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Considering that Christmas music takes over the airwaves, streaming services and charts for much of December, it’s only fitting that Christmas music has expanded over the years to include a whole lot more than just carols and church hymns. Even beyond the expansion of Christmas music into the pop culture realm, holiday music sometimes takes us beyond ice sheets and into the bed sheets. Yes, we’re talking about XXXmas – and that includes dirty holiday tunes that needn’t come just once a year.
When you think about inappropriate Christmas songs, your mind probably wanders to those bluesy Christmas jams about Santa wantin’ some satisfaction. Or maybe you think of parody tracks from LGBTQ artists who do their damndest to make the yuletide gay. Of course, there is also a myriad of hip-hop and rock songs that gleefully inject sex n’ swears into seasonal fare. And sure, we have all those on our list, but we also have a lot more… okay, we have a little bit more (including one erudite takedown of crass Christmas commercialization) but don’t get greedy. More than 10 songs would put us on Santa’s naughty list.
If you want the biggest Christmas songs, check out our Greatest of All Time Holiday 100 Songs list. If you want the best of the season, from classics to deep cuts, dive into our staff list of the 100 Best Christmas Songs of all Time. But if you want some seasonal songs that aren’t exactly appropriate for your family’s fireside, check out 10 XXXmas tracks below.
Taylor Swift has been dating Joe Alwyn since 2016, and while they’ve been together for six years, the couple has remained private about everything surrounding their relationship.
While the couple’s relationship is strictly off-limits when it comes to the press, Swift and Alwyn have briefly mentioned each other in interviews throughout the years, showing the respect and love they still have for each other after all this time.
They’ve even written songs together. Alwyn contributed to both 2020’s Folklore and its sister album Evermore under his literary-leaning pen name — co-writing the Bon Iver duet “Exile” and producing six other songs on the former, as well as penning “Champagne Problems,” The National-assisted “Coney Island” and second Justin Vernon collab “Evermore” on the latter.
In fact, thanks to his songwriting credit on Folklore, the actor even took home his own Grammy after Swift’s surprise pandemic studio set won album of the year at the 2021 Grammy Awards. These days, Alwyn is focused on his primary occupation onscreen while Swift remains in the process of re-recording her back catalog of albums.
In honor of Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn’s super-private, but super-loving relationship, we’ve compiled all the times the longtime couple has talked about each other in the press, documentaries and beyond — from Swift admitting to fans that “Gorgeous” is about her boyfriend and confirming that he is, in fact, Folklore co-writer William Bowery to Alwyn sharing how he feels about love songs dedicated to him.
See our full list, in chronological order, below.
NBC’s The Voice just wrapped its 22nd season, which saw Camila Cabello joining the panel as a coach for her first season. In the upcoming season, Niall Horan and Chance the Rapper are set to sit in the spinning red chairs for the first time.
Over the reality singing competition’s history, Blake Shelton remains the statistically best coach in terms of winning seasons — having crowned a champ from his team in nine of the show’s 22 seasons.
When The Voice premiered as NBC’s answer to FOX’s juggernaut American Idol, the inaugural cast of coaches consisted of Christina Aguilera, Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine, Shelton, and CeeLo Green. (Shelton is the only coach to have stayed on the rotating panel since the beginning of the hit show.)
Apart from Shelton’s supreme reign as king of The Voice, a plethora of star-studded musicians have appeared as coaches to try their hand at the crown including Ariana Grande, Shakira, Pharrell, Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keys, Miley Cyrus, Usher, Jennifer Hudson, Kelly Clarkson, John Legend and Nick Jonas.
Below is a complete list of which coach won at the end of each season.
The days are shorter, the nights are colder and the trees are bare. Inside, fireplaces are crackling to shield loved ones from the chilly air. When winter makes its way back around, sunny days can sometimes feel like distant, made-up memories.
While the gloom can lead to long hours inside as you avoid muddy snow and frostbitten fingers, those languid evenings can transform into quite the cozy affair, given the right soundtrack. That’s why Billboard has put together a list of 26 essential tracks for your wintertime listening pleasure.
We know December marks the beginning of celebrations for “the most wonderful time of the year.” But a good winter playlist goes beyond Christmas trees and jingling bells. The mix should be one you’d listen to all season long — weeks and months after unwrapping your final gift. So no, you won’t find Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” nor any of your holiday favorites below (for that, you can check out Billboard’s Greatest of All Time Holiday 100 list based on our charts).
Keep reading to discover tunes consistent with the mood shift that — for many of us — rolls in with the cold front. The increased time spent with our own thoughts brings on a brooding self-reflection that can feel as comforting as it can feel overwhelming. Artists from Taylor Swift to Bob Dylan to The Weeknd have captured that feeling, crafting riveting wintery melodies ideal for introspection, whether you’re curled up with your favorite blanket or venturing out into the snow.
Few artists have earned the chart hits, fan support and critical acclaim that Taylor Swift enjoys. Emerging as a country singer-songwriter on her 2006 self-titled debut before branching out into the worlds of pop music, indie folk and beyond, Swift has notched eight No. 1s on the Billboard Hot 100, inspired a dedicated legion of Swifties and won the Grammy for album of the year three times — for Fearless, 1989 and Folklore; She is just the fourth person, and the first woman, to win that prestigious Grammy three times.
In 2019, Swift was honored as Billboard‘s first ever Woman of the Decade at our 2019 Women In Music event, not just for her commercial success, but for her commitment to protecting creative rights, music education, literacy programs, cancer research, disaster relief and the Time’s Up initiative.
