Top 5 songs of the week

With pop culture at its finest, The Oracle takes a look at Billboard’s Top 5 songs of the week. 

5. Some Nights by fun

Though lowest on this list, fun’s second studio album, is likely the most meaningful on Billboard’s list. 

While the angst-ridden video’s attempts to incur dark images of war, elicit more memories of school field trips to Civil War reenactments than strife, the lyrics carry the song. 

The lyrics are softly poetic in some places “Some nights I wish that my lips could build a castle/Some nights, I wish they’d just fall off,” and juxtaposes harsh shouting in others  “Who the f--- wants to die alone all dried up in the desert sun?”

If an award existed for “Most Tasteful Use of Autotune,” this song could quite likely win it, with the controversial
singing aid used not to mask the lack of talent, but rather enhance the quality of sound. 


4.   One More Night by Maroon 5

Maroon 5 should have stopped making music in the early 2000s — probably around the same time most college students, then likely elementary school kids, stopped saying the irritating phrase constantly repeated through the song “Cross my heart, hope to die...” 

The only part missing is “Stick a needle in your eye.”  The song also represents a relationship reminiscent of the maturity levels of elementary school children with lyrics like “You and I go hard/At each other like we going to war. You and I go rough. We keep throwing things and slamming doors. You and I get so damn dysfunctional. We stuck.”

Lead singer Adam Levine appears to have pulled a Benjamin Button-esque like stunt in maturity levels, leaving his 2002 old-man demeanor in “She Will Be Loved” and days of singing about girls with “broken smiles” for singing about how he “stopped using (his) head” and now he’s “feeling stupid.” 

3. Lights by Ellie Goulding

While this song might have been interestingly catchy the first hundred times it played on pop radio stations, the meaning of the song fails to be apparent. 

Aside from the constant refrain of “lights, lights, lights, lights” and “home, home” the lyrics make little to no sense.  

As the British singer accuses an unnamed “you” of showing “the lights that stop me turn to stone” when she’s “alone,” she also sings of her brother and sister sleeping in an “unlocked place” where she feels “safe.” 

This song rings with stranger-danger, but is catchy in an obnoxious sense. 

2. Whistle by Flo Rida

After his blatant rip off Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” in 2009, Flo Rida should have been banished to singing about girls with “Apple bottom jeans and boots with the furrrr.” 

But instead he has gifted the world with another profound creation. 

One with uncomfortably overt sexual undertones that is unfortunately catchy — unfortunate in the unavoidable awkward situations it brings about. Long, silent car rides with “just-a-friend’s, accidental outbursts of singing wildly inappropriate and likely out-of-context lyrics that could get you fired from a job and an endless list of possibilities.

1. We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together by Taylor Swift

Discretion isn’t quite Taylor Swift’s thing. 

After outpours of hopeless songs directed at her love affairs gone awry with Hollywood’s squeaky clean
sweethearts and bad boys from Jake Gyllenhaal to John Mayer, Swift has never been one to mince her words. “Dear John” quoted Mayer’s “dark, twisted games,” “Back to December” reminisced on the relationship she once ended in no other month than December and the list of obviousness continues. 

But just in case Swift’s mystery man in her latest album didn’t get the message already, he shouldn’t bank on rekindling any fires soon.

“We are never, ever, ever, ever getting back together,” she croons. “Like, ever.” 

The song is unfortunately atypical from her usual style, and listening to it is best described by the lyrics in it:  “I’m like ... I just ... I mean this is exhausting, you know, like.”