Your New Year's Eve Super Sonic Binge: The Top 214 Songs of 2014

For the people who complain rock is dead, pop is done, and there's been no good music since Nirvana or Woodstock or the death of Marvin Gaye, I present the Top 214 Songs of 2014!!!

(Because not everybody loves Spotify -- thanks Taylor Swift! -- I've embeded links to songs not on the streaming service. Click, listen and enjoy.)

1. Stay With Me, Sam Smith The song matters most. Everything else is artifice. Smith's hit reconfirms this and hits me like Tired of Being Alone, One More Try and Someone Like You. The fact that blunt-but-beautiful songwriting can still succeed in 2014 Stay With Me is up for three Grammys needs to be celebrated. If it isn't, Katy Perry will be what's left of pop.

2. Uptown Funk, Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars Tell me this doesn't equal any chart topper from James Brown's '60s, Chic's '70s or Prince's '80s ? Go on, listen again, I'll wait. See, told you so.

3. Die Pretty, Ruby Rose Fox Oh, Katy, you think that's a roar? Miss Fox howls like an animal (an animal! an animal!) over a half Motown, half Horses sweaty stomp of a song. In a city with talent for days, most nights I think she's the best thing we have: voice, lyrics, looks, style and swagger.

4. Back to the Shack, Weezer Interpreted as cheeky, Back to the Shack strikes me as an honest pledge of allegiance to rock. We belong in the rock world/There is so much left to do/If we die in obscurity, oh well/At least we raised some hell. Sometimes a rock song is just a rock song.

5 & 6. Tie Me Up and Mama Was a Teenage Rocker, Animal Talk Young bands use new wave to get dark (Interpol) or dance-y (La Roux), Animal Talk use it to rock. Like maybe only the Cars before them, the Boston four-piece see new wave (and disco) as flavors of rock. Funky, flashy, so-fun-it-makes-me-giddy Tie Me Up crashes into the freaky, climatic knockout punch of Mama Was a Teenage Rocker. The best seven minutes of the year.

7. Sheezus, Lily Allen Allen skewers the regicide the music industry forces female pop singers to engage in: Second best will never cut it for the divas/Give me that crown (expletive) I wanna be Sheezus. The perfect comeback for a songwriter whose triumphs mock celebrity culture and contain cheeky self-deprecation.

8. Take Me To Church, Hozier See Stay With Me re: the power of the song. Bonus points for worshiping at the same alter Marvin Gaye and Al Green did in '73 (read: the bedroom).

9. Break Free, Ariana Grande My jam! My justification: An obvious Max Martin production with a catchy Zedd hook, Break Free succeeds because Grande doesn't blow the song out with squeaks and squeals Mariah Carey would kill the song with affections; Britney or Katy wouldn't have the chops to elevate the song. (OK, now trash me for like pap pop.)

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Your New Year's Eve Super Sonic Binge: The Top 214 Songs of 2014