![]() ![]() On “The Neverending Story,” they fused an entire album’s worth of lyrical and musical ideas into four minutes. There was no more dazzling meeting of hip-hop minds in 2020 than the collab between the long-absent Jay Electronica, the too-proud-to-bother-with-featured-billing Jay Z, and producer the Alchemist. A song this gleefully romantic couldn’t have come at a more opportune time - for the album, or in 2020. “The Power of Prayer” served the same purpose on “Letter” that a song like “I’ll Work for Your Love” did on the “Magic” album - a charming interlude about that magic moment when one’s intended comes into view and turns cold blood hot all over again. But for all that, it’s good to hear Springsteen singing a straight-up love song, too, and a fairly lusty one at that. When was the last time anyone went on “Saturday Night Live” and performed not one but two songs about dead people, as Springsteen did? Those thematic choices are unassailable, between the place in life that the Boss finds himself at and the fact that 2020 was a year to contemplate loss if ever there was one. (To see the music videos for all these songs, just click the “play” symbol on the accompanying photos.)Ī good portion if not most of the “Letter to You” album, Springsteen’s ballyhooed studio reunion with the E Street Band, was predicated on musings about mortality that got some extra muscle from bringing the old crew in to provide proof of life. It’s a list where Bob Dylan and BTS are strange bedfellows, because in 2020, strangeness is just what the doctors ordered - Feelgood and Fauci, both. With full acknowledgement that there is no way to fully acknowledge the hundreds or thousands of soul-saving songs I heard this year (and the hundreds of thousands others did), here, subject to change in a millisecond, is a selection of 2020’s finest. There was just one rule for this roundup of 2020’s best songs: only one per artist… even if you got busy and issued 35 first-rank new studio tracks this year, as Taylor Swift did. ![]() Yes, we do hope the door hits 2020 on its way out, as long as it doesn’t make the needle jump on the songs that carried us through quarantine and will keep getting us through early 2021, too. Our list of the best songs of 2020 may not be exactly what you expect from Men's Health, but if 2020 has a theme, it's the unexpected.There’s so much we’d like to erase about 2020 - but never, ever the elation, élan, empathy, harmony, rich social commentary and dumb fun that the year’s best music brought us. And it's produced a flight of female indie-rock bands and artists that tug and the heartstrings and pound at the temples all at the same time. It's flooded Spotify with incredible dance tracks, like those by Disclosure. ![]() Although you won't see anything from The Smashing Pumpkins or Bone Thugs N Harmony on our list of the best songs of 2020 so far, you will find some throwbacks mixed in with modern classics.Ģ020 has brought back stalwarts like Fiona Apple, The Rolling Stones, and Bruce Springsteen. What had so much potential (George Clooney! Arnold Schwarzenegger! Uma goddamn Thurman!) was promptly dashed by one hell of a plot-twist that quickly went south.īut like Batman & Robin, there's one silver lining amidst all the disappointment and frustration: a really, really good soundtrack. If 2020 were a Batman movie it would be Batman & Robin. ![]()
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