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Top 10 Best Hit Songs of 2013

Pop music has been part of my life ever since I was adolescene and that makes it a difficult for me as a music critic. Part of the reasons why I'm doing a retrospective list like this is to learn more about the year I was covering. I wanna know more about the history, the reason why a song can become a hit, and also the cultural zeitgeist at the time. But sometimes you cover a year that was a pivotal part of your life and the emotional feeling that you have to that year might clouded your judgement. Now if you are music historian that can be a problem, but I'm merely a critic and as objective as I can be, in the end subjectivity won out. I bring all that up because 2013 was the first year that I got into music criticism. It was the first year of middle school and the first time I wondered out into the wilderness since my school was like half an hour away. I was watching YouTube after school and during day off (sometimes at the computer lab) and I found a channel called Nostalgi...
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Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 2022

     So if you can't tell this was written back in 2022. I'm posting this up for completion purposes. But, I will make the best list as well and that will be more up to date with my opinion now because wow 2022 was a weird year for the chart. Okay back to the list proper    You know, I thought because of the vaccines and opening up again that 2022 would be a better year than the two years before it. Turns out I was wrong because 2022 has been a mess all across the board. And we don't have great music to escape to in this dark time. One word that I would describe 2022 for popular music is either mediocrity or longing. Mediocrity because how most of these songs are either meh or just below par, longing because of how most of the popular hits this year are throwback. I was actually struggle to put ten songs that I hated purely because the bad songs here are either too dull to talk about or just straight up missed the Hot 100 year end list. Which is why for this lis...

Asteroid in Love and The Subtle Queer Media

 We are currently in 2026 and it has never been a great time for people who loves queer media. In the sea of garbage that the world has thrown at us, there were a silver lining that when the art is good enough, love will wins. And that's exactly how queer media especially in Asia has seen a bit of a golden age. From BL there's an explosion with Thai BL and that really propped up a lot of BLs in other countries like Japan, South Korea, and even Western countries like Canada. There are also a lot of great queer representation in media especially in trans characters strangely enough in anime. While they're sometimes still seen as comedic relief, their stories really humanized them and they became favorites amongst anime fans. And then there's the curious case of GL and Yuri. As someone who have followed this genre before I came out as trans, GL and yuri has never been as popular as this decade. I was into this genre when the biggest GL that we had was Utena and Sakura Tric...

Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 2001

     Talking about something in hindsight can be very difficult. One of the reasons is that you are talking about stuff that are set in stone and you have to add the context about why that stuff existed in the first place. If you also trying to criticize that old stuff, you run into another beast altogether. Now you have to try and talk shit about stuff that has been calcified to the culture as a whole not just objective facts. That's why a lot of people love the idea of the "worst music ever" lists because it's a permission structure for people to mock older songs. When you stray from that canon and create your own path, that's when it gets interesting. And nothing will be straying from the canon than making your own worst list.     2001 was definitely a transitional year for pop music. The leftover from the Y2K era are starting to get grating, Nu-Metal was on the brink of implosion, rock are turning inwards as post grunge and pop punk are fighting for dominant...