LogFAQs > #930723669

Best song of the 2010s: "Ivy" - Frank Ocean
Runners Up: "Hotline Bling" - Drake, "Midnight City" - M83, "Get Lucky" - Daft Punk, "Maud Gone" - Car Seat Headrest, "Identikit" - Radiohead

I know I just spent the last several posts generally shitting on 2010s music. But here's the thing: the best songs of the decade really make me feel things more than previous decades. Maybe this is getting too personal, but every one of these songs that I listed can transport me back to a certain place, a certain feeling in my life.

"Hotline Bling" takes me back to a vacation I took with my now-wife in Miami. Driving across the bay with neon lights reflecting on the windshield of our rental car like we were in a Michael Mann movie. I remember thinking that this was a watershed moment for Drake--he just wrote the perfect pop song, and made it seem absolutely effortless.

"Midnight City" takes me back to the early 2010s. I had just moved from college into NYC and life was coming at me at a million miles an hour. The rush and the whirlwind not just of this new city life, but of "real life" in general hit me like a ton of bricks, and M83 somehow knew that and created the quintessential soundtrack for it.

"Get Lucky" arrived just as I was newly single for the first time since I was a teenager, and I remember the first feeling of liberation that I had when this song hit and I was out with an old friend of mine in Charleston. Daft Punk was back and (along with Pharrell), they made pop music okay for snobs like me to enjoy again--and probably opened the floodgates for a decade of crossover hits to come through.

"Maud Gone" found me--I certainly did not find it--when I moved to Brooklyn. It is pretty much emblematic of that tinny hipster sound that can be found at any decent bar around me, and I think will forever remind me of those weird late nights surrounded by people that I never would have imagined I'd have associated with when I was younger. Car Seat Headrest is the savior of rock and roll right now, and Maud Gone will tell you why.

"Identikit" creeped up on me just as fast as Moon Shaped Pool was announced, and it quickly became my favorite Radiohead song ever. It also gave me this spooky feeling--I was simultaneously looking back at that In Rainbows-esque sound from my freshman year of college, but also looking ahead at the song's themes. Thom Yorke, now an embittered old divorcee, singing about love a little differently now, just as I was finally settling into my own.

And that brings us to the best song of the 2010s: Frank Ocean's "Ivy." The 2010s were a strange decade of nostalgia for our generation. You can see it across various art-forms as millennials are becoming the creative forces in entertainment. Our generation looks back wistfully on our youth, the time before everything became so interconnected and so convenient (paging MetalDK). You see this especially in music--the rise of vaporwave, the moody pop and R&B songs that are dominating the charts, and in each of the top songs that I've already listed.

"Ivy" is the culmination of that sense of nostalgia. It's a reflection on youth and love, on growing up and moving on. Frank Ocean channels all that this decade has meant to me--maturing, finding oneself, longing for a simpler time, and ultimately realizing that "we'll never be those kids again"--into one singular track. It maintains its simplicity without sacrificing its scope. It's the decade's purest and most honest track, and in the category that is perhaps the most subjective, it's the most important song to me personally. I hope y'all found something like that for yourselves in these past ten years as well.
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"A more mature answer than I expected."~ Jakyl25
"Sephy's point is right."~ Inviso