In 1992, Ebony asked Tina Turner what type of singer she was. "A serious singer," she replied—then added, "and a lasting singer." She was, of course, correct on both counts. Tinas voice is one of American musics most singular instruments: Formidable and rugged, it wrings soul out of heartbroken ballads and defiant anthems alike. These five vocal performances show off her incredible emotional and vocal ranges, and prove that her place in music isnt defined by genre or style as much as it is by her incredible resilience and work ethic. "The Best" (1989)Songwriters Mike Chapman and Holly Knight had written Tinas demanding 1984 hit "Better Be Good to Me," and five years later she plucked another one of their songs—the praise-stuffed "The Best," originally written for Welsh belter Bonnie Tyler—for her own personal songbook. Tina turned the song into a triumph, her effusive praise for a lover professed with such urgency and joy that it wound up turning into advocacy for her own status as "the best." "Whats Love Got to Do With It" (1984)When Tina began putting together Private Dancer—the 1984 album that would double as her return to pops upper echelons—the first song she received was an odd track by British songwriter Terry Britten. "I felt, Gosh, what a strange little song. Its not rock and roll," Tina told John Pidgeon in the BBC Books release Classic Albums. But meeting Britten changed her mind; after hearing her out, he switched up some chord changes and altered its key, and Tina felt comfortable enough to lend it her impassioned, soaring vocal. "It was unusual and different, but it was so different," Tina recalled in Classic Albums. "Thats why it was a hit, because there hasnt been anything out there like it since, either. It was one of those songs that you get maybe once a decade." Britten would go on to write other tracks—including the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome rallying cry "We Dont Need Another Hero" and the longing "Typical Male"—that let Tina get vocally loose. "River Deep – Mountain High" (1966)Tinas collaboration with then-white-hot producer Phil Spector was a meeting of two powerhouses, and the title track from 1966s River Deep – Mountain High, which Spector wrote with pop hitmakers Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, shows how their seemingly clashing styles could come together in rousing fashion. “For the first time in my life, it wasn’t R&B," Tina told Kurt Loder in a 1984 Rolling Stone interview. "I finally had a chance to sing.” And sing she does: Her robust vocal slices through Spectors trademark Wall of Sound, making the lyrics proclamations of love sound like ironclad promises. "Nutbush City Limits" (1973)On November 26, 1939, Anna Mae Bullock was born in Nutbush, Tennessee. Three-plus decades later, Bullock, who had by then rechristened herself as Tina Turner, would commemorate the small cotton-producing hamlets "church house, gin house … school house, [and] outhouse" in this stomping slice of glam-funk, the last single she produced with her eventual ex Ike Turner. Tina throws herself into the description of the "quiet little old community, a one-horse town" fully, her stretched-out yowl contrasting with the insistent percussion and woozy analog synth in thrilling fashion. "Proud Mary" (1993)Ike and Tinas transformation of Creedence Clearwater Revivals 1969 riverboat chronicle turned it into one of Tinas signature songs, with its lazy-river rhythms eventually exploding into a horn-festooned rave-up and giving Tina a chance to reinvent rock in her own image. Versions of Tina doing "Proud Mary" abound, and theyre always worth listening to. The locomotive live version featured on the deluxe edition of The Rolling Stones 1970 live album Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! is particularly taut. But the version that appeared on 1993s soundtrack to the Angela Bassett-starring biopic Whats Love Got to Do With It has a special resonance: Tina recorded a new version of that track and other songs from the period when she was second-billed to her abusive ex-husband, and the spitfire vocal she offers up on "Mary" doubles as a celebration of the rebirth she began almost a decade prior.

