I wrote most of the post a month ago, and then promptly forgot about it. It's a bit late now, but I figured I might as well give it a touch up and post it. Anyways, 2012 has been an astonishingly bad year for good songwriting. You'd have to go back more than a decade to find a year that had as little good music. The good news is that, despite the lack of quality songwriting, music continues to move forward: After almost a decade, R&B has finally stopped trying to sound like Usher's Confessions . Drake , Frank Ocean , The Weeknd , Miguel , and others have been experimenting with personal lyrics, electronic textures, and warm sounds with very compelling results. Electronic music has gone on a maximalist bent with artists like Rustie and TNGHT . With electronic music moving forward, Pop music has happily stepped in and claimed dubstep as it own . Also, there's been a lot of very compelling pop music that blurs the line between mainstream and indie (ex. Jes