Rolling Stone's 50 Best Albums Of 2012

Top 50单曲

50. Carly Rae Jepsen, 'Call Me Maybe'
49. Kacey Musgraves, 'Merry Go Round'
48. Deadmau5, 'The Veldt'
47. Superchunk, 'This Summer'
46. Maroon 5 feat. Wiz Khalifa, 'Payphone'
45. Justin Bieber, 'Die in Your Arms'
44. The Wanted, 'Glad You Came'
43. Tanlines, 'All of Me'
42. The 2 Bears, 'Bear Hug'
41. Danny Brown, 'Grown Up'
40. Craig Finn, 'Rented Room'
39. Dwight Yoakam, 'A Heart Like Mine'
38. Teen, 'Better'
37. Muse, 'Madness'
36. Himanshu, 'Womyn'
35. Icona Pop, 'I Love It'
34. Kendrick Lamar, 'Swimming Pools (Drank)'
33. Miguel, 'Adorn'
32. Bruce Springsteen, 'We Take Care Of Our Own'
31. Low Cut Connie, 'Boozophilia'
30. Thebeach Boys, 'That's Why God Made The Radio'
29. Grizzly Bear, 'Yet Again'
28. Grimes, 'Oblivion'
27. The Lumineers, 'Ho Hey'
26. A$AP Rocky, 'Goldie'
25. Psy, 'Gangnam Style'
24. Japandroids, 'The House That Heaven Built'
23. Randy Newman, 'I'm Dreaming'
22. Skrillex feat. Sirah, 'Bangarang'
21. Donald Fagen, "Weather in My Head'
20. Leonard Cohen, 'Going Home'
19. Beach House, 'Other People'
18. The Rolling Stones, 'Doom and Gloom'
17. Kitty Pryde, 'Okay Cupid'
16. Van Halen, 'Stay Frosty'
15. Usher, 'Climax'
14. The Vaccines, 'Teenage Icon'
13. Mumford & Sons, 'I Will Wait'
12. Fiona Apple, 'Hot Knife'
11. fun., 'Some Nights'
10. First Aid Kit, 'Emmylou'
09. Bob Dylan, 'Pay in Blood'
08. Jack White, 'Sixteen Saltines'
07. Bruce Springsteen, 'Rocky Ground'
06. Kanye West feat. Big Sean, Pusha T and 2 Chainz, 'Mercy'
05. Neil Young and Crazy Horse, 'Ramada Inn'
04. Frank Ocean, 'Thinkin Bout You'
03. Passion Pit, 'Take a Walk'
02. Taylor Swift, 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together'
01. Alabama Shakes, 'Hold On'


Call Me Maybe
The last thing we expected from 2012 – a universal pop song that everybody loved. It has it all: disco guitar, Chic bass, Philly soul-synth strings and brilliant testifying to the power of overheated hormones.

Payphone
Payphone – really? Did Adam Levine's iPhone battery drain? The title may have confused a few kids, but the song was a smash, and for good reason. A burst of pure spun-sugar pop goodness, with delicious hooks and a surprisingly sour message beneath the candied surface: "One more ****ing love song, I'll be sick."


Die In Your Arms
Bieber's best weapon has always been his vocal tone – a soulful rasp that hints at depths of longing beyond his years. That tone is deployed to wondrous effect in this throwback blue-eyed R&B single, whose vibe, and lilting melody, are pure prime-period Hall & Oates. Bieber's manager called it "hater-proof." He's right.

Glad You Came
Naughty boys! Irish-English teen-poppers push at the genre's PG-13 rating with a club-bumper that dares to raise the specter of under age inebriation ("Hand you another drink/Drink it if you can"). The unshakably catchy chorus does its work, as do the blunt 4/4 beats – and the salacious double-entendre in the title.

Madness
The U.K. prog-rockers went Kid A with this year’s The 2nd Law, but this was the LP’s pop-ready cherry – all sweet Bonoish crooning by Matt Bellamy, electronically distressed backing vocals and deep-space bass wobble. Then the guitar rips in and brings it back to Earth. Chris Martin called it their best song ever; we agree.

Adorn
Now this is some single-payer sexual healing. The R&B stud croons a baby-making slow jam that sounds up-to-the-minute fresh yet steeped in soul tradition. Miguel might be new on the block, but he already comes on like a master, right down to the way he lets his tongue linger over that "ll-l-let you" hook.

Gangnam Style
Seoul Brother Number One invents a dance craze and conquers America, the one place that had resisted Korean disco. "Gangnam Style" blew up on YouTube and became a Top 10 hit in South Korea, Mexico, Ireland, Belgium, Lebanon, Israel, Russia and the U.S., where sexy laaadaaays know a monster beat when they hear one.


Bangarang
For dubstep purists, this was their "Judaaaaas!" moment. For the rest of us, it's speaker-blasting thud-funk, obvious and proud of it, rewiring Daft Punk the way Daft Punk rewired Chic. Skrillex throws down the populist gauntlet for EDM, the most comically named genre since IDM, going for all-out superstar-DJ flash.


Doom and Gloom
The Stones return after seven years with the kind of apocalypse-blues kick-in-the-teeth only they can deliver. It's "Start Me Up" stripped raw for a near-future full of zombies, war and environmental chaos. Mick Jagger stretches out the word "screw" like he's slowly tightening one into the world.