In 1982 Tina Turner laid the groundwork for her Private Dancer comeback when she collaborated with the British Electric Foundation, a side project of Human League and Heaven 17s Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh. Their collaboration—a synth-heavy rework of The Temptations 1970 broadside "Ball of Confusion"—was enough of a smash for the then-unsigned Turner to ink a deal with Capitol, and the B.E.F. offered to produce. But they had a difficult time agreeing on a track. "Nearly everything [Ware] brought me was some kind of R&B," Turner told Musician in 1984. "I said, I dont want R&B, I want rock n roll." Turner bristled when people pigeonholed her as a soul singer; "I am a rock and roll singer," she told Rolling Stone while promoting Private Dancer in 1984, neither the first nor the last time she would correct anothers assumptions. "River Deep, Mountain High," which she recorded with Phil Spector in 1966, was one of her early efforts at defying convention, her bravura vocal paired with Spectors famed (and pricey) Wall of Sound; the song, now a standard, stiffed at radio in the States. Spector, as guitarist and longtime friend Marshall Lieb recounted in Mark Ribowskys biography of the producer Hes A Rebel, believed it was because hed refused to engage in payola. But Tinas ex-husband, who was credited on the track yet didnt appear on it, had other ideas: "Ike Turner, who places River Deep up next to Good Vibrations as his two favorite records, says the Spector production didn’t get airplay because the soul stations said too pop and the white stations said too R&B," Ben Fong-Torres wrote in a 1971 issue of Rolling Stone. "’See, what’s wrong with America,’ [Turner] told Pete Senoff, is that rather than accept something for its value…America mixes race in it." While Ike Turners overall effect on his ex-partners life was pretty terrible (and he and Tina did have a fair amount of R&B in their repertoire), this broken-clock sentiment touches on a couple of things that have been true for decades. First, listening with ones eyes can result in genres being placed on music despite its sonics; and second, the stringent formatting of radio leaves a lot of worthy records by even big names stuck between the cracks. Black artists who, like Turner, rooted their music in rock ideals had to forge their own path. Betty Davis mixed rock and funk with Davis intense yowling in ways that still blow minds. "She introduced me to the music of Jimi Hendrix—and to Jimi Hendrix himself—and other black rock music and musicians," Miles Davis (her ex-husband) wrote in his 1989 autobiography. "She knew Sly Stone and all those guys, and she was great herself. If Betty were singing today shed be something like Madonna: something like Prince, only as a woman. She was the beginning of all that when she was singing as Betty Davis. She was just ahead of her time." The R&B trio Labelle, meanwhile, followed up the breakout success of "Lady Marmalade" with Phoenix, a showcase for singer/producer Nona Hendryx’s rock knowledge that stiffed on the charts. And Princes 1981 slot opening for the Rolling Stones—who had brought Ike and Tina on tour with them a decade-plus earlier—for two shows in Los Angeles was received so poorly by audiences conditioned to a particularly white-man-dominated "rock" ideal that promoter Bill Graham had to calm the crowd down. “I got hit in the shoulder with a bag of fried chicken," then-bassist Brown Mark recalled in 2016, "then my guitar got knocked out of tune by a large grapefruit that hit the tuning keys.” Private Dancer, the first album to result from Turner’s Capitol deal, operated squarely in the rock realm even as it contained covers of Ann Peebles "I Cant Stand the Rain" and Al Greens "Lets Stay Together" (the latter wound up being the song she collaborated on with Ware and Marsh). Her cover of David Bowies pre-apocalyptic "1984" pairs her roar with glittering synths; the simmering "Private Dancer" has a weeping guitar solo by Jeff Beck; "Better Be Good To Me" pairs Turner with a gang-vocal choir that wouldnt sound out of place on an AC/DC album. Yet with the exception of "Better," none of Private Dancers singles charted on rock radio—not even the monumental "Whats Love Got To Do With It," which topped the Hot 100 for three weeks in 1984.As the tabulations of the Hot 100 have shifted, that cross-genre chart has become more susceptible to trends among radio programmers and consumers. In recent years, this has particularly affected those artists whose music checks multiple boxes, or even the wrong one. While Beyoncé is rightly considered one of pops premier artists, she didnt have a chart-topping single between November 2008, when "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" was in the pole position, and December 2017—and that was through a featured credit on an Ed