Top 100 Songs Of 2008 — Full

He started typing.

He smiled. Outside, a neighbor set off a firework. 2009 was seven minutes away. He put his headphones back on, queued up #100, and hit play.

Finally, he reached #1. He already knew what it was. He'd known since he started. top 100 songs of 2008

#99: "Viva la Vida" by Coldplay. He’d listened to this on the bus ride to his last final exam, feeling like a medieval king about to conquer his destiny. Now he was a peasant sweeping up the castle.

Alex put his headphones on. Song #100 was "Closer" by Ne-Yo. He remembered dancing to this at a frat party, trying to impress a girl named Maria. He’d spilled a entire beer on her shoe. He winced, deleted the sentence he’d just typed, and moved on. He started typing

He scrolled higher. The middle of the chart was a warzone. #72: "Low" by Flo Rida (feat. T-Pain). He’d heard that song at every single stoplight, every house party, every sad trip to the grocery store. The "Apple Bottom jeans" had become the universal background noise of his senior year. He wrote: This song isn't music. It's a cultural event horizon.

"Just scroll through the list and call it a mess," his editor, Jen, had said over a crackling Skype call. "Say it was the year the wheels fell off." 2009 was seven minutes away

He stared at the screen. For all his cynicism, he couldn't write the dismissive, ironic takedown Jen wanted. He couldn't call 2008 a mess. It was a mess. The housing market had cratered. He owed forty thousand dollars. The last Bush administration was limping to a finish. But on the dance floor, for three minutes and fifty seconds, nobody cared.