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Its Romain Gavras-directed video though added another layer to the seemingly innocuous tune. Though tracks like ‘Born Free’ had seen MIA being outwardly political, ‘Bad Girls’ was all about having fun and looking like a boss while doing it. She was going to flip off millions at Madonna’s half-time Super Bowl show she was going to collaborate with WikiLeaks’ highly controversial Julian Assange and she was going to swagger her way through a pan-global hip-pop track about driving cars really, really fast. Here was an artist who wasn’t going to play by the rules. ‘Bad Girls’ was MIA at her fierce, furious best as we launched into a new decade. If “ Live fast / Die young / Bad girls do it well” wasn’t one of the finest bars of the decade, it was bettered only by the line that followed : “My chain hits my chest when I’m banging on the dashboard”. On ‘Swimming Pools (Drank)’, he shrugged off the peer pressure to prove he was an artist without equal. Lamar has said the song is really about growing up with the choice whether to become a casual drinker or a drunk. Here the reality was rendered in sombre, sober tones as he reminisced on family members he watched drown in the alcohol they poured themselves: “Granddaddy had the golden flask / Backstroke every day in Chicago.” In another artist’s hands, having enough liquor to fill a swimming pool could have sounded glamorous or glorifying.
#Justin bieber beauty and a beat ft nicki minaj zippy full
On first listen you might easily have mistaken this for a woozy, seductive drinking song designed to soundtrack a thousand nights out and wild parties, but if you paid full attention it soon became clear Lamar was satirising exactly that sort of vacant scene, and warning of the disastrous siren call of alcoholism. It was also a perfect example of one of the things that made Lamar the decade’s most compelling rap lyricist: his ability to simultaneously embrace and subvert musical clichés. ‘Swimming Pools (Drank)’ was the breakout hit that first brought Kendrick Lamar to mainstream attention, giving the Compton rapper his biggest US hit to date and marking his first appearance on the UK charts.
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Words: Dhruva Balram, Jordan Bassett, Leonie Cooper, Rhian Daly, Alex Flood, El Hunt, Charlotte Krol, Sam Moore, Hannah Mylrea, Kevin EG Perry, Zoya Raza-Sheikh, Nick Reilly, Thomas Smith, Dan Stubbs, Andrew Trendell, Kyann-Sian Williams
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This list is chockablock with artists unafraid to stand apart, and if these songs are threaded through with an overarching, era-defining message, that’s perhaps it. We’ve come a long way, baby, and while some things haven’t changed – the planet’s still fucked, if you haven’t noticed – the biggest trend of the 2010s was doing things off your own back, giving yourself permission to be brilliant. And the most recent? This year’s ‘Bad Guy’ from Billie Eilish, an eccentric alt-pop masterwork from a talented teenager with an internet connection. It’s worth noting that the earliest track from this list of the best songs of the 2010s happens to be ‘Stylo’ by Gorillaz, a political funk banger that, released in the first month of the first year of the decade, warned about the harm that humanity is wreaking upon the environment. Some songs grow with you, and I hope you’ll find that’s the case with some of our 100 picks below. And I danced to it, drunk, a little less lost but probably equally badly dressed, at a house party with friends I made just last year. I danced, drunk and lost and badly dressed, to our Number One track as a student in my early twenties. Can you sum up a decade in one track? Can you distil 10 years into, like, four minutes? In a way, you can.