A vinyl record is breakable: not terribly, but obviously. Pull it from between the sheaths of its cover, and the rings shine. Drop it, and it won’t shatter — but bend it, and it’ll snap. To keep a vinyl record in good condition, to make sure it will last to be a thing that can survive you, you have to be careful with it. You have to appreciate its very existence.

For years, critics and market researchers have treated the vinyl medium’s resurgence in the digital age with the same kind of tentative caution. Connoisseurs are grateful for the format’s return, for the permanence and tangibility it offers. But vinyl’s resurgence is always tinted by a looming question: Is vinyl really back, or is it just a trend?

Vinyl is selling, but it can’t save the industry

For the 11th year in a row, Nielsen Soundscan reported an increase in vinyl albums sold in the United States. Consumers bought 13 million vinyl albums in 2016, an increase of 10 percent over 2015. That’s more vinyl records sold last year than from 2008 to 2012, the heralding of the genre’s comeback, combined. Compare that data with sales of CDs (down 16.3 percent) and digital sales (down 20.1 percent), and vinyl is the only music format with stable sales; everything else is in rapid decline.

The Nielsen Soundscan numbers make clear that the only sector of the music industry that’s succeeding these days is vinyl, which makes it an easy “savior” for a music industry that hasn’t figured out how to make money off streaming as other physical formats continue to decline. Due to the streaming market, artists are making less money off listens to their music than ever before, and major (and minor, indie) labels haven’t figured out how to reliably make money without physical sales. Many of these labels are now pinning their dreams of the profits of yesteryear to these spinning plastic disks that sell at higher prices for nostalgic value.

But the vinyl obsession is still difficult to predict, making it a problematic savior figure.

Using the midyear vinyl numbers in July 2016, Michael Nelson argued for Stereogum that not only have we reached “peak vinyl” but we’d passed it. Nelson looks at the year-over-year increases in percentage sales of vinyl from 2012-’16 midyear reports to show a bell curve (14.2, 33.5, 40.4, 38.40, 11.5), and uses this to argue that the bell curve will continue downward. “If that arc continues on that trajectory (and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t), vinyl sales are gonna plateau sooner than later,” Nelson argues. “And not long after they plateau, they’re gonna crater.”

Nelson’s not alone in his fear that the vinyl obsession might be a Band-aid to the industry’s profit issues more than a solution. Doomsday rhetoric around vinyl began in 2015 when Marc Hogan wrote a piece for Stereogum titled “Have We Reached Peak Vinyl?” which argues that because the music industry has lost any semblance of an idea for how to make money off art, vinyl is a doomed product.

Both Nelson’s and Hogan’s arguments gloss over a key factor in the life of vinyl records, though.

True vinyl success might not actually be a win for the labels

Both of those Stereogum pieces write about vinyl in the context of the ever-in-danger record store, the majority of which closed fairly quickly over a very brief period of time in the early 2000s. This was a shock to the industry, and signaled a lack of interest that very quickly led to a lack of profit. Without stores to ship new music to, how could consumers find it?

Some of the concern regarding where and how the actual vinyl transaction occurs has been mitigated as major corporations like Amazon begin to offer robust vinyl selections. But all of that vinyl — the vinyl that Nelson’s and Hogan’s articles are concerned with — is newly produced and pressed. And therein lies the complicating factor in vinyl’s supposed savior status.

“What these mainstream stats never capture is the massive secondhand market and independent stores that have never gave up on vinyl,” Dominik Bartmanski, the author of Vinyl: the Analogue Record in the Digital Age, tells me. “That’s important, and these sections of the market continue to be important for vinyl’s relevance as an economic good, and above all a cultural good.”

Anecdotally, when I think about the vinyl albums I (a music person) bought in 2016, this assertion makes sense. Of the 10 vinyl albums I bought in 2016, I purchased seven of them secondhand at record stores. None of those seven albums got counted in the Nielsen consumer report, and the year-over-year change in percentage of secondhand albums bought isn’t counted at all right now.

My experience isn’t unique, either. Many people buy secondhand vinyl because labels reprint very few older albums. Sure, if you want, say, David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane (a 1973 album), you can buy it as a new edition on Amazon for about $13 — but that’s because Bowie died last year, and consumer interest in his records shot up. But what if you wanted to buy another 1973 album, like Call Me by Al Green? You can buy that on Amazon, but it’ll cost you $43.12. At the secondhand shop in my neighborhood, I found it for $17.89.

Unlike some other formats, vinyl records hold up over time, meaning their secondhand market is pretty well-stocked (not to mention those records that are handed down between generations). To find an obscure or specific album from the original vinyl era, you’ll very likely have to go to a secondhand shop, where it’s been purchased from a previous owner. Under this model, the question then becomes: Which part of the music industry is vinyl expected to save?

Let’s say I take my shiny three-year-old Lana Del Rey Born to Die vinyl to a secondhand store. When I bought it the first time at a concert, everyone made money: Lana, her label, the songwriters and engineers, the people working the booth. But on second sale, only two people make money: me and the owner of the secondhand shop. That’s how all secondhand sales work, but if vinyl’s resurgence is mainly taking place in resale markets — which I’d argue it is — it’s not going to help the industry at large at all.

Vinyl doesn’t seem to be going anywhere

Because the secondhand market is untraceable and doesn’t really make any money for the greater industry, almost all of the focus (both in vinyl-as-savior narratives and in doomsday narratives) is on how well new vinyl is selling. And while it’s selling better than CDs and digital albums, it might not be sustainable for the larger industry.

