Rober Awards

We begin our end of the year review a little bit early, but considering how it has unfolded no one could blame us for wanting it to finish asap, hopefully moving from the year of the pandemia onto the year of the vaccine. A time marked by the social distance needed to keep the bug at bay has meant an almost total lockdown of presential cultural activities, tours cancelled, clubs and bars shut down, all on top of the pain and anxiety this situation has inflicted upon us. Good news is that, perhaps due to the confinements, many of us had more time to explore what music had on offer and this has been a surprisingly good year for it in which streaming and online activities came to the rescue, offering some relief amongst the harsh circumstances.

And although the growing concerns of recent years about the creative decadence in most traditional genres such as rock, electronica, hip-hop and even urban, whose denomination had to be sacrificed due to political correctness and changed to progressive R&B, music has proven resilient and looks to be in a state of, how Dua Lipa would put it, future nostalgia, where everything is revisited and repurposed to be enjoyed by new audiences.

Not the best year for innovation then, but the popular music landscape in 2020 showed both a perfect way for escapism and a voice for cultural and social concerns. On the escapist front, pop stars from Asia and, above all, Latin America -beating records in streaming platform and making of Puerto Rico a new cradle for music talent to rival London, Brooklyn, Tokyo or Seoul- kept on stealing the traditional anglo-saxon predominance. On the socially conscious one, the aboundance of new forms of protest song fighting the big political battles of our time, either police brutality, racism, totalitarism, white supremacism, female and LGBTI inequalities… as well as some rather brilliant works recorded during or dealing with this confinement have brought renewed energy and relevance to the much maligned and uber commercialized state of pop.

In terms of what is new and groundbreaking, Jazz seems to be again the sound that is experienced the biggest expansion. It´s influence being felt everywhere, not just in R&B and hip-hop records, but in a new generation of brilliant musicians becoming popular. Afro-pop got the honourable silver medal, after Beyoncé´s latest videoalbum extravaganza introduced some of the biggest pop stars of the black continent to the world, many of them suitably having their go at international recognition. In other order of things, a few -perhaps fewer that it should have been- of our favourite artists proved their good shape, with a few new others knocking at greatness’ door. All of which has created an incredibly diverse year for music which we will further discuss about when we publish out Top 50 albums.

Now it’s time to look back at the 100 songs that we enjoyed the most and, following the tradition, we begin with the symbolic number 101; usually reserved for one of the year’s guilty pleasures representing the state of mainstream music. This year is by Latin female star KAROL G and her international breakout hit ‘Tusa,’ which features Nicki Minaj, who has lended her rhyming talents to some of the year’s biggest hits, happily ending the streak of bad luck her career endured in 2019.