Sick of the sight of twerky

Ed Power looks at the highs and lows of a mixed year in music

SEX and pop have always danced around each another and in 2013 their strange tango commandeered the headlines as never before. On the one hand, this was the year of the twerk — of Miley shaking her bum in Robin Thicke’s face, of Robin Thicke shaking his misogyny in the whole world’s face, of Kanye West’s Yeezus, simultaneously a work of quasi genius and a borderline anti-woman diatribe.

But it was also the year that gave us Lorde, a teenager who might just be the smartest, most grown up singer of her generation. Refusing to conform to the industry’s vision of young women as gyrating sex pots, she quietly and elegantly became one of the biggest talents on the planet, with a debut album that trembled with the carefree guilelessness of youth and yet was shot through with a beyond-her-years wisdom. Meanwhile, Katy Perry covered up and urged others to do likewise, and Haim proved that a rock group fronted by three flaxen-haired Californians could be about the tunes, not the flesh.