Sheeran song (the goopy "Perfect"). The Hot 100s ever-mutating formula shut out the pop-art explosion video for "Countdown" and the "If It Isnt Love"-saluting clip for "Love On Top"; both came out in 2011, two years before YouTube stats were incorporated into the big charts formulas. And her keeping Lemonade off Spotify was a big part of why no song from that watershed album cracked the top 10. Beyond Beyoncé, though, R&B seemingly fell out of favor among pop programmers in the late 2000s, a trend that was accelerated by radio consolidation, programmers doubling down on tight-ship formatting, the rise of the less-grooving style of music shorthanded as "EDM," and the increased presence of sports talk, a longtime staple of the AM band, on the FM dial. While that didnt alter Beyoncés musical trajectory very much, it did leave R&B artists—even ones with proven track records, like the silvery-voiced Amerie and the human-condition observer Ne-Yo—in what seemed like eternal turnaround. Ameries joyously resilient "Gotta Work" found its biggest audience when it boomed out of NBA All-Star Game promos; Ne-Yo, meanwhile, had his greatest chart successes when he played Pitbulls foil, giving a winsomeness to hope-tinged EDM bangers like "Time of My Life." More than five decades after "River Deep, Mountain High" was rejected by American programmers and listeners, artists who want to identify as pop while also bridging genres are still finding if not outright resistance, at least confusion from the more conservative-minded people out there (and in boardrooms). But theyre soldiering on, and as Miguels Kacey Musgrave-assisted country rework of his psych-funk track "Waves" shows, theyre continuing Tina Turners legacy of resisting classification, and—like her—theyre doing so loudly and proudly.

During the first season of Tina Feys zany Muppet Show update 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin, playing ever-demanding executive Jack Donaghy, stares at a portrait of his boss—the man who represents, to him, the pinnacle of corporate achievement. As he raises his teacup to the portrait, which he himself painted, he sings, softly, the chorus of a song that ruled radio during the 80s waning months: "Simply the best.. uh, uh, uh."Tina Turner plucked "The Best" from the back catalog of Welsh belter Bonnie Tyler for her 1989 album Foreign Affair, and its since become one of Turners signature songs. Its soundtracked number-retirement ceremonies for top-tier athletes like Philadelphia 76ers sparkplug Allen Iverson and the appropriately named Pittsburgh Penguins legend Mario Lemieux. It accompanied the New York Rangers victory lap after their curse-breaking Stanley Cup victory in 1994. And its been used to honor championship-team anniversaries and no-hitters, as well as the 2008 Presidential campaign of Joe Biden.On TV, though, "The Best" has a slightly different story, one thats connected to the rise of self-lacerating, reference-heavy comedy that particularly took off in the 90s, when mind-numbing McJobs and Alanis-branded irony were just entering the cultural bloodstream. The Voice, The X Factor, and other singing-competition shows have featured hopefuls emulating Tina, although those who pick the rock-tinged "The Best" over, say, "Proud Mary" are also setting themselves up for tart-tongued rebukes from the judges.But quite a few uses of "The Best" play Turners triumphant vocal in a context that sorely needs it: the workplace. One of its earliest placements came in a 1998 episode of The Drew Carey Show. In the fourth-season episode "Drew Between the Rock and A Hard Place," Drew (Drew Carey) — blonde and goateed, thanks to his burgeoning music career—is enticed to do one last job before quitting to pursue his dream of life on the road. He hems and haws some, and then: "Get my lumbar pillow — Im gonna be doing some sittin," Carey declares before the songs chorus kicks in. (It pauses for a bit while Carey sharpens his pencil.) The songs placement probably presaged the ending where Carey decides to stay in Cleveland and with his officemates for at least a few more seasons.Other uses, however, are a bit more laden with irony. Arrested Developments 2013 episode "The B Team" uses "The Best" to introduce Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) and his core production team for the ill-fated biopic about his thieving family — a prison warden slashes screenwriter Warden Stefan Gentles (James Lipton), as well as Carl Weathers and Andy Richter, playing themselves, as they strut through the soaring lobby of Imagine Entertainment. The music is actually coming from Gentles iPad, but the effect remains. Similarly, in the 2016 The Simpsons episode "Much Apu About Something," a motley crew of volunteer firefighters—among them Krusty the Clown ("This is the one good thing I do!") and Principal Skinner—speed