100 Songs Outtakes: Halfway There

(It's Day Seven of our look at some quality songs that couldn't crack the Top 100.  The full list of my 100 Songs for 2010 will be available December 6.) 

So we're halfway through the near-misses. In that spirit, here are five songs that made my Halfway 100, but won't make the year-end list. It shouldn't reflect poorly on any of them. These are all good songs. It's just that there was a lot of great music this year.

MGMT - "Congratulations"

I get the feeling this album is going to age incredibly well. Like Pinkerton-style misunderstood-cult-classic well. Just a hunch. So, if that happens, let the record show that I thought this song was, um, I guess moderately okay in 2010.

Gorillaz - "On Melancholy Hill"

Song of the year over at Dots and Dashes. In the same way that, in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, I think it is also true that, in the future, every song will be number one on someone's blog. The better songs will just be number one on blogs people actually read. No offense to Dots and Dashes ... I'm sure they have a lot more reader than I do.

Toro Y Moi - "Leave Everywhere"

Toro y Moi is one guy from South Carolina, and he's probably seen as the leader of the chillwave movement, which we discussed yesterday. Anyway, after his critically-acclaimed chillwave album, he released this song as a single, and it's not chillwave at all. It's just a straight-ahead rock song. And so the blogs got all excited, talking about how this showed how Toro y Moi was branching out, leaving chillwave behind for a wider audience, he was bored with chillwave, he was taking chillwave mainstream, back and forth, etc, etc. For a small, weird group of people, this was like Dylan going electric.

And then the guy gave an interview where he basically said, "Yeah, I wrote that song like five years ago, I just wanted to release it before I forgot about it. It really has nothing to do with any of my future plans." And everything everyone wrote was instantly meaningless. I feel like, if you had to explain internet journalism to an alien, that story would pretty much do it.

Erykah Badu - "Window Seat"

As Elliot* pointed out when this song first appeared, all the controversy surrounding the music video really obscures the fact that this is just a great, chill song. Somebody say come back, come back baby ...

(And the video, I guess, is NSFW-ish, but really ... this is what we're offended by now? I feel very un-shocked.)



*And I link to Curt's column all the time, but I feel like I have been neglecting the great work Elliot is currently doing at the Wichita Eagle. Cherish it, as he'll be in Zimbabwe before you know it.

New Pornographers - "A Bite Out of My Bed"

And here's the problem with being consistently wonderful: I start to expect it of you. If this song came from some no-name blog-hype band, I suspect it would have cracked the top 50. As is, it's the New Pornographers, so it's the third-best song on their album and probably doesn't crack the top 25 in their catalog. Sorry guys. Please continue being consistently wonderful anyway.