The discussions around peak vinyl and whether or not vinyl will continue to boom often circle around a deeper, greater fear: that the music industry is broken in a way that cannot be fixed. Because the industry is still largely controlled by major labels, and there is no clear way to pay artists for work that is streamed hundreds of thousands of times, only to make them a few hundred dollars, vinyl has become a false messiah for an industry that’s forgotten how to make a profit.

“The drop-off in CD sales after the industry’s 1999 peak coincided not only with Napster but an early-2000s U.S. recession; meanwhile, real wages for Americans on average have barely budged in decades,” Hogan wrote for Stereogum. “To a degree, the fate of the current vinyl boom is inextricable from what happens to the broader economy.”

To a degree, Hogan is right. During the next recession, consumers will probably buy fewer $20 vinyl records, just like they will buy less organic food, and fewer hardcover books, and less bespoke fashion. But that doesn’t mean those trends will die, or even that they won’t be able to recover. In the last US recession (in 2009), for example, book sales took a huge hit that some stores, like Borders, never recovered from. Since the economy has recovered, book sales have returned — and, as with vinyl, they’ve mainly returned to independent and secondhand stores.

One thing is clear: Vinyl is not going to fix the greater problems with pay in the music industry. But that doesn’t mean vinyl itself is dying.

“I do not think the rekindled interest in vinyl is a passing trend, or a mere retro fashion or a short-lived vintage craze,” Bartmanski tells me. “If mainstream demand continues to grow, new pressing machines can be built, and prices are likely to grow too; if it plateaus and stays at this relatively healthy level, it means it can live on, certainly in cities with vibrant music cultures.”

The resurgence in vinyl, as Bartmanski’s book argues, doesn’t just show us something about the music industry; it shows us something about ourselves. “Music is more than data, more than convenience,” Bartmanski says. “Vinyl’s an equivalent of quality slow food in music consumption.”

And that seems to make all the difference in whether people perceive vinyl as thriving or dying: satisfaction. According to Bartmanski, people buy vinyl because it sounds different (not better, just different), and because it’s an object they can hold in their hands. Consumers are attracted to vinyl because they like the big-format art covers, and they like to keep the music in their collection. Sometimes they even buy vinyl just because they like how fragile it is. Just because the format can be broken doesn’t mean it will.

Every year, the biggest stars in music get together to watch each other perform, walk a red carpet, and balance an armload of golden gramophone statuettes.

And every year, the actual presentation of Grammy awards becomes less and less important. Though the Recording Academy hands out 84 categories’ worth of awards every year, only the biggest get handed out during the show, and even those get pressed for time.

Instead, the biggest night in music is about performance, be it in a musical number, behind a podium, or on the red carpet. The 59th Annual Grammy Awards, held on Sunday night, weren’t the best performance the music industry has ever put on.

The pacing was off, there were plenty of poorly timed jokes, and there were more mistakes than moments of gold. But no matter how good the show is, the Grammys are always one of the most talked about nights in music.

So let’s take a look at the night through its most instantly iconic and most utterly uncomfortable moments. Because this is, after all, a night all about winning, we’ll be breaking the night down by handing out golden gramophones to the winners, and pitying the utter losers:

Winner: Adele

Adele cried no fewer than three times at the Grammys on Sunday.

For the second time, she took home three of the big four Grammy awards: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year. Adele also won all three of the major awards in 2012 for her 2011 album 21. And this year’s Grammys, in all aspects, revolved around Adele. The opening shot of the night was her singing “Hello,” and the final shot was of her hugging her producer Greg Kurstin.

Had she not won almost every major award of the night, though, the biggest moment of the show would have still revolved around her. Adele was supposed to sing a slower-paced, more emotional version of George Michael’s “Fastlove” in tribute to the singer, but no more than five bars into the song, she stopped the performance, saying that she had to, “get this right,” and she started the performance over again. CBS bleeped out her response to the mess-up, but she could be seen mouthing an f-bomb. It was a moment of perfectionism and displayed the humility that she would continue throughout the night.

In what will probably become the most talked-about moment of the night, Adele claimed that she could not accept the award for Album of the Year, saying that she thought the award belonged instead to Beyoncé for her stunning album Lemonade. Earlier in the night she told Beyoncé from the stage, “I want you to be my mommy.”

Adele did not actually hand over her gramophone to Beyoncé during the ceremony, but her acknowledgement that Beyoncé was yet again shut out of the big four Grammy categories, despite creating an incredible work of art, was an important, considerate, and seemingly sincere thing to do. Her intentions will almost certainly be questioned and dissected in the next few days, but Adele has never been a very good actress, and her shock and immediate deference to Beyoncé’s work certainly shows appreciation and reverence.

Winner: Beyoncé

There are very few rooms where Beyoncé isn’t a winner. Despite losing out to Adele on her major nominations for the night, Beyoncé still put on an incredible show during her performance to close out the telecast’s first hour. She started the set with a hologram interactive of her, her daughter Blue Ivy, and her mother interacting in various poses that represented fertility, femininity, and regality. She wore a halo of gold reminiscent of Pacheco’s 1621 Immaculate Conception painting of the virgin Mary, surrounded by dancers wearing halos of their own. Beyoncé was showered with flowers as she sang two of Lemonade’s slower songs: “Sandcastles” and “Love Drought.”

“Women like her cannot be contained,” Beyoncé’s voiceover said at the beginning of the performance, and she definitely could not be at this year’s Grammys: She took home Best Urban Contemporary Album and Best Music Video, and when Adele professed how much she loved Lemonade from the stage, Beyoncé’s eyes shone with tears.

Though she may have lost the big three awards to Adele, nothing about Beyoncé’s behavior could label her a loser.  

