45. Jennifer Lopez ft. Lil’ Wayne - I’m Into You

We’re quite literally picking up where we left, because I’m Into You is a very similar song to #46’s Got 2 Luv U. Both are cute, breezy, euphoric, infatuated midtempos, with some great catchy choruses, and then some rapping we could take or leave. We can’t help but cheer up whenever we hear this song, and the same could be said for pretty much everything on J.Lo’s amazingly consistent comeback album Love?.

44. Little Jackie - 31 Flavors

Anyone who’s been following this countdown knows what we love Little Jackie for by now: great motown inspired pop with some properly funny, wellwritten, lyrics. 31 Flavors is a shining example of this, excusing/glorifying adultery with lines like ‘When I’m with one man, I kinda feel like I’m dying, so consider my infidelity self defense.’ Not the strongest defense, but it definitely makes for a very entertaining song.

43. Le Kid - America

With Girls Aloud and Mini Viva gone, and one great single after another, Le Kid quickly became our new favourite pop group in 2011. America was pretty much for Le Kid what Call The Shots was for Girls Aloud and I Wish for Mini Viva: a usually immensely fun and feisty pop act suddenly coming up with an amazing melancholic electronic midtempo. In all three cases mentioned the singles weren’t their most instant ones, but they are definitely songs that have made for many many rewarding listens, and have yet to get old.

42. Aqua - Playmate To Jesus

When you ask a random person what they think of when you mention Aqua, ‘great ballads’ probably won’t be the number 1 answer. Shame really, because, even though we too mainly turn to them when we feel like cheesy europop, some of their slow songs are definitely amongst their best material. Aquarium had Turn Back Time, the most un-Aqua single they’ve done, which never failed to make people go ‘I loved that song… It’s Aqua? No way!’, Aquarius had the stunning title track, and last year Megalomania provided us with it’s lovely lead single Playmate To Jesus. Admittedly more of a midtempo than a proper ballad, but still one of Aqua’s more serious and beautiful songs. Something about it makes us feel like christmas, and we absolutely love it for it.

41. Katy Perry ft. Kanye West - E.T.

Forgive us for our foolishness, for despite us owning and loving the Teenage Dream album, we never found this song that special, and it wasn’t until this performance that it finally clicked. Luckily just in time to still correct our mistake in this top 100. We don’t know what we were on but E.T.’s yet another great Katy Perry single. We do prefer the Kanye free album version though.

50. Bruno Mars - Marry You

Yeah, you may have to thank Glee for that one! We first heard Marry You when it got performed on some Glee episode, long before we even knew Bruno Mars existed, and actually even before his version had been released. We’re not the biggest fan of the ‘I’m bored, let’s do something silly.. yeah, let’s marry!’ sentiment of the song, but if we ignore that part of the lyrics, and focus on the great euphoric lovesong that remains, we absolutely love it. If we’re honest, we’ve never listened much to Bruno’s version, but we don’t really consider all Glee songs proper singles, so we were glad he ended up releasing his as one, allowing us to still represent this song on our list in some way.

49. Little Jackie - Cock Block

We’re really not thát immature, but on our first play of Little Jackie’s 2011 album Made4TV the line ‘sorry I can’t see straight, there is a cock blocking my vision’ definitely grabbed our attention. We do appreciate Jackie’s bluntness and her no-nonsense ‘if I want to say cock I say cock, and I won’t resort to crappy metaphores like ‘put the plug in the socket’’ approach, but this song wouldn’t have been here if, besides, admittingly, being quite funny, it didn’t have a great tune as well.

48. Keri Hilson ft. Nelly - Lose Control

You could say this is a fairly average R&B midtempo, and you’d probably be right. In theory this song doesn’t do anything special or new.. Yet it was one of the few late 2010 songs we stayed obsessed with right until the very end of 2011. We just love the melody, and somehow the song feels quite emotional, even though lyrically it really isn’t.

47. Take That - Love Love

When we first heard this we thought ‘oh look, it’s Kidz 2.0’. Today we still stand by that thought. But it’s one of those rare cases where the sequel actually improves on the original.

