In a year when we inched that much closer to streaming's eternal now, the music of 2022 felt suffused with temporality — looking back to a better time, anticipating tomorrow's promise, taking stock of the present in 15-second snippets.
1. Beyoncé, "Renaissance": Pop's deepest-thinking superstar doesn't really deal in anything but Big Important Statements. Yet the textural scope and intellectual rigor — not to mention the emotion and the pure pleasure — of this loving tribute to dance music's Black and queer pioneers is still staggering to behold. Play it in the club; play it in the library; play it wherever someone may doubt that history is alive.
2. Rosalía, "Motomami": Another thoroughgoing work of pop scholarship, this one from a Spanish singer, songwriter and producer for whom cultural boundaries exert all the weight of ink on a mapmaker's paper.
