Can a Playlist Save the World?
No, but perhaps it can inspire it (and other notes on my Spring 2025 playlist)
I’ve been making seasonal playlists for fourteen years— first on YouTube, then on Spotify. Largely this is a diaristic exercise: I love looking back on playlists and thinking, ah! Yes, I remember constantly listening to Lana del Rey and Glass Candy in early grad school in a fit of post-indie sleaze angst and girlie longing. Or, oh yes, the summer of 2018 is when I was DJing for What the Float for the first time, and was gently encouraged to incorporate more EDM into my repertoire (something I still only really do if forced). In high school, like many millennials, my friends and I would make mix CDs for one another, and I had an endlessly proliferating stack stuffed into the glove compartment of my mother’s Corolla.
To this day, one of my absolute proudest life achievements is thinking up what might be called the Great Mixtape Project: I asked 30 or so of my friends and two high school English teachers to give me a mix CD of “songs that represented them as people,” and I compiled these into a writable DVD with everyone’s songs included, each CD in a folder with the name of the person who contributed. Then I distributed a copy of the DVD to all participants. I don’t remember my track list exactly (sadly my own copy of the DVD is nowhere to be found), but I remember mine started with Pink Floyd’s Astronomy Domine and included Rage Against the Machine’s Sleep Now in the Fire, and Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog. It was such an important exercise, and I listened to the CDs for many years with so much fondness— my friend S’s entirely-classical CD (he is now training to be a concert pianist!), L’s use of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthem of a Seventeen Year Old” (very on-the-nose), an English teacher’s use of the Cure and Modest Mouse. Years later my mom found my old CD collection (including everyone else’s CDs!!) somewhere in my childhood bedroom and I decided to make a playfully self-deprecating TikTok video a few weeks after first downloading the platform in late 2021:
(There’s something about music and its curation that is deeply, profoundly intimate. Why is it that a mixtape is more romantic than flowers, more loving than an expensive piece of jewelry, possibly more intimate than sex?)
All this to say: I am perhaps a little bit obsessed with playlists. They are so of a time and place, so temporally- and spatially-oriented. Which is why today’s seasonal playlist may read, in future years: oh, yes, the beginning of the Revolutionary Era, when everything, even if tangentially, had something to do with communism, or the desire thereof (therefor?)! Which is why I am especially excited to share it. No, not every song has to do with revolution, obviously (it would be a little kitschy if it were). But for me, these songs, in this particular order, had a strong bouyant effect, and I found myself, when listening, as if carried away by a story, as if the songs comprised a kind of élan vital whose overall effect is greater than the sum of their parts.
It starts with one of my very favorite songs of the season, already linked in my last post: Molly Nilsson’s “The Communist Party,” which slightly modifies text from the pamphlet “100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the USA” from HUAC (the House of Un-American Activities Commission), and which you can read in its stupid, hilarious entirety here. Nilsson flips the text into a song about a Communist Party and includes a perfectly kitschy 80s beat. My favorite lyrics:
Today, Communism is a world force
Who are the communists?
How do they work?
What do they want?
What would they do to you?
Judy Holiday
Lena Horne
Charlie Chaplin
Paul Robeson
The blacklist is the guestlist!
…How do Communists gеt control over organizations in which the
Majority is not Communist?
They work, others won’t
They know how to run a meeting, others don’t
They come early and they stay late
The next track, Jamie xx and the Avalanches’s “All You Children,” continues the party theme, layering a sample of a woman reading to children with the characteristic electronic synth mania typical of both artists. When I listen to this song I imagine a group of people dancing to the beat like child tricksters, or the red imps of the famous 1923 Soviet film.
The next track, “I want to be better,” is one of many incredible songs from the latest Ela Minus album, DIA. There’s something impetuous about it— maybe because she doesn’t sing in her native Spanish?— but the lilting synth-pop is so childlike and perfectly mirrors the stubbornness of this imagined person, a childish persona fighting against her better nature:
I want to be better
I thought I was better
But I just seem to keep acting like a little kid
“Eusexua” by FKA Twigs sort of continues this trajectory into desire, and the song itself seems to fall into it, as if careening over a cliff. Suddenly the genre totally changes and a dance beat appears as if from thin air. The entire album is bewitching but there’s something especially affecting about this first track, as if entering into a rabbit hole. My favorite part of the song is actually the outro:
People always told me that I take my love too far
Then refused to help me
I was on the edge of something greater than before
But nobody told me
I love this feeling of tipping over into something else, and the next song makes a very hard left away from synthpop and into folk: the Catalan song “si veriash a la rana” by Tarta Relena (they’re actually touring NY soon!) My favorite music blends folk with electronic beats and they absolutely scratch the itch. I actually didn’t realize they used a synth until I accidentally came across their tinydesk concert. Wow! Also this music video makes me wish I actually became a music video director (my dream job from when I was in junior high and I became addicted to Fuse and VH1 after my family finally got cable).