Loser: sound mixing

It’s incredibly difficult to mix the sound for an arena performance, much less for more than a dozen different performers using separate stages and backing sounds. But it’s also impossible to forget how difficult it is to engineer sound, because the Grammys never make it look easy. Every year, there is at least one technical blip in the Grammys’ three-hour-plus telecast, but it was truly astounding how many issues this year’s ceremony had.

Most notable was Adele’s f-bomb-laden pause during her in-memoriam tribute for George Michael. It would be easy to blame the stumble on Adele, especially given her rocky performance at last year’s Grammys; but, as was the case then, too, problems like this almost always happen when an artist can’t hear themselves in an earpiece due to poor mixing.

Adele’s flub was the most obvious flaw of the night, but far from the only one.

When Tori Kelly walked on stage to participate in the Bee Gees tribute, I barely even registered her messing with her earpiece, because so many people had done it before her. Alicia Keys’s alto was mixed lower than Maren Morris’s, making their voices blend together instead of sounding distinct and full. Metallica’s James Hetfield’s microphone wasn’t working at all during the first half of the group’s otherwise-passable set with Lady Gaga.

These kind of sound issues might be more acceptable at the Emmys or Oscars, but when the entire show depends on the sound, it’s pretty important to get the mixing right.

Winner/Loser: political commentary

For the first two-thirds of the Grammys, every single political reference was halfhearted at best.

Paris Jackson started off the night’s blithe political references with a reference to #NODaPL. Laverne Cox referenced a future Supreme Court case. Katy Perry wore an armband with the word “Persist” and stood in front of the preamble to the Constitution projected on a wall. The president of the Recording Academy even called on the president and Congress to “update music laws” and “support the arts.” All of these movements, no matter how well-intentioned, felt fairly empty during such an otherwise glitzy night.

Then, in one of the most riveting moments of the night, Anderson .Paak joined A Tribe Called Quest for a performance bedazzled with political statements. Standing on the center stage, the group thanked “President Agent Orange” for the Muslim ban and had backup dancers knock down a wall onstage. The group ended the performance with raised fists; “Resist. Resist. Resist,” was chanted as the set ended, concluding the show’s only outwardly political statement with real heart and guts.

Loser: Joy Villa

Joy Villa, who goes by the stage name Princess Joy Villa, made the first headlines of the night, arriving on the Grammy red carpet wearing what looked like a giant white poncho, only to strip it off in front of the paparazzi to reveal a dress sporting Donald Trump’s signature campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” in vertical sparkling letters.

A multiracial artist actress and singer, Joy Villa wasn’t nominated for anything at this year’s Grammys — her Instagram profile says she’s a “Grammy Considered Artist” — abut she still managed to snag her own piece of the spotlight with her puzzling fashion statement. That may be a win for her PR people, but it wasn’t really a win for her.

Winner: David Bowie

In his entire music career leading up to this year’s Grammys, David Bowie had only won a single regular Grammy — Best Video, Short Form in 1985 for “Jazzin’ for Blue Jean.” (He was also presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.) That means that until tonight, Bowie had never won an award for his work as an individual artist.

Before this year’s show even began, though, Bowie — who received an in-memoriam tribute treatment at last year’s Grammys — took home four posthumous awards: Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical (Blackstar), Best Rock Performance (“Blackstar”),  Best Alternative Album (Blackstar), and Best Recording Package (Blackstar). And in winning Best Rock Song during the live show, Bowie won for every category he was nominated in.

Loser: James Corden

The Grammys, possibly jealous of every other awards show, decided to bench LL Cool J this year and hand the hosting reins over to late-night personality, “Carpool Karaoke” host, and CBS mainstay James Corden.

Corden began the night by falling down a flight of stairs, and then wearing one shoe to sing a constructed rap meant to kick off the night in spectacular fashion, I guess.

Part of the reason the Grammys have never had a traditional host like other awards shows, though, is that the Grammys are already packed full of performances. The show does not need Ellen DeGeneres creating a group selfie, because it has a dozen superstars performing choreographed sets.

The addition of James Corden to the Grammys’ already-crowded night not only added a mess of gimmicky moments that were completely unnecessary (a joke about Corden’s parents swinging, for example), it took away from the already little time allotted to the actual award winners: The show played off Greg Kurstin when he tried to give speech after Adele for their Song of the Year win, and yet made plenty of time for James Corden to do an extended Carpool Karaoke gag.

That’s not necessarily Corden’s fault — CBS chose him to host for a reason, after all — but he frankly can’t out-perform most of the big names on the Grammys stage, and it was cruel to make him try.

Winner: Chance the Rapper

The two things Chance the Rapper is most well-known for are his gospel inspiration and being an independent artist — and he took every chance to hammer both of those brands home at this year’s Grammys.

The Chicago performer kicked off the night with a Best New Artist win for his mixtape Coloring Book, an R&B album laden with Gospel references, and used his moment in the spotlight to continually repeat “glory to God,” while accepting his award. And when he won Best Rap Album, he dedicated it to “the indie artists who’ve been doing this stuff for a long time.”

Where Chance truly shined, though, was in his performance toward the end of the show, when he sang “How Great” with a full choir and gospel-music superstar Kirk Franklin. Even though his mic was turned down so low you could barely hear him, he was dynamic, and he moved straight into a high-energy rendition of “Blessings,” pacing back and forth and jumping around the entire stage.

Chance’s dependence on gospel inspiration may be nearing its tipping point, but for tonight, it served as a perfect conduit for his impressive talent.

Watch: Adele turns acceptance speech into Beyoncé tribute

When the 2017 Grammy Awards are held on Sunday, February 12, only a handful of winners will be announced during the performance-filled ceremony that airs on live TV.