away from a burning building as "The Best" plays.Perhaps its most well-known TV placement of the past two decades is probably during the “Motivation” episode from the second seasons of the original UK version of The Office. Hapless aper salesman David Brent (Ricky Gervais) caps a buzzword-and-leaden-joke-filled speech with a jog over to a strategically placed boom box. "Promise me youll remember one thing, yeh?" Brent asks the confused workers sitting before him—then he hits "play" on the radio and engages in an animated lip sync thats clearly designed to make the attendees clap and sing along. They do not. The pantomime goes on for what seems like an excruciating time, but is only about 20 seconds, until Brent pierces the silence—"Ive been David Brent! Youve been the best!" he winks, bopping out of the room in front of the incredulous crowd.Why does this particular song have so much resonance not only with the comedy crowd—its also been used on Zooey Deschanels kicky New Girl and the disgraced-richies chronicle Schitts Creek—but with those who place their characters at work? The production—handled on the original version by Tina Turner and the late soul singer Dan Hartman—is likely part of it; its surfaces resemble the glossy sheens of office-supply catalogs, sparkling efficiency to which the most dingy, windowless offices aspire.But the real reason is Tina, whose reassurances that her subject land with the confidence that made her one of rocks biggest stars—a self-possession that the hapless workers portrayed in these bits rarely deserve. While the full song, minus the oft-used soundbite, is directed toward a lover (comedic uses tend to cut off the chorus right before she declares "Im stuck on your heart, I hang on every word you say/ Tear us apart, baby, I would rather be dead," perhaps fortunately), when Turners chorus is chopped down to its most essential part, it lands like a strivers internal monologue manifested in the air, cutting through the drudgery of paper shuffling and pencil sharpening and turning the everyday into a triumph. But the victory is as short-lived as the two-word phrase that inspired it.

Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.

The storied songwriting team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin won their first joint Oscar at the 2020 Academy Awards for “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” a disco-tinged, self-affirming strut from the Elton biopic Rocketman. That Oscar capped off a decade of big-ticket soundtrack songs, whether they were high-concept tracks like Lana Del Rey’s glammed-up Great Gatsby lament “Young and Beautiful,” heart-tugging ballads like Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born duet “Shallow,” or Pharrell Williams’ giddy Despicable Me 2 bounce “Happy.” Musicals were in high supply during the 2010s as well, with La La Land and Frozen leading the pack of song-filled fantasias that took viewers to far-off lands.

Keeping tabs on new releases is a job in and of itself these days, what with the scattering of arenas for announcing albums, distributing music, and telling your friends about what youve been listening to lately. Gone are the relatively simple days of heading to a shop staffed by people who have earned your trust (either individually or through some hivemind-harnessed power) and plunking down money for the things their employees, or some underpaid alt-weekly denizen, recommended.But the explosion of releases occasioned by the rise of digital platforms in particular has allowed me to take more chances on virtual A-sides. Playlist-surfing is how I found out about the British three-piece Peaness, whose name still causes me to stifle giggles when I say it on the radio and whose chunky, standoffish take on twee is absolutely delightful. And it’s how I first heard the Montreal duo She-Devils, whose come-hither cabaret promises a dark ride. And! I found out about the sweetly vicious Florida trio UV-TV through, of all things, a blog.It’s also been a solid year for older acts who are still in the music-making business, thus shoring up the "it’s been a good year for music" claim that Im pretty okay with staking at this early June moment. The Afghan Whigs, who I adore enough to continent-hop in their honour, released the uneasy, swirling In Spades; Mark Lanegan soldered his scorched-earth burr to warm electronic textures on Gargoyle; Juliana Hatfield pointed her hooky disdain toward the Trump administration on Pussycat; and Stephin Merritt got big and conceptual again with 50 Song Memoir, which has perhaps one of the best musical encapsulations of the quixotic relationship between humans and felines ever put to tape. That moment on “‘68: A Cat Called Dionysus” when he drolly sings "he haaaated me… but I… loved… him" could probably soundtrack more than a few self-aware rom-coms, too.

