HEY! These are the best song lyrics of 2015

Like it or not, humanity is adapting to this fractious information age. Hungry and distracted, we now absorb our brain-vitamins from an infinity of crumbs.

So if you love contemporary pop, you've surely learned to listen for bigger ideas inside smaller parcels. We've grown comfortable grazing on MP3s and swatches of streaming audio, making it easier for us to hear a song as its own universe - or even better, as a universe containing other universes.

The lyric sheet might provide the best window into our evolving practice of close-fast listening. This year's most enchanting lyrics were phrases that leapt from their surroundings with distinct propositions of their own.

Have lyrics always worked like that? Maybe. Or maybe modern popcraft is mutating to meet our growing expectations while catering to our impatience.

Either way, the year's best lyrical dashes felt mysteriously rich. Here are a few.

• "Broken hearts last longer" - Janet Jackson

The most sublime moment on "Unbreakable," Janet Jackson's better-than-it-should-be 11th album, arrives during "Broken Hearts Heal," a disco-paced eulogy to her late brother - perhaps the most famous human in recorded history. So this is a light, short song about heavy, planetary mourning.

The first line of the refrain reads like sympathy card poetry: "Broken hearts heal stronger." She's recycling Nietzsche's "That which does not kill us makes us stronger," a sentiment that too many Americans have recycled into patriotic bluster that prioritizes recovery over reflection.

But Jackson's rejoinder hints at something much cooler, something like a metaphysical transference: "Broken hearts last longer."

She's recycling lifeforce, suggesting that a life ended too soon gives a little of what's left to everyone else. This is subtle, sacred stuff. And you can dance to it.

• "HEY!" - Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato, Hailee Steinfeld, Selena Gomez, Ellie Goulding, Daya, Rachel Platten, Tove Lo ...

2015 was the year of "HEY!" - an exclamation-point of a word that punctuated too many pop singles to count.

But for starters: Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood," Tove Lo's "Talking Body," Demi Lovato's "Confident," Hailee Steinfeld's "Love Myself," Selena Gomez's "Sober," Ellie Goulding's "Around U," Daya's "Hide Away" and Rachel Platten's "Stand By You."

Each of these women deployed their shouty "HEY!"s almost exactly the same way, but to different ends. "HEY!" made crushes feel more urgent. It made rivalries feel more poisonous. It made promises feel more secure. It was a remarkably versatile lyric, which explains why it was so overused.

But ultimately, "HEY!" helped these young singers establish an authority over their music with an efficiency that "ooh," "ahh," "ohh," "la-la-la" and the eternally flexible "yeah" simply couldn't match.

"HEY!" was a declaration of presence that crystallized through repetition - a demand that we not just listen, but keep listening, too.

• "I pull up and arson all over your garden" - Young Thug

So much brilliantly broken poetry came gushing out of Young Thug's throat this year. So much! Too much? Never.

And while the Atlanta rapper consistently put the elasticity of the English language to the test this year, he also blurted out a nifty mission statement or two. The most evocative one, from a mixtape track called "Freaky," involved fire and rain, life and death: "I pull up and arson all over your garden."

Never mind the fact that transforming nouns into verbs is one of Thug's minor superpowers - here, he's describing his knack for re-imagining the laws of rap music, threatening to make paradise more beautiful by destroying it.

It gets trippy on various levels. Listening to his psychedelic description of the encounter is the encounter.

• "You're not punk, you're just scum" - Shogun of Royal Headache

In addition to being the greatest rock-and-roll hate-song in forever, "Garbage," by the Australian band Royal Headache, doubles as a master class in punk singing.

The band's frontman, Shogun, nails all kinds of low-key tricks involving phrasing and melody, all while berating an ex-friend who now belongs "in the trash."

Eventually, he's forced to answer his "trash" razz with a rhyme, and he spits out something silly: "You deserve to get bashed!" The punch doesn't land quite like he'd hoped, but now he's backed himself into a corner, so he doubles down and repeats it. "BASHED!" Then he explodes in a roar, as if he's angry with himself now - and because all anger is anger with one's self.

Even so, the song's best line is its big kiss-off. "You're not punk," Shogun sings. "You're just scum." In this context, to be punk is to be dedicated, genuine, even brave. To be scum is to pose as such. And through those six withering words you can trace all of this man's fury to the root of all romantic punk rage: disappointment.

• "Be the first of your friends to like Greek yogurt this summer." - Holly Herndon

Much of composer Holly Herndon's music is permeated with a refreshing optimism about our technological future, but maybe not all of it.

On one recent song, "Locker Leak," Herndon decorates a jittery digital soundfield with a confusing array of verbal snippets - assorted tongue-twisters, fragmented catalog copy, advertising slogans without context. Intentional or not, it echoes the disorienting nature of capitalism in the information age, like Radiohead's "Fitter Happier" without the melodrama.

"Be the first of your friends to like Greek yogurt this summer," one of Herndon's voices urges us, jumping out of the data-babble with a friendly reminder that consumerism has always been a perverse form social competition.

So yeah, don't fear the future. There's plenty to fear right now.

• "I bought all the sodas at the gas station." - Future

The great glossary of American rap lyrics is overflowing with boasts designed to conjure unfathomable wealth. Here's one that's entirely fathomable: "I bought all the sodas at the gas station."

It's a delightfully precise brag about Future's means, but it's also a dreadfully bleak confession about Future's pharmacological appetite - "Rotation" is one of many songs in which the haunted Atlanta rapper drowns his pain in lean, a popular sedative cocktail of Promethazine mixed with high fructose fizz.

We've all bought a soda at the gas station. That part feels tangible. The depths of Future's misery feels much less so.

• "Then I proceeded to brush some strangers teeth, but they were my teeth." - Kurt Vile

The great techno-spiritual writer Erik Davis chases after a very cool and potentially useful idea in "Nomad Codes," his collection of essays from 2010: He believes that our daily occurrences of brain-dead boredom might come in handy at the moment of death, helping us to navigate our way across the bardo to whatever comes next. And "even if we are only riding that last wave to flatline," Davis writes, "it pays to know how to surf."

Let's assume that Kurt Vile - the blue-collar rock mystic from Philadelphia - has similar ideas floating through his head. As a lyricist, Vile excels at narrating his own zone-outs, keenly aware that those absent-minded instances secretly surge with spiritual potential.

His new album kicks off with the best song he's ever written, "Pretty Pimpin'," and there's a great line in the first verse about how our minds come alive each morning. "Then I proceeded to brush some stranger's teeth," Vile sings, "but they were my teeth."

When your morning hygiene ritual offers you an out-of-body experience, get into it. In preparing for another day, we might also be preparing for the other side.