Next, a dip into something more lighthearted: Adult DVD’s “Do Something,” which reminds me of so many people I know who feel the need to do! things! but can’t seem to find that one thing they want to pour their heart and soul into. Relatable, and also very emblematic of our spiritually bereft, community-deprived era.
Tried fishing, I’m off the hook
I joined the club but they only read books
…So I’ll go home, read the book
page for page, and now I’m hooked
I’ll try
Anything
I just wanna do something
The next song is really just about someone who turned into a bug, and I just think that’s swell: Thomas Flynn’s “I’m a bug now.” I don’t even particularly like bugs, but a few days ago at my book launch one of my interlocutors asked me why there are so many animals and bugs featuring in the films I analyze and I was a little baffled. I think I just really love non-human creatures! Maybe I like bugs more than I thought!
My granary stays full
I'm happy through the winter
Got a queen bee on speed dial
I'm a four-wing sinner
'Cause that's my bug's life
The next song continue the string of somewhat more indie rock songs, but in this song especially the lyrics are incredibly important. Naomi Yanos seems to have put to music what I’ve been thinking about academically, and personally, for several years— complicity, the role of media, and the function and affective power of protest. I’ve had these lyrics spinning around my head for months.
Complicity in the war machine
Can’t tear my eyes from a bloody sheen
…
Roll over roll over their face
Pepper spray
hemorrhaged eye balls
calibrate
I wish you the greatest
and by that I mean the people’s weight
If grandma can take prison I’ll take jail
Following is a Ukrainian electronic artist ҐAVA (pronounced, I think, gava, combining Cyrillic and Latin alphabets), and the song “діалог” (dialogue). I honestly just think the song is cool as heck and has a great beat. I know enough Ukrainian to find the lyrics super haunting, about a dialogue between (ex) lovers gone wrong, but possibly also a metaphor for war. Especially haunting to me, the lines:
Запах свободи? Ціна [The smell of freedom? A price]
Хто ти для нього? Чужа [Who are you for him? A stranger]
All this in two minutes!
The next song, Self Esteem’s “Love Second Music First,” continues a kind of glitchy synth pop beat from the previous, with added fuck-misogyny-and-fuck-you-all contemptuousness. The scene is set by the title: I’m imagining the artist called for a booty call by another musician, to her utter annoyance. As she persistently repeats, “Let me be gorgeous in peace”— something that I should probably put on a lanyard bracelet as a self-reminder?
“The Peacock Dance,” Fakear’s collab with Pouvoir Magique, drops us into some kind of cyborg pagan wonderland. I hadn’t heard of Pouvoir Magique before, but according to his artist bio, “He…became fascinated by the connection between humans and the invisible, drawing inspiration from ancestral drums, ritual chants, and cinematic melodies.” Oh hey, me, too, man! But is it problematic of a French electronic artist to attempt shamanistic melodies? Does it matter?
The next track, Nicolas Jaar’s “Aqui,” shares some of the mystery of the previous song, with added political complexity. All of Jaar’s projects are fantastic, from Darkside to Against All Logic. But there’s something really intimate about his solo work, less pop-y. I don’t know Spanish well enough to know the translation of the lyrics right off the bat, but they’re so haunting:
Dices que lo que vemos en la calle no puede ser
Dices que son puros cabros chicos de otros lado’
Dices si fueran de verdad de aquí no harían esto
Dices si fueran de verdad de aquí se podría ver
¿Pero qué significa ser de verdad de aquí?
¿Qué significa ser de verdad de aquí?
or:
You say what we see on the street can't be true.
You say it's just kids from somewhere else.
You say if they were really from here, they wouldn't do this.
You say if they were really from here, you could see it.
But what does it mean to be really from here?
What does it mean to be really from here?
Ok so I have nothing to add about the next song except it’s Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra” and I’ve listened to it about 100 times since it first came out, and it rules. It’s about magic! Re-enchantment! The desire for self-oblivion! Georges Bataille would have a field day!!!!
