2011’s Best Overall Music: Adele - “Rolling in the Deep”

Spending easily over half of the year with the #1 album in the world was the London chanteuse whose 21 turns heartbreak into harmonious bliss. Most expressive of this notion? “Rolling in the Deep,” Adele’s desperate cry to anyone who is willing to listen for her emotional retribution for a shattered soul. The original version of the song is everything we used to love about music, brash pianos, brutal kick drums and thin, insistent guitars with Adele’s vocals turned up to 11, shouts of delirious passion cascading off of a waterfall of misery into a pool of tears. When leading re-mixer Jamie XX touched the track, he found its pop core at the hand clap break, opening the overwhelmingly inviting notions of the track to indie trending dance floors worldwide. John Legend’s version? Perfunctory, a period at the end of a most dominant sentence.