But the Grammys will hand out awards in literally dozens of less glamorous categories before the live broadcast begins.

Just what are these categories? What’s being rewarded? Read on.

1) Why are there so many categories?

The Grammys are a massive awards show. There are 84 total categories where someone can take home an award, and, believe it or not, there used to be more than 100. The current categories run the gamut from Song of the Year to Best Metal Performance and everything in between. There are so many categories because they must cover any song written in a given year — yes, even your cover of “Take on Me” done in the style of traditional Inuit throat singing.

Here is the full list of every Grammy category.

2) Why does it matter how many categories there are?

Awards are only as important as they are difficult to receive.

Take the Academy Awards, for example. There are only 24 categories that a person can win an Oscar in, and they vary in prestige. For male actors, for example, only two people (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor) can say they are an Academy Award winner in a given year. You only have so many chances.

The Grammys give out almost four times as many awards as the Academy Awards, and they vary only slightly in prestige. The distinction between the award for Rock Song and the award for R&B song isn’t one of quality. It’s one of genre.

At the Grammys, talent is split into so many different categories that winning an award doesn’t matter nearly as much. It would be like if the Oscars split the Best Picture category into nine genres of movie and awarded each film a gold statue.

But there are a few higher-prestige awards — four of them, to be specific.

3) What are the biggest categories?

• Record of the Year
• Album of the Year
• Song of the Year
• Best New Artist

These four awards are the big guns of the Grammys. Winning one of them means an artist gets to give a speech during the primetime broadcast and have a picture of her kissing her trophy plastered across the internet.

Winning a Grammy can increase sales for artists who receive their awards during the live show, a boost known as the “Grammy effect.” In particular, since 2001 the Album of the Year Award has historically bumped sales by at least 50 percent and sometimes by more than 900 percent, according to data gathered by NPR.

If you’re lucky enough to be awarded a Grammy during the awards’ live broadcast (an honor usually limited to the big four categories and the best albums in rock, country, R&B, and rap), your album will see a sales bump. Beck, who won Album of the Year in 2015 for Morning Phase, saw a sales bump of 945 percent after the Grammys. Taylor Swift’s 1989, which won Album of the Year in 2016, saw a sales bump of 91 percent after its win. 

But that high is short-lived even for a big four winner. Can you name the Best New Artist from 2016? (It was Meghan Trainor.) What about Rap Album? (Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.) Maybe you can’t name the last Oscar winner for Best Picture, either, but at least you immediately know what that means. (It was Spotlight, by the way.)

Winning more than one Grammy in a major category can bring a much bigger increase in sales, however. After Adele won three of the big four awards in 2012 (Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year for her album 21 and its song “Rolling in the Deep”), her post-award sales bounce was 207 percent — and she has since sold more than 10 million copies of the award-winning album. This year, something similar could happen to Beyoncé, or again to Adele; both women are nominated in multiple categories, including Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Record of the Year.

But it’s not like Adele or Beyoncé was hurting for sales before the Grammys. Paradoxically, you’re more likely to win multiple trophies in the big four if you’re already a big seller.

4) What is the difference between Song of the Year and Record of the Year?

The answer is actually much simpler than it might seem.

Song of the Year is an award for a song itself, not the performance of a song. It is awarded to the songwriters who wrote the lyrics and melody.

Record of the Year is the award for a song in its entirety, as it appears on an album. It includes the artist’s performance of the song, the song’s production values, the song’s recording engineering, and the mixing of the performance. Record of the Year is awarded to the winning song’s producers, mixers, and engineers, as well as the performing artist.

5) What is the difference between a Performance award and a Song award?

In almost every genre there are two awards — one for the year’s best song and one for the year’s best performance. For example, in 2016, Best Rock song went to the members of the Alabama Shakes for “Don’t Wanna Fight.” But Best Rock Performance went to “Circe” by Ghost. This could seem confusing, but it’s almost exactly the same as the distinction between Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

Song awards are given to songwriters. Performance awards are given to everyone involved in a song, including the performing artist. If the Grammy powers that be wanted to make the difference less confusing, they could rename Record of the Year to Performance of the Year.

All of this has to do with the way songs are written and copyrighted. In fact, there are two copyright owners to every single song. The first copyright, known as the mechanical copyright, belongs to the people who write and compose the song. (Its name stems from the invention of mechanical pianos.) The Best Song award, then, honors the songwriters behind massive pop stars. The second copyright belongs to the performer.

However, because so many artists write their own songs, it’s possible to win both Best Song and Best Performance for the same track. For example, in 1971 Paul Simon won the Grammy for both Song of the Year and Record of the Year, because he both wrote and performed the Simon & Garfunkel song “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

6) Are the categories the same every year?

No. When the Grammys debuted in 1959, they had just 28 categories. At the 53rd Grammys (in 2011), there were 109 categories. Since then, the Recording Academy has consolidated some of the categories to cut down on awards glut:

According to the Grammys website:

In early 2009, The Academy embarked on its first-ever comprehensive evaluation of the GRAMMY Awards structure and process. A great deal of research, discussion, and evaluation led to a call for change, embracing the idea that a transformation of the entire awards structure would ensure that each genre would be treated in parity to others.

Between 2011 and 2012, the Grammy committee cut 31 categories, including Best Rock Solo Vocal Performance, Best Urban/Alternative Performance, and Best Contemporary Jazz Album. You can see a breakdown of the categories here. Since then, the Grammys have added a handful of categories, to put the current total at 84.

The most important change made was the removal of the distinction between male and female soloists. Instead of Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, there’s now just Best Pop Solo Performance, which pits artists like Beyoncé and Justin Bieber against each other. The change also removed many of the R&B genre’s distinctions, including Contemporary R&B. This later led to the creation of the Urban Contemporary category in 2011.