Here are the 40 biggest Taylor Swift songs, based on actual performance on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 (through the chart dated December 17, 2022).
Trying to capture what a “queer song” sounds like in 2022 is a lot like trying to explain what the color yellow is — all in all, it’s not possible. That’s because, simply put, songs by queer artists released throughout 2022 run the gamut of popular music, from thundering electro-pop, to sultry R&B, to funkwave, hip-hop, Latin, indie rock, disco and much more. Gone are the days where openly-LGBTQ people — both artists and listeners — were siloed off into one stereotypical genre landscape, now replaced by an audience who are listening to a vast array of musical genres, and a bevy of artists ready to show off their skills in nearly every musical field.
The result of that evolution is not only a diverse landscape of music created by queer artists, but a new frontier of pathways toward success. Along with showing off the musical flexibility of a community trying to survive amidst less-than-ideal circumstances, 2022 also proved that massive mainstream success is not exclusive to a single queer artist at a time. Whether it’s topping the Billboard Hot 100, charting for the very first time as a solo artist, or even successfully reinventing your sound, 2022 was a year defined by queer artists pushing their limits to discover new avenues toward the promised land of “making it” in the music industry.
But which of these songs managed to stand out from the rest this year? Below, check out Billboard‘s picks for the 25 best songs released by LGBTQ artists in 2022 (listed in alphabetical order).
2022 was good for a lot of things — in the music world, artists like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Bad Bunny and more had blockbuster years worthy of recognition. But when it came to the continued fight for LGBTQ rights, 2022 proved to be more of a backslide. In the United States alone, queer and trans folks spent the year working tirelessly against more than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures (including Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and Arkansas’ ban on gender-affirming care for young people), threats towards gender diverse kids and their families, a fatal shooting at a gay nightclub, and countless more tragedies and setbacks. Around the world, people struggled to support the biggest sporting event in the world being held in a country where being queer is a crime, while anti-LGBTQ sentiment and hate crimes continued to rise around the world.
Despite the onslaught of negative sentiment and oppressive ideals, queer artists showed up to represent and support their community in 2022. The methods they employed through their albums were often varied — some aimed for sheer escapism, creating new sonic worlds for their fans to luxuriate in; others looked their circumstances dead in the eye, using their music to channel the rage they felt at a world that was seemingly set against them. Either way, LGBTQ artists made their voices heard through some of their best works to date in 2022.
So, which of those albums stood out among the rest? Below, check out Billboard‘s picks for the 20 best albums by LGBTQ artists released in 2022:
This year brought several multi-week No. 1 hits on Billboard’s country charts, along with a surge of new artists earning solid hits with their first singles. Meanwhile, several established artists delved deep into themes of redemption, heartbreak, nostalgia and even revenge.
On this list, Billboard highlights some of country music’s top songs of the past 12 months, from established artists and upstarts alike.
In 1994, Mariah Carey‘s Merry Christmas, which contains her seasonal chart-topping carol “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” helped revitalize the contemporary pop holiday album. The singer’s effort was not the top selling yuletide-themed project of the year — that title went to Kenny G’s Miracles: The Holiday Album — but its enduring popularity helped set a new standard for the modern Christmas album.
By the turn of the century, recording a holiday album became a rite of passage for almost every burgeoning pop star, with some releasing more than one over the course of their careers. Mariah herself released Merry Christmas II You in 2010, while a cappella group Pentatonix dropped six holiday albums in a decade.
At the same time, seasonal music, secular or otherwise, continues to transcend genre and age. Both Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber were just 17 when they released their first holiday collections, The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection and Under the Mistletoe, respectively. And now that well over a decade has passed since both releases, only time will tell if the two have festive fa-la-la follow-ups up their sleeves.
To celebrate “the most wonderful time of the year,” Billboard decided to take a look back and tally up the 21 best Christmas albums of the 21st century so far. Whether you’re curled up by the fireplace with a warm cup of cocoa, taking a drive through winter wonderland or rocking around the Christmas tree with your friends and family, listen in below.
And check out our top 100 Best Christmas Songs of All Time list here.
It was a refrain heard throughout the Billboard offices in the first half of 2022: Where are the hits? The slow start for new entries really impacting the Billboard Hot 100 had us all looking left and looking right for the sort of songs we usually take for granted — the kind that slowly (or not-so-slowly) spread to all corners of the culture, connecting every kind of music fan and becoming unavoidable parts of a given year’s experience. With 2021’s biggest singles refusing to go away and this year’s listenership seemingly too spread out to elect new consensus hits to replace the incumbents, it was starting to look like we might go the whole calendar subsisting on nothing but reruns.
Luckily for us, the hits showed: first from some of pop’s biggest returning heroes, then from some artists taking the next step towards stardom, some longtime hitmakers we hadn’t heard from in a bit, and some new names we hope to be hearing a lot more from in the years to come. And of course, it wasn’t just the big songs that enraptured us in 2022; we found plenty of smaller favorites to save to our streaming playlists and inspire our vinyl orders in between those. But the year just wouldn’t have felt complete without those late-arriving, chart-crashing smashes, particularly since we ended up getting a handful who proved more than worthy of their position.
Here are our 100 favorite songs of 2022, a year that once again proved that no matter the time or context, pop music always finds a way. (Songs were considered eligible for the list if they either came out in 2022, were first released as an official single in 2022, or peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022 — though sorry, Stranger Things heads, we still couldn’t quite justify including “Running Up That Hill” or “Master of Puppets.”)