Note to teachers: You might not consider all of the songs on the playlist appropriate for your students. Please preview first.
The New York Times Magazine put together a playlist of 25 songs that “tell us where music is going.” The selections include “Sorry” by Justin Bieber, “Say No to This” from the “Hamilton” soundtrack and “Consideration” by Rihanna, and they range from hip-hop to hard country to electronic.
What songs are on your current favorite playlist?
Nitsuh Abebe writes in the special feature’s introduction:
It’s not as if I made some principled choice not to listen to it. It’s just that Beyoncé released “Formation” on a Saturday, and then performed it at the Super Bowl on Sunday, and as of Monday I hadn’t gotten around to it, for reasons that are incredibly uninteresting: I happened to have been doing other stuff, which seems as if it’s probably among my rights as an American.
By then, though, the song had become such an intense focus of discussion at the digital water cooler — to the point where it felt difficult to turn on a computer without someone’s views about “Formation” and its various sociopolitical valences reaching out and grasping for your throat — that my not having heard it acquired some kind of political dimension. A decision had to be made. Either I needed to dutifully consume this object of conversation and develop an opinion about it or I needed to develop a defense of why I hadn’t yet done so.
The point being: Here, for a moment, was music that actively dragooned me into paying attention to it, based not primarily on sound, performance or composition, but on the rolling snowball of perspectives, close readings and ideological disputes accreting around it.
It’s songs that do this now; individual songs and mass opinion, working in tandem. This wasn’t always the case. We’ve spent the past century or so trying, in creaky and convulsive ways, to figure out what music is even for, and how we intend to use it. When and where will we listen to it? Will other people be there? Should people own music? Who should write it — the performers? What’s a normal amount to release at once? How will we find out about it? Will there be pictures? Are you absolutely, definitely sure we have to pay money for it? For the moment, there’s only one answer to these questions that seems to connect strangers in a truly monocultural way: We shall gather in huge, fawning riots around towering pop singles to trade politicized takes on them.
She concludes:
We’ve found a way to collect around the handful of songs we all have in common, yoke them with our opinions and make a (mostly) joyful noise. I don’t begrudge Beyoncé or the world one second of it. But it does throw into stark relief the things we have a much harder time talking about, at least with strangers: the way songs make us feel, the things we discover in them that aren’t already on other people’s minds, the obscure pleasures we’re willing to risk trying to explain from the darkness. The ever-larger private life of music. How do we talk about that?
Go ahead, scroll through the interactive, and be sure to have the volume turned up. Maybe you’ll discover something new for your own playlist.
Students: Read the whole article, then answer the questions below:
— What songs are on your current playlist?
— How does your playlist make you feel? What mood does the music evoke? What do you hear in your favorite songs that maybe other people don’t?
— What, if anything, does your playlist say about you? How is the music you listen to part of your identity?
— Look through The Times Magazine’s playlist, and listen to anything you’re not familiar with. Do any of the songs appeal to you? Anything you would consider adding to your own playlist?
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