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Year In ReView: 16 of our most favorite Boston songs of 2016

Choosing our favorite 16 Boston songs of the year is like choosing your favorite child -- if you were the Duggars or some other family with a few hundred kids. While mainstream pop continued to die a slow painful death, it was another bang-up year of music coming out of the isolated Boston music scene. What we have in our region are legions of musicians making music on their terms and their own way, and the result is a fantastically eclectic batch of new tunes that proved this year was one of the best around town. The selections below, listen alphabetically, aren't any sort of ultimate Best Of, though they do reflect what we've enjoyed the most, what we've hyped on these digital pages, and what we had spun on VanyaRadio. If you read this website on the regular, you should be quite familiar; if not, then dive in and hear something new and exciting.

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Michael Christmas, “Paranoid”

As mentioned earlier, Boston’s hip-hop scene blew the fuck up this year. And Michael Christmas leads a crew who seem destined to put this city further on the unlikeliest of maps come 2017. While Cousin Stizz and OG Swaggerdick delivered pure heat, it was Michael Christmas with maybe the most killer jam in spring’s “Paranoid,” rapping about watching Empire, making a couple mill, and putting strippers in his bars. Just listen to that hook, and embrace the man’s effortless flow: “Groundhog Day everyday, Bill Murray/Cuz I’m in the same fit and my face still furry/And this shit mundane and this shit get boring/So I take long breaks on these real big tours/And come back to the spot, kick my shoes off, stay up/Throw socks in the hamper, lay up, Kobe/Most calm niggas never ball, Ginobili/Thirty points make you look lazy, Duncan/If you like me, you don’t be at the function/Play this song while you roll up something.” Life is good when everyday is Christmas.

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