We are in the weird time for the chart. I can't say for certain why I'm feeling this way but I do. 2026 so far has been one of those years like 2011 or 1996 where a lot happened, but the chart seems to be stable and active. What made it weird is that to me 2020s pop music has been very up and down. The closest year I can say met this feeling was 2023 and even then the global music really carried that year while there was chaos in America for the second half of the year. After such a downturn of last year's pop music, 2026 felt like ten times more excited and interesting to talk about. And yet, there's this nagging feeling that it could turned to worst. I'm using the chart week of Harry Styles album impact and I can safely say that the chart is healthy again even if there's still lingering bad trend of 2020s that reared its ugly head. For example! 20. No Batidao - ZXKAI & slxughter The success of this song kinda baffled me still even though last year we had p...
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...