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The 40 Best Deep Cuts of 2005: Staff Picks


The 40 best non-singles released from 2005's best albums, including Fall Out Boy, 50 Cent, Madonna and Mariah Carey.

So while there were plenty of blockbuster albums that dominated the charts in 2005, a whole lot of them weren’t actually from 2005: Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway, Ciara’s Goodies, Gwen Stefani’s Love.Angel.Music.Baby and Green Day’s American Idiot all notched multiple hits on that year-end Billboard Hot 100 (including at least one in the top 10) but all were technically late ’04 releases. Behind Rappa Ternt Sanga anthems “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)” and “I’m Sprung,” the Florida native ditches the Auto-Tune to showcase his versatility while looking inward on “Fly Away.” Two decades later, T-Pain’s legacy has long been solidified, but none of that was promised, as he grappled with the uncertainty of whether he’d ever reach those heights in a career where many fall short of stardom: “I wish I can know those things/ That everybody else knows.” — MICHAEL SAPONARA In the interim, a new generation of singer-songwriters (Björk, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple) utterly unafraid of embracing their oddities, had risen to prominence — but the sprawling double-disc effort made it clear the English iconoclast was from finished when it came to pushing alternative music in idiosyncratic new directions.

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