This was an odd year for music. As Vanyaland senior writer Daniel Brockman details in his annual Year In Pop roundup, the two-way highway of comings and goings produced a wealth of in-crisis pop, solemn rock, and schizophrenic hip-hop alongside a cruel abundance of iconic deaths and life-lessons from rock's dinosaur guard. And as this Vanyaland contributor list proves, it was another wildly eclectic and eccentric year of sound, proving that genre restriction is truly dead for those who still actually care. For our Top 25 Songs of 2016, we pitched and polled our writing staff about their favorite tracks of the year, then condensed each list for a composite ranking. Below are the results, with the song's nominator doing the honors of telling us why the song cracked the list in the first place. It may not be perfect, but it's ours, and it's worth more than just taking a Chance on.
