T.O.K.'s Top 20 Songs of 2014, or: Ariana Not So Grande, or: Iffy Azalea

We at T.O.K. confess that we have no idea how to write about music.  But we know what we don't like.  And 2014 had a lot of it.

Maybe it's just that '13 had a ton of amazing music, mainly from old timers who've still got it, like Bowie, McCartney, Marr, and They Might Be Giants.  There seems to have been little left.

Even the bad music was terrible.  The de facto artist of the year, Iggy Azalea, is as irritating and cloying as she is probably racist.  Her ubiquitous "Fancy" was catchy and earwormy enough to warrant my listening to her entire album, which is painful enough to be fodder for Guantanamo inmates.  The internet keeps insisting that I like Charli XCX, which I have faithfully tried to do.  The other song that was everywhere this year, Magic!'s "Rude," is unlistenable! but I'll cede the rest of that argument to Studio 360's Sideshow podcast, which this summer aired a very precise thesis on why the song is a crime against humanity.  Ariana Grande, another pop idol that seems to have gained popularity for no good reason, seems to have risen from the Disney ashes that respawn late-teen stars every few years or so.

I suppose Grande is just this generation's Britney Spears, but I seem to recall even Britney's music being better than hers.  I don't know if it's just that I'm an old man, but we in the '90s had much better bad music.  We had the rivaling boy bands of 'N Sync and Backstreet Boys, rivaling divas of Britney and Christina, and Limp Bizkit.  What do the kids have now to compete? (Taylor Swift, I suppose, who's growing more adept a businesswoman and less adept a songwriter with each release.)

There were a few bright spots.  Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, for the second year in a row, released a killer album ("Playland").  There were solid, though not exceptional, albums from Sharon Van Etten and Allo Darlin'.  Stars, whose "The North" was my favorite album of 2012, unfortunately underwhelmed this year, except for one song.  Copeland, one of my favorite emo bands, did not disappoint with their comeback record, "Ixora."  Veruca Salt's reunion, though short, was delightful.  U2, despite the botched publicity stunt around their album's release, came out with some of their best work in years on "Songs of Innocence." "Weird Al" Yankovic might have had the best overall album of the year with his first #1 on the Billboard charts, "Mandatory Fun."

Here are our 20 favorite songs of the year, in descending order.  Let these be an incantation against the rest of 2014.