46. Sean Paul & Alexis Jordan - Got 2 Luv U

We thought this song flopped miserably, but Wikipedia just corrected us. Still, considering how incredibly catchy it is, we’re baffled how it still felt like it hardly made any impact.. we never heard it on the radio, never saw it on tv, never heard anyone mention it… in fact we could have easily entered 2012 without ever knowing this song even existed. Luckily, we pretty much followed every move Alexis made this year, and, though initially we were horrified thinking she was leaving behind her great dance pop for a generic urban sound, this somehow ended up being our favourite single of hers thusfar.

100. Melanie C - Weak

Kicking off our list in style with a weak song!
(Wow, that was unfunny.)
After many years of pretty inconsistent material, The Sea saw Melanie return to the mellow, warm sound, that made us love Northern Star so much. It’s third single Weak failed miserably in living up to it’s title, by being actually rather lovely.

99. Florrie - Begging Me

With Girls Aloud and Mini Viva gone and Annie not being very active either, Florrie’s presence in 2011 was very much appreciated. Her Experiments EP slightly missed the fun of the aforementioned acts, and Begging Me probably lived up the least to it’s EP’s title by being very much Xenomania by numbers, but nonetheless it did a very pleasant job of providing us with our yearly Xenomania fix.

98. Kelly Clarkson - Mr. Know It All

We like Kelly, her new album is probably her most consistent one yet, but Mr. Know It All wins the title of ‘least exciting Kelly Clarkson lead single’ for us. Frankly, if it weren’t for Kelly it wouldn’t have made the list. Still, we did end up playing it a lot, it grew quite a bit on us, and we do like it. It’s just no Stronger (which you won’t be seeing on this list because we consider it a 2012 single!).

97. Nicole Scherzinger ft. 50 Cent - Right There

After whatever mess the last few years were supposed to be, this year Nicole finally properly kicked off her solo carreer (oh, and killed it again) with a surprisingly decent collection of songs. This was one of them. And yeah, that’s pretty much all we have to say about it.

96. September - Me & My Microphone

We were OBSESSED with this song in early 2011. It actually was pretty much the only song from September’s Love CPR album we played. Back in April we made ourselves a top 20 of favourite singles thusfar and it was on it.. so what happened?
Well, 95 better songs happened probably, plus the inevitable aging, overplaying, excitement fading.. It’s no Satellites, that’s for sure. But still quite a nice slice of Swedish dance pop.

95. Take That - Kidz

Greatest Hits albums aside, Progress was the first Take That album we purchased. No regrets there (well, besides not waiting for the rerelease). Are we right in thinking at the time this was their least cheesy, sweet single to date? Either way, for a Take That song it sounded surprisingly cool. One of our favourite songs on the album, although there’s another uptempo that might just beat it…

94. Little Jackie - Take Back The World

2011 saw the triumphant return of an act that pretty much defined our summer of 2008. And we were thrilled to see she hadn’t changed a bit. With sassy lyrics and catchy motown tunes Made4TV provided us with a whole lot of new favourite songs. Take Back The World isn’t even the best of them, but quite a treat nonetheless.

93. Nicole Scherzinger - Don’t Hold Your Breath

And there she is again, (Doll)dominating the bottom of our list. Don’t Hold Your Breath was a surprisingly poppy song for an American artist, but suffered slightly from a ‘we heard the remix first, and after that the original couldn’t quite live up to it’ syndrome.

92. Pitbull ft. Ne-Yo, Afrojack & Nayer - Give You Everything

Probably number 1 on our list of songs we liked way more than we should. We don’t really like Pitbull, or any of the zillion artists involved, the song is generic as hell.. but damn, it’s catchy! This is quite the opposite of Kelly’s entry: if it had been recorded by any other artist, it might have very well ended up a good thirty spots higher.

91. Demi Lovato - Skyscraper

This wasn’t an exceptional year for ballads, and there’s not a whole lot of them on this list (we count about 8 of them), but who would have thought one of the year’s finest would be coming from a Disney girl? We’d be known to like a Miley, Hilary or Selena song or two, but Demi never quite clicked, and the other’s songs never were much more than ‘good fun’. So getting the raw emotional vulnerable mess that Demi is on Skyscraper was a very pleasant surprise. Still, she wasn’t our favourite Disney lady of 2011..