The best of 2014: movies, TV, music, and books

All but the most arrogant among us understand that our lives are shaped by forces far outside of our control: your government, the global economy, socio-economic hierarchies, wars, technology, evolution, and the broader panoply of Things That Matter But No One Is In Charge Of.

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks is a novel about those things. But it doesn’t feel like one. Told from the perspective of five different people over the course of about 60 years, the novel is intensely personal. Mitchell ties them together by way of a time-spanning magical war — which is, by my lights, the novel’s cleverest thematic and literary asset.

One of the most ambitious videos of 2014 was this one, released in October to promote the group’s new album:

The video, which is filmed as a single long take, starts out with the band in a warehouse dancing around on what look like electric unicycles. Then they scoot outside, and the drone-mounted camera zooms upwards. The viewer is treated to increasingly spectacular choreography involving dozens, then hundreds of women with colorful umbrellas.

Charli XCX has the hair of Lorde, the voice of a young Britney Spears, and the backing beats of an early 2000s London electronica club. But what you might not know is that you can probably hum one of her songs right now, because she powered two of the biggest songs of the past couple of years — even though the songs weren’t actually hers.

Charli XCX stamped her name on what is probably the biggest song of 2014: Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.” In fact, she’s the one who sings the title of the song. (She’s so fancy. You already know.) And she was the “I don’t care! I love it!” behind Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” a big hit last year. So should you be paying attention to Charli XCX? If you care about pop music and where it’s going, definitely. Her new album Sucker came out December 15, and its one of the best albums produced this year.

An incredible album transports you, song-by-song, through a journey that is musically and lyrically diverse enough to maintain your interest all the way through. A great album has two or three skippable songs. A good album has mostly great songs but several duds.

But the most confusing albums are the ones that are truly bad, but have one or maybe two incredible pieces of music on them. They’re usually from bands you expect more from, all-time favorites who just didn’t have the right stuff this time out. These aren’t one-hit-wonders. These are songs that are magical little gems buried in the midst of the bland, the boring, or even the downright bad.

Cherilyn Sarkisian is a popular human entertainer, a phantasm of light and feathers we mere mortals know as Cher. She’s famous for her wondrous acting performances in movies like Moonstruck and the timbre in her voice that produced songs like “Dark Lady.” But there’s another side to Cher that’s eclipsed by the showgirl’s shadow — that side lives on Twitter.

On Twitter, Cher is a digital oracle: she’s predicting downfalls of nations one minute, calling attention to pressing animal rights matters the next, and alerting her followers to financial news in her next 140 characters. And she dispenses these bursts of passion in digital hieroglyphics — her tweets are part emoji and part Drudge report, all mixed with flashes of caustic mortality. Honestly, hers is one of the best Twitter feeds out there, a daily reaction to the news, filtered through the perspective of your aunt who just got a smartphone.

These are the songs I would pick as the best tracks of 2014 if I had an ounce of courage.

They all say something fascinating about the state of music in 2014. They are masterpieces of production, vocal ability, and lyricism. They are also not typical choices for the best track of 2014 — they are in the wrong genre, or not unanimously loved, or even almost unanimously disliked.

Two years ago, comic book creator Kelly Sue DeConnick said something that burned itself into my brain.

“I am willing to make other people uncomfortable, so my daughter won’t have to,” she said.

For a comic book nerd, Wednesday is the best day of the week. New issues are released on Wednesdays, allowing a reader to pick up where they left off, start new adventures, or gain the closure of a story that’s come to its end.

In 2014, there have been some sterling stories that I adored.