7) How do songs get nominated in a category?

The nomination and voting process for the Grammys is complex. Members of the Recording Academy are allowed to nominate candidates in the big four categories and then in up to nine genre categories. But those votes might not actually count: The nomination votes are tabulated, but then a private committee decides on the actual nominees.

Once the nominees are chosen, all Recording Academy members get to vote for the winners of the big four awards, as well as the winners of up to 20 genre categories. The secret committee (presumably) does not intervene.

If you have more questions about how the Academy selects the award winners, you can find all the answers in Vox’s Grammy voting explainer.

Every year, the songs that become staples on the American Top 40 charts have a tone. In 2008, that tone was pure optimism, with songs like Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and Colbie Caillat’s “Bubbly.” In 2015, the songs were minor-key and kind of frantic: songs like Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” and Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.” This year, the songs are even more similar: They all sound like songs for dancing and crying, songs whose uncertainty could go on for a minute or for 40.

What’s so interesting about 2016’s pop hits, though, is that so many songs with this tone (and there are a lot of them) get there through the same exact music theory principle.

I first noticed the 2016 tone in the Chainsmokers’ “Closer,” featuring Halsey, when it played immediately after Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” on a playlist I was creating. (Like other songs mentioned in this piece, “Sorry” was technically released in 2015, but it remained at or near the top of the charts for a good chunk of this year, which makes it a 2016 hit for the purposes of this exercise.) Despite being performed, written, and produced by entirely different people, there was something in the chord structure that made the two songs sound the same.

I couldn’t figure it out, so I called Owen Pallett and asked him to listen to both. Pallett is a brilliant pop music theorist who is a frequent Arcade Fire collaborator and an art-pop auteur. “The one thing I noticed,” he told me, “is that they have ambiguous key centers.”

What’s an ambiguous key center?

Usually in popular music, it’s incredibly clear which chord is the “home base” in any song. Normally a song’s key center is the last note or first note in every four-bar loop. Even the most basic music theory training would make it very easy to recognize the key of a song on Top 40 radio on first listen.

Take the Beatles’ “She Loves You” as an example: In the chorus, when they sing “She loves you / yeah, yeah, yeah / With a love like that / you know you should be gla-ad” — the key of the song is the note that “glad” ends on, G major.

Without getting too technical: A key is defined by the note that the scale you’re using starts on, and consists of all seven notes in that scale. Of course, most songs use more than one chord, but they always return to the principal chord of the song’s key. In the case of the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” that key is G. Typically, a major key is more upbeat and positive. It sounds comfortable and expected. A minor key sounds more dissonant and potentially sad.

Normally it’s obvious which key a pop song belongs in. But in a song with an ambiguous key center, the chords are arranged in such a way that it’s difficult to tell which chord is the home base. Sometimes this is achieved by never actually playing the note the song is based on, as in Charlie Puth’s “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” featuring Selena Gomez. In this case, the song uses the chords A, B, C-sharp minor, and G-sharp minor, chords that could belong in three different keys (E, C-sharp minor, or G-sharp minor). Sonically, though, the song sounds most like it’s in E major.

Or sometimes it happens because there are only a few chords in the song but two of them sound like they could be the key center, like in DNCE’s “Cake by the Ocean,” which uses E minor and A minor back and forth over and over again.

“It sounds more intellectual than it is when you hear it,” said Ethan Hein, an adjunct professor of music and doctoral student at Montclair State and NYU, when I asked him about all this. “All it means when you hear it is that you’re just kind of floating and drifting. The songs are a little more open-ended.”

Ambiguous key centers aren’t new, they’ve just become more popular

The chords and notes used in 2016’s biggest hits aren’t unique; they’re the same exact ones we’ve been hearing since the invention of modern music around 1750. But by shifting a few notes here and there, current pop artists can keep their songs from sounding predictable and give them a more open-ended tone. Instead of landing back on the chord we expect it to, these songs lift back up into another note, making the song more buoyant, surprising, and dynamic.

Even ambiguous key centers aren’t a new thing, per se. Ambiguous key centers were very common chord structures for classic rock songs. That’s because the biggest influence on classic rock was the blues, which still had key centers, but the rules were totally different. And that, both Hine and Pallett agree, plays a big role in why we are seeing the emergence of so many ambiguous pop songs right now.

“This music, it tends to start in black culture, and then young white people and young hipsters kind of make it its own. That’s going back to jazz,” Hine said. “That’s kind of been the history of American music. And it’s definitely what’s happening here.”

Inspired by hip-hop and the rise of less formulaic popular music by R&B singers and producers, white artists have begun (intentionally or unintentionally) creating songs that mimic that music within their own genre. A great song by Solange Knowles or even a song like Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” has less predictability than a standard pop song because it draws on jazz music, which, while predictable in its own way, has an entirely different setup.

This has been happening for a little while in modern popular music. Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” (2008) denied listeners the root key to create a sense of weightlessness. And Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” (2014) was completely unclear on what its key even was.

“It’s interesting because, at least in the history of Western art song, there’s never been nearly as much of a preference toward ambiguous key centers as there is in current pop music,” Pallett told me.  

Ambiguous key centers make songs emotionally dynamic

What all of the ambiguous pop songs of 2016 are doing is using the major key and its relative minor to keep the listener guessing about whether the song is happy (major) or sad (minor).

A perfect example of this is Major Lazer’s “Cold Water” featuring Justin Bieber, which could either be in F-sharp minor or A major. Though there’s a backing EDM-inspired beat to this song, Justin Bieber’s voice sounds more somber and serious than uplifting. Take, for example, a couplet in the first verse: “So take a deep breath and let it go / You shouldn’t be drowning on your own.” It’s about the sweetness of reckless love, right? Or is it about a destructive relationship?

