I don’t listen to very much popular music. I don’t understand when young people talk to me about various wrappers with foodstuff names or singers with blue hair and British accents. I feel old.

But this year, there were some mega-huge hits even I heard. Usually, these songs were included in some other context besides Billboard Top 40 charts, and sometimes these contexts were pretty unusual.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest cross-over hits of 2011:

“Friday” by Rebecca Black. If anyone missed Rebecca Black’s incredibly annoying super-hit this year, they must be living under a bigger rock than I am. The unfortunately-catchy tune details the Friday of a fourteen-year-old, a day that includes eating cereal and partying. Just in case you missed it, the retailer Kohl’s recently used the song to advertise its Black Friday deals.  

 “Run the World (Girls)” by Beyonce. I really like this song and video from Beyonce that features a synthesizer-induced stutter and the lyrics “Who run this mutha? Girls!” Although this girl power anthem seems a bit forced and strange—girls, unfortunately, do not rule the world, nor do the more appropriately named "women"—you can’t fault Beyonce for trying. Beyonce made a pretty interesting marketing decision with this song earlier this year, too, waking up the members of the Space Shuttle Discovery with this tune.

“Someone Like You” by Adele. Adele’s “Someone Like You” has heart-wrenching lyrics, and, if you didn’t know already, Adele has some serious soul. But I think the two subsequent incarnations of the song—on Glee and Saturday Night Live—are even better than Adele’s original. Glee does a knock-out mash-up of “Someone Like You” and another Adele tune, “Rumors,” using two big voices from the ladies of the show. Saturday Night Live did a viral sketch that showed workers at some company listening to this song and crying and eating ice cream. It’s pretty much the funniest thing SNL has put out in a long time.

“Super Bass” by Nicki Minaj. Nicki Minaj is confusing to me. She looks like a Harajuku Girl with her pastel colored hair and outfits. “Super Bass” is a cool song, I suppose, and Minaj’s rapping in some ways seems like something new. But weirder than Minaj herself is the spin-off of the song, sung/rapped by a little British girl named Sophia Grace and her cousin Rosie. The YouTube video went seriously viral and the little girls became sensations on Ellen.