My Top 100, No. 20: "Halo" by Beyonce

I'd like to tell all of you a story about a time I was really wrong about something.

"Halo" is this generation's definitive ballad for solo female vocalist. It's "I Will Always Love You" of the 2009s. Of course, being that song for this generation means that everyone's going to try to pull the sword out of the rock.

Here's "Halo" eating Florence + the Machine alive (mostly Florence--The Machine does what it can) on the BBC One Live Lounge, for instance. That one stuck with me for a while, because I like Florence + the Machine a great deal and hearing her fall so comprehensively on her face was kind of unsettling. It made me think that "Halo" was uncoverable, so singular was Beyonce's greatness.

Then I encountered LP's cover, and I changed my mind.

It's great. She stays with Beyonce vocally the whole way through, and there are a lot of things I like better about the cover, because you can really let a song like this expand over the course of seven minutes in ways that you can't with a radio single. But because it was done live, I made the mistake of saying that LP took Beyonce's lunch money.

This is incorrect. Here's a video of Beyonce singing "Halo" in the lobby of a hospital, sitting down, with no microphone or any backing instruments except one acoustic guitar.

Not only does she retain her lunch money, she just rolls out of bed and does the goddamn goddamn.
I don't know if there's a song on this list where the performance itself has more to do with why I like it. I tried breaking down the songwriting to see if there was a great hook or something--there isn't, and when I discovered that Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic was one of the people who wrote it, it made sense. If there is any songwriting magic, it's in using the word "Halo," which, by invoking angels, makes you think about death and beauty, to say nothing of how you can just sing it over and over in the chorus and it sounds like "La la la."
Even the LP cover is so great mostly because it stands on what Beyonce already accomplished with this song, which is a showcase for a great singer, but transcends that only through her charisma.