“This is one of those things where I firmly believe that this kind of analysis is like a biopsy,” Pallett noted. “Whoever wrote the chords and the melody, I don’t think that they were consciously, like, sitting down to create an ambiguous key center.”

He’s right. It’s totally possible all of these artists ended up at these song feelings individually and unintentionally.  

“I do feel like it’s really hard to communicate with millions of different people, and if you’re doing it successfully, it does mean that you’ve really tapped into something,” Hein told me. “And it does feel like everyone tapped into this one thing. There’s something bigger than any artist or listener here.”

In 2016, the big unifying factor of white pop was the ambiguous key structure: a sonic space that sounds buoyant and light, and isn’t quite sure if it’s happy or sad. That waffling — between happiness and sadness, between fear and joy, between major and minor — does seem incredibly apt in this year. If 2016 taught us anything, it’s that our country is deeply divided on almost every issue. For every political or emotional event that happened this year, it seems like half of America felt happy and the other felt sad. It’s pop music’s job to appeal to both of them, and by using ambiguous key centers, these artists managed to do just that.

Here’s a playlist of songs with ambiguous key centers that landed in the Top 40 this year:

If 2016 was good for anything, it was music. Yes, we lost a few truly brilliant minds in David Bowie, Prince, Sharon Jones, and Leonard Cohen. But on the whole, music thrived in 2016. Massive pop stars dropped albums overnight, albums that had eluded us for half a decade suddenly appeared, and captivating new names rose from nothing. To pick a top 15 songs in a year like this feels almost dismissive, cruel even.

So instead of picking the absolute best songs — those that stretched the boundaries of the medium or genre — we’re redefining “best” to mean songs that made this year, in its deepest and darkest moments, feel a little bit less like a raging garbage fire.

These songs together create a 1,000-foot view of this year. They are songs that made an impact, and songs that didn’t. Songs that hit No. 1, and songs that didn’t chart at all. They are songs by women, by people of color, by debut artists and seasoned veterans. But mostly, they are songs that are good and feel good.

1) “Black Beatles” by Rae Sremmurd feat. Gucci Mane

“Black Beatles,” the hit single off Atlanta hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd’s sophomore album, is an irresistible jam. It’s fitting that it became the soundtrack to so many people’s mannequin challenge videos, where frozen people struggled to keep their limbs and heads unmoving as the incredible bouncing beat just begged them to move. An ode to rock-star style and swagger, “Black Beatles” takes a party anthem and makes it into an arena-worthy masterpiece. This is a song for everyone: young bloods, old geezers, weirdo girls with green hair, dealers, and haters.

2) “Formation” by Beyoncé

Beyoncé dropped “Formation” the weekend of the Super Bowl, and then quickly stole the halftime show from Chris Martin with a team of Michael Jackson–inspired, Black Panther–derived backup dancers. With “Formation’s” hoarse whispering intro, Beyoncé Knowles Carter entered a new dimension, a realm where she’s not only a force of pop music but also a driver of political conversation. It’s a song steeped in New Orleans bounce music that shredded the already fragile genre boundaries in which critics threatened to constrain Beyoncé. With the music video’s sinking police car imagery and a rallying cry of “I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making,” Beyoncé gave the thriving Black Lives Matter movement an anthem.  

3) “Your Best American Girl” by Mitski

The best art tackles life in all its complexity, instead of paring it down to its simplest concepts. On “Your Best American Girl,” Mitski unabashedly discusses the American dream, femininity, girlhood, parental expectations, and racial dynamics, all in three uncontainable minutes. The song’s verses are gentle, lilting things that rise and rise into the roar of a chorus steeped in anger. This isn’t a female-empowerment anthem arrived at easily; it’s the product of years of reflection and frustration, simmered until it thickens into something rich and substantive.

4) “Angels” by Chance the Rapper feat. Saba

“I got my city doing front flips,” Chance the Rapper crows at the beginning of “Angels,” and nothing seems truer in 2016. Culturally speaking, this was a great year for Chicago: Not only did the Cubs win the World Series but two homegrown, mega-talented hip-hop stars joined forces to create an incredible song. With a church choir background and a steel drum, Chance the Rapper delivers a song that truly exemplifies black joy. It’s beautiful, it’s energetic, and boy is it happy.

5) “Female Vampire” by Jenny Hval

“It hurts everywhere,” Jenny Hval whispers at the very end of “Female Vampire.” It’s a single line that forces listeners to reconsider the preceding three minutes of shining synths, breaking vocals, and gradual growing dance beats. Before the end, the song has the feeling of falling into a trance — but that whispered line makes obvious just how laden with emotion “Female Vampire” is, its thumping beats less a disguise than a plea for help. It’s gorgeous in its pain.

6) “Tennessee Song” by Margo Price

Watching Margo Price perform feels like stepping into a time capsule. Wielding an acoustic guitar and sporting a teased bouffant hairstyle, she looks like something out of a different era — and she sounds like it, too. Though 2016 was not the best year in history for country music, this 33-year-old Midwesterner quietly released one of the year’s most underrated albums, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter. “Tennessee Song” is warbling and toe-tapping and just the right amount of twangy. “In this world, we won’t be long,” Price sings, but it sure seems like she’s here to stay.

7) “Soy Yo” by Bomba Estéreo

Choosing the most sonically addictive riff from 2016 would be a difficult task, but the climbing flute that backgrounds Bomba Estéreo’s “Soy Yo” is a strong contender. The song rose to prominence thanks to its viral music video, which follows a young girl with giant glasses who is so self-confident she cannot bother to care what popular girls or older basketball players think about her. But part of what makes that video such fun to watch is that “Soy Yo” has a lilting buoyancy to it that very few songs in 2016 had. It’s just, well, happy.

