Kendrick, Cardi B and Kesha: The year in pop music
This year we heard Drake's take on the playlist. We heard haters double down on Ed Sheeran. We heard Kendrick Lamar rise to yet another level and heard Jay-Z's response to Lemonade (sort of, anyway).
New albums dropped from big names like LCD Soundsystem, Taylor Swift, Bjork, Fleet Foxes, Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, Father John Misty and Lorde.
Promising newcomers like SZA, Daniel Caesar, Jessie Reyez, Sampha and Cardi B also made their mark.
We also heard "Despacito"… everywhere.
We mourned and healed with Ariande Grande fans and we revisited music from those we lost.
When it comes to music, 2017 was certainly a bountiful year. To break it all down for us, we reconvened our music panel, writers Andrea Warner and Maura Johnston and musicologist Nate Sloan, to discuss the music that mattered most this year.
Here are their picks:
SONG OF THE YEAR
Andrea Warner: "I picked Weaves' "Scream," featuring Tanya Tagaq. It is a feminist, political, incredibly powerful tune and it's also punk as f---. It builds to this cacophony of righteous anger and frustration and ultimately pride and empowerment. It's such catharsis in 2017."
Maura Johnston: "My pick is by an artist named Casey Dienel and it's called "High Times." It's a winding chronicle of a wayward vacation that this woman is taking in Palm Springs. The song is from Dienel's new album Imitation Of A Woman To Love, which is also my favourite album of the year. It's an earthy exploration of femininity and what it means to be a woman who doesn't quite fit in with society for whatever reason. The music is thrilling and evocative with kind of weird synth explorations. She also has a beautiful stunning voice."
Nate Sloan: "Off Jay-Z's 4:44, it has to be "Smile". A song that samples Stevie Wonder's "Love's In Need of Love Today," which is one of my all-time favourite tracks, so I am definitely susceptible to it. I think the closing moments of this song are some of the most poignant musical moments of 2017. It's a recording of a poem recited by Jay-Z's mother, Gloria Carter, describing her experience of coming out and it just needs to be heard. It's a really powerful statement."
ROOKIE OF THE YEAR
Warner: "Daniel Caesar's Freudian is exquisite and Jessie Reyez had an incredible year. They had these incredible breakout years, and they're so young and they have so much left to do and so many places to grow. Also, Cardi B for the world with "Bodak Yellow." I mean, it's just an incredible song and I think there's so many layers to what she does. I'm so excited for her."
Sloan: My pick is Residente. This Puerto Rican rapper created an album over the course of two years and recorded around the world, from Tuva to Beijing and all the way back to Puerto Rico. It's an incredible artistic and social statement and I just can't recommend this artist enough."
Johnston: "My pick is more of a rebirth than an arrival, but the first person I thought of when this question came up was Kesha because I feel like she had this reinvention with the album Rainbow. It's such a triumph and so much fun to listen to. It's been really great watching her settle into the version of herself that she has been wanting to present for many years now."
'LEMONADE' OF THE YEAR
Johnston: "I would say Kendrick Lamar's Damn. in that it had the conceptual headiness with its structure. Just last week Lamar re-released it with the tracklist in reverse because it's a story that can be told backwards or forwards. It also had a ton of pop appeal. It reeled off a ton of singles. "Humble." was huge on pop radio and there were other songs like "Love." and "Loyalty." that really lit up the playlists of radio stations. I would also give an honourable mention to 4:44 by Jay-Z."
Sloan: "I'm going to piggyback on the latter half of that answer because 4:44 seems to be literally the companion album to Lemonade and I think it's equally effective at being this stunning musical document and being really trenchant."
Warner: "I think there were a lot of small records that were quiet evolutions. For me, it's Vivek Shraya's six song EP Part-Time Woman. She's a South Asian-Canadian transgender woman and that album's all about the intersections of her identity and what it means to be a woman in 2017. It will re-shift your whole life. It will just change the way you think about everything."
To discover some of the great tunes of 2017 you might have missed, check out our Day 6 playlist with all the music discussed in our year-end music panel.
To hear all of Andrea, Maura and Nate's picks, download our podcast or click the 'Listen' button at the top of this page.