The overall unsteadiness of 2017 stretched to pop, which seemed plagued by an existential crisis that could be chalked up to the still-developing sea legs of streaming-music discovery, the panic of radio programmers looking over their collective shoulders at the looming threats posed by Spotifys Rap Caviar and Apples A-Lists, or just overall exhaustion. (It was a trying year.) The best pure pop pleasures of the year came largely from those artists who decided to cast formula to the wind and instead veer off in their own direction.Carly Rae Jepsens "Cut to the Feeling" (a holdover from the E•MO•TION era that proved how her cast-offs pack more punch than even the most precision-grade Max Martin concoction) led the charge, its call for letting it all out urged along by a squad of synths clapping; Paramore distracted from the heartache at the core of After Laughter by eclipsing it with laserbeam guitars and Hayley Williams height-scaling vocals; Miguel threw himself into his vocals as well on War & Leisure, singing like it was the only thing keeping him from certain doom. Radio wasnt without its pleasures; DJ Khaleds seemingly improbable Santana interpolation got life from Rihannas dead-serious flirtations on "Wild Thoughts," while Camila Cabellos slinky "Havana" felt like a trap-pop update of the "Smooth" formula, only with Young Thugs tongue-twisting rhymes standing in for Carlos licks.Kelly Clarkson and Kesha announced their liberation from pops mathematicians with albums that felt more like their live presences, electric and whipsawing through genres and giggling at the fun of it all. Ne-Yo, trapped in the purgatory of vocal features and top-down label uncertainty over the "marketability" of R&B for so long, put out "Another Love Song," a suited-up return to his Year of the Gentleman era that also stood out for actually expressing romantic pleasure. It aided a resurgent year for the genre on multiple levels: younger artists like Khalid, SZA, and Jordan Bratton used their soul-side-ready voices as a jumping-off point into modern textures; the sibling duo Chloe x Halle twinned and looped their ghostly voices into next-generation gold on The Two of Us; Luke James triple-dipped with his star turn as Johnny Gill in BETs outrageous New Edition biopic, the woozily coital "Drip," and a recurring role (complete with weekly singles releases) on Foxs girl-group musical soap Star; and Michigans Curtis Harding threw it back to the hot-buttered era on the stunning, sumptuous Face Your Fear. Pops best moments provided a metaphor for the year—the noisy mainstream might have its ever-more-fleeting moments, but the really satisfying moments lurked within more hidden corners.

