Call Me Maybe

Almost nothing in "Call Me Maybe" behaves like a hit should, which is why it became one. It opens on a pizzicato string riff — actual violins, sawing a hook usually reserved for a synth — and keeps them front and center through the whole song, giving the track a bright, slightly cartoonish, storybook quality. Carly Rae Jepsen sings in a thin, close-miked, un-diva voice that sounds like a person who is genuinely nervous, and the production (Josh Ramsay) resists any drop or EDM concession: the payoff is just a melody, delivered fast, with a rhythm that trips over itself the way a real confession does. The lyric captures a very small event with absurd precision — she has met someone, gotten no signal, and hands over her number anyway, the "maybe" doing all the work of face-saving. Its 2012 spread was inseparable from the lip-sync video meme, which turned it into a communal joke that people then discovered they meant. A Canadian folk singer's pivot became the most disarming pop song of the decade. It fits a bedroom mirror, a group of friends in a kitchen, the specific comedy of liking someone before you have earned the right to.