The Music Scalpel

          Well, thank God the worst list is done. They are the hardest to write. It is tough to be critically negative about music a majority of people like. Most of the songs have a minimal quality bar, leading to few easy targets. Especially this year. Pop music has been the best for a while. We found many great breakthrough artists that I hope can stick around. Many favorites also came back with quality material. Now let's rank the best. Honorable Mentions: Million Dollar Baby by Tommy Richman (#8): I returned to this song more than I am proud of.  Something about the old-school synthesizers and his falsetto makes it a super fun listen.  Wanna Be by GloRilla feat. Megan Thee Stallion (#40): These MCs run this song with clever lyrics and interesting flows.  Pretty Little Poison by Warren Zeiders (#60): Warren Zeiders did not need to go this hard. He really sells this toxic relationship with all of his might.  Too Sweet by Hozier (#10): I am...

       2024: the year pop music came back to life. This was a solid year for the genre, so this list was hard to make. There are more "dislikes" than true "hates." Yet there are still some "hates" and I found a new list this year. As I write this, Billboard has not released its year-end list, so I paid a couple bucks to a chart predictor on Twitter, Talk of the Charts, to use their list. With this list, I actually get 100 new songs. Billboard's year-end is 25% Christmas songs and music from last year that stayed on the chart for a long time. So this list goes up to 118. Now that that's settled. let's start with the dishonorable mentions. FE!N by Travis Scott feat. Playboi Carti (#97): This unessential song has an obnoxious repetition of "fiend," a synth line that sounds offkey, and a pair of boring verses from Travis and Carti, where the latter sounds awful. act ii: date @8 (Remix) by 4Batz feat. Drake (#80): I hate everything that 4B...