling stage show.
Taylor Swift continued to dominate with singles from her stylistic swerve1989, but, more surprisingly, songs from that album came in for a radical remake by Ryan Adams, whose full-length covers tribute transformed Swift’s strutting pop into doleful folk and rock.”