8) “That Old Black Magic” by Bob Dylan

It was a good year for Bob Dylan. He became the first musician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the first American to win the prize in more than a decade. But he also released an excellent — if a little weird — cover album of songs made famous by Frank Sinatra. Dylan takes a song that, in Sinatra’s voice, is beautiful, enchanting, and as mushy as love songs come, and makes it menacing. Which means “That Old Black Magic” does exactly what great covers are supposed to do: honor the original while making the song his own.

9) “Don’t Touch My Hair” by Solange Knowles

Ethereal, quiet, and steely, Solange Knowles’s “Don’t Touch My Hair” has soul. A display of activism as specific as the individual hairs that grow from a black woman’s head, “Don’t Touch My Hair” is a song built on tiny decisions that have a deep impact. The song’s quiet lyrics and plummeting vocal runs are built atop a thumping drum beat so rhythmic it feels more like a human heartbeat than a sonic effect. “Don’t Touch My Hair” is grooving, emotional, beautiful, and the first song in a long time to make a cowbell sound cool.

10) “Sister” by Angel Olsen

In eight minutes of dreamy, lush chord progressions and glimmering symphonic effects, Angel Olsen evolves away from her standards with “Sister.” The first two glittery pop songs to emerge from her album My Woman (“Intern” and “Shut Up and Kiss Me”) are quick-paced soft-bangers perfect for a party playlist. Listening to “Sister,” though, is like listening to an artist find a space just for herself. “She came together like a dream / that I didn’t know I had,” Olsen sings — a line that describes this song as much as anything else.

11) ”Adore” by Savages

Starting from a simple walking bass line, “Adore” is darker than most of the songs on this list — but it’s also incredibly rich. “Is it human to adore life?” Jehnny Beth sings over a steely guitar line, and that’s just the beginning. As the song progresses, the guitars become more discordant, the bass line gets faster, and Beth’s voice grows angstier and angstier until she’s screaming a “truth that cuts like a knife.”

12) “Nostrum” by Meshuggah

Swedish metal band Meshuggah’s “Nostrum,” the second single from this year’s The Violent Sleep of Reason, is as chaotic as this year felt. This is a heavy, hammering monster of a song, laden with snare drums and rapid, cascading guitar riffs that evoke the feeling of tumbling down a too-tall flight of stairs. There’s some gorgeous drum work behind all that noise, and a few frenzied guitar parts that create really enjoyable rhythmic interplay. But really, the appeal of this song lies in screaming and thrashing along — which was sometimes exactly what this year needed.

13) “Needed Me” by Rihanna

The biggest hit from Rihanna’s 2016 release Anti was far and away the No. 1 single “Work,” featuring Drake. But deeper in the album, in a place less warm and inviting, is the stunning track “Needed Me.” Here, Rihanna is icy, almost unfeeling. With its strung-out vocals and twisting, climbing chord progressions, “Needed Me” is Rihanna at her absolute best.

14) “Ultralight Beam” by Kanye West feat. The-Dream, Kelly Price, Kirk Franklin, and Chance the Rapper

Part gospel and part hip-hop, “Ultralight Beam” is Kanye West at his gentlest, a song with such emotional weight it propels the rest of The Life of Pablo forward. West is a divisive character in any room, and the biggest hit on his 2016 album, “Famous,” became that less because of its quality than the reality TV–worthy drama it inspired. By contrast, “Ultralight Beam” is not dramatic, but rather a soft, prayerful rumination on the world and the spiritual realm. It’s an unhurried reminder that hip-hop can be beautiful, careful, and insistent even when it’s slowed down.

15) “Gold” by Kiiara

Kiiara’s “Gold” is a hit made by the people. After uploading it to SoundCloud last summer, the more or less unknown 21-year-old Illinoisan struck gold: In 2016, her song was streamed on Spotify more than 238 million times. That success soon bled into more traditional music outlets: “Gold” started getting radio play, peaking at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. Listening to “Gold,” it’s easy to see what made the out-of-nowhere track so enticing: With her sliced-and-diced vocals and a choppy electronic beat, Kiiara created something that’s just unstable enough to be addictive.

Christmas caters to small children. The endless mythology around Santa and the endless fights over popular toys all center on bringing Christmas cheer to another generation of tiny humans who have yet to realize that everything is a lie.

One of the most popular lies to tell children in recent years has been the myth of the Elf on the Shelf. Here’s everything you need to know.

It began with a children's book

The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition is a children’s book, written by Carol Aebersold and her daughter Chanda Bell. Self-published in 2005, the rhyming book tells the story of a group of Santa’s elves who hide out in houses around the country to watch children and decide if they are naughty or nice. The book quickly became an extension of the Santa Claus Christmas fable. In 2008, it also won the Book of the Year prize from Creative Child Awards.

In 2008, the rise of the elf began. The Elf on the Shelf joined Facebook, and Aebersold and Bell, the authors, went on a book tour. The elf character began picking up momentum, and by 2012, he was a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The Elf on the Shelf has been a best-seller every year since 2013.

The book says that at night, the elf flies back to the North Pole to tell Santa how children are behaving, before returning to their homes to hide. Thus, the elf plays a game of hide-and-seek with children, who look for their elf in a different spot in their house each day.

The book only sets up one rule that children must follow so that the elf can do its job: “Please do not touch me. My magic might go, and Santa won’t hear all I’ve seen or I know.”

