1. Mos Def, “Quiet Dog”
- From the 2009 album The Ecstatic (Lala link).
- Official website.

Mos Def’s latest album, The Ecstatic – with a cover featuring a cropped still from Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, one of the greatest American movies of the last four decades – has been described as his best since Black on Both Sides. (See my short blurb on his recent “Black on Both Sides in its entirety” tour.) One might say that isn’t saying much; the previous two albums were merely decent, and didn’t quite live up to the promise of his debut album (and certainly not if you count Black Star, his excellent collaboration with Talib Kweli).

But still: “Quiet Dog” has become my favorite Mos Def track ever, the real Empire State anthem of 2009. It’s partly because I’ve found that I tend to love the songs that sound like Mos was merely messing about: “Fear Not Of Man”, for instance, is a State of the Hip-Hop Nation manifesto delivered, one thinks, almost off the cuff. “Umi Says” features him trying to sing (just barely, actually), over an ambling jazz groove that sounds more like a noodly instrumental coda.

At the end of a decade when the hip-hop charts seemed to consolidate its shift from its funk/soul sample base to European club music — from boom-boom-bap to boomf-boomf-boomf — “Quiet Dog” was a nervy single to release, featuring a stripped-down return to (for lack of a better term) “rap-o clap-o”, and starting off with an excerpt from a Fela Kuti interview (check out David Letterman’s usual nonplussed reaction to hearing his name in the YouTube video above). Mos Def seems infatuated here with that single kids-on-a-Brooklyn-streetcorner, drum-and-handclap rhythm – “The prominent bassness / Zulu arrangement / rockin’ amazement” — simmering down only towards the end.

It has a breathless intensity that the songs mentioned above don’t quite have, as if the thick torrent of words flowing through him and the Sugarhill Gang and everyone else before him can’t be stopped and won’t be stopped, and he needs to talk himself into staying cool. Dare I say it? It’s the dank, primal, musical embodiment of his most beautiful boogie man persona, the opposite of “bright as the A.M.,” the mighty Mos Def stirring a cauldron with strange sonic brew for your favorite nightmare.

The single was released exactly a year ago today, which gives it something of an unfair handicap on my list. It means that it’s been bouncing around in my head for a year now – the music in my headphones and in the streets and in the car and on the train and at work and my favorite song of 2009.

*I was going to cite Kid Cudi’s ubiquitous 2008 single “Day ‘n Nite” as an example, but remembered that Kanye West had already utilized Daft Punk, of all bands, for 2007′s “Stronger”.

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The rest of the list:

2. The Sea and Cake, “On a Letter” (2008)
3. Pinback, “Loro” (2008)
4. Quantic and His Combo Bárbaro, “Linda Morena” (2009)
5. Passion Pit, “Folds in Your Hands” (2009)
6. Ximena Sariñana, “Vidas Paralelas” (2008)
7. Thomas Tantrum, “Work It” (2008)
8. The Zombies, “I Want Her She Wants Me” (1968)
9. Ben Kweller, “Old Hat” (2009)
10. Ida Maria, “Oh My God” (2007)
11. Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel, “How Do You Judge Me” (2003)
12. The Phenomenal Handclap Band, “15 to 20″ (2009)
13. Speech Debelle, “The Key” (2009)
14. ComaR, “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.” (2008)
15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody” (2008)

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