Kacey Musgraves looks like a perfect country music ingenue – until you notice her nose-ring and the punky peroxide streak in her chestnut hair. The 24-year-old Texan's debut single is similar. It comes on gently – a banjo and a fingerpicked acoustic nudging a lovely singsong tune – but the story it tells is fierce and unblinking: a tale  of small town America, where bleak prospects, bad marriages, and boredom are a young woman's birthright. "Mary, Mary, quite contrary/We're so bored until we're buried," Musgrave sings. It's as poetic and potent as any song released in 2012 – an instant classic, a "My Hometown" for millennials.

Listen to "Merry Go Round":

“1999”

“I don’t consider myself a great poet,” Prince told Rolling Stone. “I just know I’m here to say what’s on my mind.” In the case of the apocalyptic party anthem “1999,” he was worried about then-president Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies. The song’s melody is based on a riff borrowed from the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Prince originally envisioned the first verse with three-part harmony but later split the vocals between himself and members of the Revolution. Because Warner Bros., with whom Prince was locked in a contractual battle, owned the original’s masters, Prince rerecorded the song and appropriately released that version in 1999.