So if you’ve already had one greatest hits compilation, doing enough to make it to a second one means a choice to make. Does your second one also include things collated on the first one, including any new tracks? It doesn’t really matter, all in all it’s a pretty good problem to have. That’s where The Singles Jukebox finds itself in 2019 — ten years of critical criticism and time to take another victory lap. The line-up of our team has changed a lot, but the mission hasn’t. We have our stalwarts, but we refresh our perspectives with new blood. We’re still out there rating pop songs to two decimal places. This feature picks up where the last one left off, making it our equivalent of 1967-1970 to the previous 1962-1966, or our GHV2 to the previous one’s The Immaculate Collection.
In the lead-up to this feature we asked ourselves: What would happen if we said that any writer could go back and change their score if they wanted, or to submit a score for a song that they hadn’t written about originally? Would our victors still be victorious? Then we went and answered it. For each year, you’ll see our “Top 10” as it was in that year, plus the “Top 10” after new scores came in. We’ve also listed the most controversial and most hated songs of each year, and a collection of some of our finest entries for you to re-read. Click the banners at the bottom for each year to navigate through the feature.
There’s another few thousand songs reviewed over the last five years, and we broadened our scope and breadth of coverage further in that time. We’re proud that our site continues to treat pop from around the world on the same level as the globe-straddling superstars (and we’ll never gratuitously treat it as novelty) and we’re proud that the upper echelons of our ratings are full of women, LGBTI+ and persons of color (because their art has always been essential).
We’d like to thank our readers for being here for us. The site’s a labor of love for all of us, and we love getting some back. We hope you’ll still be with us in 2029 and beyond.
[Link to 2014] [Link to 2015] [Link to 2016] [Link to 2017] [Link to 2018] [Link to 2019 sot far]