After Christmas is over, the elf flies back to the North Pole, presumably to spend time with Santa until Thanksgiving the next year. Nobody ever seems to talk about why the most efficient delivery system for this Santa surveillance racket is sold in major department stores, or why the elves just started showing up in 2005, but there you go.

The elf in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (Brad Barket/Getty)

With the book comes a toy — and encouragement of parental deceit

When parents purchase the book for their children, it comes with a small plush elf that they are invited to use to reenact the events of the book. It’s an opportunity for parents to put their lying skills to the test, to see if they can convince their kids this elf is real, lives in their home, and communicates with Santa. In 2007, Jennifer Garner was photographed carrying an Elf on the Shelf box; shortly after, the Today show aired a segment about the toy and sales began to skyrocket.

You can buy the elf with “brown skin tone” or “light skin tone” and as a boy or a girl.

You can "personalize" your elf

You can name your elf whatever you want. As the book explains, being named is what allows elves to become powered by Christmas magic and fly back and forth to the North Pole. The book encourages families to create a tiny birth certificate for the elf with its name and the date of its “adoption.”

Having trouble thinking of a name? Want to teach your children about peer pressure, social media, and conformity? These are some popular names for elves, according to Pinterest:

A list of suggested elf names. (Pinterest)

The toy can breed competition (and potentially feelings of inadequacy)

Because the elf is supposed to be “alive” and watching children to see if they’re naughty or nice, this toy basically requires parents to move it to a new location every night. There are entire Pinterest boards of ideas for how to creatively place your elf in your house to delight your children (and make your Instagram followers envious).

The elf in the silverware drawer. (Pinterest)

The elf makes a grocery list. (Pinterest)

This can cause added holiday stress for a parent with young children. And on top of the actual work of remembering to move the elf around, there can be pressure in certain social circles to make your elf do the most interesting, creative, and performative things, so that you can shame and humiliate the elves of your children’s friends.

The pressure has even led some parents to adopt drastic measures like saddling their elf with a serious case of the flu or a broken leg just to get some relief from the nightly elfin repositioning — not exactly the stuff warm holiday memories are made of.

“Is it any wonder that this kind of holiday madness, which dovetails with every strain of guilt mothers feel over their domestic imperfections, coupled with the catch-22 that if you do your job right, your children will never thank you for it (because all these goodies come from the Elf!), sometimes leads to a backlash?” Kate Tuttle wrote for the Atlantic in 2012.

The parenting benefits are iffy

As a parenting tool, the Elf on the Shelf is similarly controversial. The story makes clear that Santa is busy at the North Pole and unable to watch every child in the whole world, so the elf has been sent to do his dirty work for him. The elf serves as a tangible reminder that children are supposed to be “nice,” not “naughty,” and some parents use the elf as a way to discipline their children by reminding them that the “elf is always watching.”

Yet this tactic comes with its own set of issues. As Petula Dvorak wrote for the Washington Post in 2012:

It’s a Faustian deal. First, you get this amazing disciplinary tool. My little heathens instantly turned into angels the moment I said, “The Elf is watching.” Not like the abstract “Santa is watching.”This was a real, actual thing, staring down at them with dead eyes, perched on the curtain rod, then the bookshelf, then swinging from the chandelier. I was beginning to fear withdrawal come January.

Theoretically, teaching your children to be “nice” in order to satisfy an imaginary elf may not help them determine right from wrong but rather teach them to perform based on the promise of rewards. (One supposes parents could just keep the elf game going year-round, but that sounds exhausting and seems like it has the potential to backfire once your children realize their moral center was founded upon a toy.)

The elf is a symbol of the surveillance state disguised as a children's toy

“I watch and report on all that you do!” the elf warns in The Elf on the Shelf, adding that “the word will get out if you broke a rule.” This sounds pretty familiar!

“Having been molded by this age of NSA overreach, [Edward] Snowden, Wikileaks and Anonymous, what bothers me most is that inviting Elf on the Shelf into the home unnecessarily extends surveillance culture into a place that should be free of it,” Alex Steed wrote in a column for the Bangor Daily News in 2014. “Santa Claus is a myth that at best represents generosity at its finest. But with the elf, we choose to emphasize his surveillance. That is really weird.”

Some find the very rules of the elf “game” disturbing. As digital technology professor Laura Pinto and co-author Selena Nemorin wrote in a paper published by the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives:

[T]he hands-off “play” demanded by the elf is limited to finding (but not touching!) The Elf on the Shelf every morning, and acquiescing to surveillance during waking hours under the elf’s watchful eye. The Elf on the Shelf controls all parameters of play, who can do and touch what, and ultimately attempts to dictate the child’s behavior outside of time used for play.

The toy, they write, “blurs the line between play time and real life” by dint of the elf’s never-ending surveillance (at least during the Christmas season).

As Colleen Leahy writes for Fortune, “The Elf on the Shelf embodies, He sees you when you’re sleeping/He knows when you’re awake — lines disturbing to the cynical adult or Santa-fearing child.” And even more than the Christmas song, the toy raises a thorny issue: What does it teach children when you allow them to believe they are being watched at all times and that this is ultimately for their benefit? At least to Pinto and Nemorin, it means we’re setting them up for “dangerous, uncritical acceptance of power structures.”

Plus, the elf brings up questions about security within private homes that can even scare some children. “Why inject a note of fear and suspicion into a season and a holiday that are meant to be about love, togetherness, and forgiveness?” Tuttle wrote.

This year has been hard enough. Now more than ever, we need the freedom to enjoy the holidays without the specter of big-government surveillance in our homes — no matter how whimsically packaged.

Tanya Pai contributed to this story.

Watch: How pop culture turned into popular belief