In times of crisis, indie-pop—or twee, or whatever you want to call the sort of pop music thats exquisitely appointed while singing finely tuned chronicles of furtive glances and squirreled-away heartbreaks—is my comfort-food music. Sweater-weather vibes and hummable melodies were in large supply in 2017 both in the U.S. and abroad. Cheeky British act Peaness (pictured) collected its recent output, including the stellar love song "Seafoam Islands," on Are You Sure?; Chicago scrappers Varsity released the spaced-out yet self-protective "Settle Down"; and British trio Girl Ray put out the stunning, exploratory Earl Grey, which triangulated the songcraft of Carole King, the wooliness of mid-90s K Records, and the exacting wit of Squeeze (as well as a prog freak-out or two) into a gorgeous record.A few of the labels from my 90s college-radio heyday—when I first grew heart-eyed over indie-pop—are still at it, putting out lovingly detailed pop albums. The Spain-based label Elefant, which has been operating since 1989, released La Bien Queridas breezy Fuego, which surrounds the chilled-out alto of Ana Fernández-Villaverde in urgent synths ("Si Me Quieres a Mi") and squiggly guitars ("El Lado Bueno"). The 10-inch by the resurgent British act The Primitives, also an Elefant release, soared with "Ill Trust The Wind," which combined a singsong earworm with guitar fuzz. Matinée Recordings launched in 1997 and this year released a slew of records that included the chiming Other Towns Than Ours by Melbournes Last Leaves, which includes three-quarters of the brainy Aussie indiepoppers The Lucksmiths. The 20th-anniversary comp Matinée Idols throws back to the days of various-artists-CD-based discovery with a Last Leaves track as well as the Snapchat-era lament "Me, My Selfie and I" by Scots Strawberry Whiplash and "Postcard" from the sweetly synthy Swedish band The Electric Pop Group. (Postcards also figured into the making of Jens Lekmans gorgeously forthright Life Will See You Now.)The labels that are still kicking almost make up for the sting of losing Fortuna POP!, the UK-based label that announced its shutdown after 22 years in business and punctuated said farewell with the dreamy Flowers track "Say 123," which combines chugging guitars and vocalist Rachel Kennedys spectral soprano. Bittersweet feelings are crucial to indie-pop, though, so the beauty of that song at least made for a fitting goodbye.

"Is this the end of America?" Lana Del Rey asked this question over and over again on her fever-dreamy "When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing," her voice trembling and swooping as she pondered an existential query that spoke to my heart in 2017, too. The stream of headlines touting rollbacks and tax cuts for the super-rich, the heightened Tweetstorms, the Facebook comment wars, the sky looking just a little bit more tinged with gray every day—it was a rough year for everyone.Music helped. Kendrick Lamars DAMN. was a potent parable no matter how you arranged its tracklisting; most of it could probably make it onto this playlist, but I especially enjoyed "DNA.," a rebuttal to stereotypes of black America that has the added bonus of making failed Al Capone excavator Geraldo Rivera look like a particular fool. MCs like Jeezy and Dreezy also addressed the current situation, and Rihanna spat acid-tinged fire on N.E.R.D.s confrontational "Lemon." Foxs Star, which balanced the pulpy with the political in its two post-Trump-election seasons, called back to the civil rights era with the storming "America Dreaming."Its worth noting that few of the explicitly political songs by even the biggest artists crossed over to radio, which attempted to remain neutral in the wake of the nations torment. While the bleaker global mood was certainly reflected in Logics anti-suicide dirge "1-800-273-8255," Khalids doomed-generation anthem "Young Dumb & Broke," and Post Malones hazy, irritating dive into self-loathing "rockstar," the conditions that led to this malaise were taboo. Blame the precarious financial situation of pop radios corporate parents, or the nationally determined nature of the stations playlists, but the relative crappiness of songs like "rockstar" compared to charged-up hits of the past like Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Youngs "Ohio" (or this years cover by Late Show bandleader Jon Batiste, soul revivalist Leon Bridges, and guitar demigod Gary Clark Jr.) made plain just how shared problems being talked around robbed radio of a crucial spark. (If only streaming-music services included "Political" as a mood... although Spotifys "Im with the banned" project, which paired American musicians with artists from countries affected by this years attempts at a travel ban, is a good start.)Either way, President Donald Trump is likely happy that hes affected the mood of so many people, even if those who referenced