Stay Frosty
This single-handedly proved the reunion was worth the wait. Diamond Dave rides the Van Halen brothers' flashiest riffs in decades, shooting o one-liners with the wisdom of a strip-club Zen master – from "You want to be a monk, you got to cook a lot of rice" to "Look beyond that kung-fu fighting/God is love, but get it in writing."

Climax
Usher has always had a Madonna-esque ear for the sound of the moment. Jumping on a Diplo beat for this smash single was one of his savviest moves ever: The understated electro brings out a stunning sensitivity in Usher's vocals. The lyrics are about a harsh breakup, but the delivery is so heavenly you barely noticed.

I Will Wait
There wasn't much rock in 2012 with the scope or ambition of Mumford & Sons' soaring Bono-meets-banjos brand of oldtimey folk. The isolation and dread in this ballad of road-weary longing proves that music can be soul-wrenchingly heavy without plugging in a single amp or hitting a power chord.

Some Nights
fun. followed their epic debut hit, "We Are Young," with another skywriting anthem, this one even more tinged with lush melancholy. It's young-adult angst that almost anyone turning 23 can relate to, with lines like "I try twice as hard and I'm half as liked." The martial beat and sky-high vocal charge still made entropy feel awesome.

Emmylou
"I'll be your Emmylou and I'll be your June/If you'll be my Gram and my Johnny, too," sing two Swedish sisters, name-checking country-music partnerships – Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, June Carter and Johnny Cash – in stunning harmony. Sometimes we Americans need outsiders to remind us of our awesome heritage.

Pay In Blood
In one of his most vicious songs ever, Dylan conjures a demonic figure – military brass, politician, CEO, pick your poison – while guitars glint like a switchblade. "Our nation must be saved and freed," he announces, explaining the deal with "I pay in blood, but not my own." It's like a pilot pitch for a "Masters of War" miniseries.

Sixteen Saltines
Mr. White: frisky, loud and utterly unhinged. He unleashes his most aggressive riffsince "Seven Nation Army" and reaches up into his wiggiest falsetto to testify about being under his demon lady's sexual spell. When he yelps, "Spike heels make a hole in a lifeboat," he sounds delighted to be going down with the ship.

Rocky Ground
This bold melding of church hymn, plain-folks lament and hip-hop protest bloomed on tour as Springsteen turned on his arena-preacher vibe. The song is a somber assessment of America’s state of equality; live, Springsteen turned up the light and promise – proving that the right way to hear this song of the year was not on iTunes.


Mercy
The conflicted Kanye takes a back seat: This is Yeezy and pals having wild fun, jabbering catchy nonsense about cars and women over old reggae samples and deep bass stabs. Stop thinking, start bouncing.


Ramada Man
A 17-minute epic on the scale of "Like a Hurricane" that surveys a long-term relationship in the wake of grown kids. Time and drinking take their toll, love almost saves the day, and a road trip becomes a revelation without a resolution. "Every morning comes the sun," Young sings. And the guitars play on.

Thinking Bout You
The year's deepest love song won us all with the subtle gender-flipping in the opening verse, but the rest of the lyrics are even better. "Since you think I don't love you, I just thought you were cute, that's why I kissed you," Ocean sings. The leap into aching falsetto a moment later is as universal as melody gets.

Taking A Walk
This synth-pop nugget is one of the greatest songs of the Great Recession: "My partner called to say the pension funds were gone," sings Michael Angelakos with barely suppressed panic. Then the bright, upwardly mobile chorus kicks in, and you are reminded why pop songs exist: to help mute the pain.

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
It's like a Clash of the Titans: Swift, the world's hottest pop singer or songwriter, meets up with Max Martin, the Swedish maestro who's been the Dr. Evil of global trash-disco for more than a decade. To nobody's surprise, they cook up a perfect three-minute teen tantrum about country girls getting mad at high-strung indie boys, topping the charts faster than you can say, "This is exhausting." It's a stadium-chant breakup song that may have less to do with the actual guy it's about than with the massive raging-cowgirl audience Swift has led to the pinnacle of the music world.

Hold On
In a year when most divas couldn't get beyond post-Gaga spectacle, along came Brittany Howard, a twentysomething from Athens, Alabama, who reincarnated the ghost of Sixties rock and soul without resorting to oversinging histrionics or bald imitation. "Bless my heart, bless my soul/Didn't think I'd make it to 22 years old," she sings in a husky moaning-in-the-moonlight drawl, riding a groove steeped in the stew of Muscle Shoals and Stax-Volt. Heath Fogg's guitar line rolls forward, deceptively lazy, all dusty funk and twang, and Zac Cockrelland Steve Johnson lock down the rhythm like Duck Dunn and Al Jackson Jr. And then, in their own old-school version of a bass drop, the band ramps up on the chorus and Howard yells, "You gotta . . . wait!" just as they all stop thebeat and soar for a breathless moment, like skateboarders hanging in midair, before crashing back to the rhythm. If there are ghosts in this music, they're personal ones, but Howard wrestles 'em down, making this a battle cry against failure – for herself and anyone else struggling against steep odds. In 2012, that was a lot of us.