him specifically didnt have many nice things to say about him or his friends. Juliana Hatfield took on Trumps administration on the ferocious Pussycat, which featured the gently grooving reckoning "Kellyanne"; Randy Newman used Russian president Vladimir Putins life as fodder for the rollicking "Putin"; Neil Young mused about "A gameshow host/ Who has to brag and has to boast" on the shuffling "Almost Always." Propagandhi used some of the more vulgar snippets from the leaked tape of Trumps gross 2005 chat with Access Hollywoods Billy Bush to underscore the point of "Adventures in Zoochosis."Not all of this years political songs focused on Washingtons reality-TV circus. Austras mournful "43" was a deliberately downtempo stomp written in memory of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College who were kidnapped in Iguala, Mexico in 2014; Belle & Sebastians brightly strident "The Girl Doesnt Get It" gave a tongue-lashing to Brexit supporters; Pissed Jeans grinding "Its Your Knees" took self-loathing masculinity to task, while Margo Prices swaying "Pay Gap" was a working-womans anthem that aimed its lightly worn vitriol at "rich white men" who view women as housework-capable pets.And then there was the years most unexpectedly gripping political statement, which wasnt about the Trump administration specifically but which might as well have been. In June, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released Murder of the Universe, their second album since February (of a promised five in 2017); its a sci-fi rock opera replete with chillingly ominous narration and flutes and frantic riffing. It tells the tale of a cyborg who builds a "Soy-Protein Munt Machine," a self-loathing apparatus designed to cover the world in vomit. The apparatus eventually balks at its mission, so the cyborg takes over, finding unfathomable pleasure in utter destruction—"I turn lakes into porridge and buildings into bile/ I am a noxious soup filling valleys with vomit-torrents/ Castles crumble in landslides and I munch the rubble/ It tastes good," he robotically growls over the finale and title tracks increasingly clamorous musical bed. (Sorry for giving away the ending.) The nihilistic pleasure that the protagonist takes in destroying absolutely everything had a particular resonance when it came out in June—sample the New York Times headline from that week: "Can Trump Destroy Obama’s Legacy?"—but the albums combination of absurdity, grossness, and musical audacity added up to a stunning comment on 2017 that one can easily freak out alongside.After the murder, however, comes the process of rebirth, and more than a few artists were expectantly looking toward the horizon in search of better days. Björks enveloping "Tabula Rasa" is a prayer for the next generation, hoping to envelop them in as much "grace and dignity" for as long as possible; Big K.R.I.T.s gospel-jazz cacophony "The Light," from his towering double album 4Eva Is A Mighty Long Time, brings Robert Glasper and Bilal along for his trip to a more welcoming home; Vic Mensa and Ty Dolla $igns "We Could Be Free" and Miguels "Now" also offer messages of determination.Hulus adaptation of Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale wound up being one of the most talked-about episodics of 2017, both because of the eerie parallels between Atwoods dystopian visions and the greater (read: more traditionally patriarchal) America staked out by the Fox-evangelicalist likes of Mike Pence. The book and shows Latin refrain—“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”—got loosely translated into English and turned into a rallying cry for Kesha on "Bastards," the opening track to her triumphant comeback Rainbow. "Dont let the bastards get you down, oh no/ Dont let the assholes wear you out," she wails with increasing fervor, a choir eventually joining in. Taken with civil-rights veteran Mavis Staples powerful "No Time For Crying" ("No time for tears/ Weve got work to do/ Weve got work to do," she belts over simmering country-soul), its a rejoinder to Lana Del Reys plaint, a firm "hell no" rooted in a desire to make the world better not just for the present, but for future generations.

James Spaders bravado scenery-chewing isnt the only reason to watch NBCs twist-filled spy drama The Blacklist. Great songs from the past (Golden Earrings massive "Radar Love," Harry Nilssons withering "One") and the present (Mark Lanegans weary "Bleeding Muddy Water," The Kills swaggering "Sour Cherry") lurk underneath the bullets and double-crossings. The show managed to squeeze in a cameo by Brooklyn metallurgists Liturgy, who were joined on drums by a cameoing Peter Fonda as they tore their way through "Harmonia." Music supervisor John Bissells keenly selected tracks further propel the shows breakneck plots and, at moments, allow its harried characters time to reflect and be human.