Save me from this empty fight
In the game of life
…
It’s time to cast your spell on the night
I followed Lady Gaga with Desire’s “Drama Queen,” produced by Johnny Jewel. The song has such a specifically early 2010s-trying-to-be-80s feel that makes me feel so nostalgic for that particular era in which I made incredibly bad choices (like buying Jeffrey Campbell Lolitas because I saw them too often on lookbook.nu, yikes). Also I do just love any song that slips in the word ‘guillotine’ and makes it work:
Nice and clean
Guillotine
Thirsty blade
Serenade
You're a part of me
The next couple of songs are less lyrically-focused but just have such a strong affective pull. “Quasar” by Ben Lukas Boysen starts gentle and slow and adds beats and rhythms consistently, but almost imperceptively, until you’re just out of your mind dancing at the end of the song and you have absolutely no clue how you got there. I barely remember what quasars actually are— astronomy was a short unit in high school and I remember something about black holes and electromagnetism— but there’s something galactic about the song and makes me feel like a weird little disco cosmonaut.
The next song sounds perhaps more pop punk/emo than my usual taste, but I’ve been blasting this in my car for months. “For frank forever” by piglet is a heartbreaking one, on slowly figuring out being trans, on suicide, on companionship. The song starts gentle and, like “Quasar,” crescendos into the type of song in which the lead musician breaks an electric guitar into smithereens on a stage and screams. I screamed these lyrics so many times on I-95 over the past several months, my dog must know the whole thing by heart.
So a chemical imbalance, really?
Not the pain that death leaves with the living?
I don't believe it in the slightest
Every trans suicide is a murder when you think about itThere's whispers of it coming to fruition
It's so cold I shake my limbs around the kitchen
Trying to charm a bit of heat into my body
While you list all of the ways we'll make them sorry
It happens so slowly
Its hard to keep track
It started as a feeling long before I knew the facts
The next song, Rival Console’s “If Not Now,” has no lyrics, but the title is extremely evocative. Whether or not it refers explicitly to the anti-Zionist movement I used to be an active member of… remains a question. I think, at the very least, the title must refer to the Rabbi Hillel quote that is also central to IfNotNow’s founding: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” There’s something about the song that makes me feel like it’s yearning for something to happen— that there is a beautiful world just ready to be crafted into being. At one point in the song there is a barely-perceptible sigh, the affective power of a politically-oriented longing.
There must have been something about that sense of yearning that connected it, in my head, to Twin Shadow’s “As Soon As You Can.” Something about this song disturbed me when I first heard it, and just made me so unbearably sad. Strangely, like many of my secretly-favorite songs (including Glass Animals’s “It’s All So Incredibly Loud”), the song is about that unmistakable immediately-pre-breakup period, just before everything falls apart:
I must have said something
That I didn't mean
I talk in my sleep now
And tell you my dreams
Now I've got your attention
But what does that mean
Were hardly together
And loose at the seams
And then, “Electra” by Public Service Broadcasting— a song that samples advertisements for planes and machines from, possibly, the 50s, and even Soviet space engineer Sergei Korolev (according to this great review), which also describes how the song is from a concept album about Amelia Earhart (“Electra” was the name of her plane). I love art about flying. I love this version of techno-utopianism, light-years away from the Musk-obsessed tech bros. “Electra” is an ode to possibility, to flight-as-metaphor, to dreaming of something otherwise, even if it fails.
The next song, “This is how we walk on the moon” by Tirzah, is a cover of a song by Arthur Russell that I’ve never heard, and is from the soundtrack to a BBC series, Mr. Loverman, that I’ve never seen. But I think that’s fine. The Speakers Corner Quintet, and especially that violin motif, creates this beautifully nostalgic, graceful tone that makes me immediately think of walking along a city at dusk— it’s soft, but full of graceful possibility, of gentle growth, pushing steadily upwards:
Each step is moving, moving me up
Moving, moving me up
Every step is moving me up
This is how we walk on the moon
I don’t always love ballads, but I absolutely needed to end with this long Father John Misty rager called “Screamland.” Father John Misty, a.k.a. the best member of the first (and best) iteration of Fleet Foxes, has been in the news a lot recently. Partially because of his genius takedown of Yeezy’s insanity on X:
(That screenshot was posted very early on; it now has 2.4M views)
… and then Azealia Banks discovered FJM and now they have a thing going?
Anyway, all this to say, I’ll happily join the FJM cult. There’s nothing quite like ending a playlist with a proverbial scream into a void, and a song about love, addiction, and hope.
The optimist
Swears hope dies last
And shoots the lamplight clean from the brakeman's hand
It's always the darkest right before the end
Anyway, kudos if you’ve read this far! I’m a complete novice when it comes to translating the experience of listening to music to text, but wanted to try something phenomenologically-oriented, like affect theory but filtered through the lens of an early 2000s Livejournal account entirely based on song lyrics. I hope you enjoy this playlist! As always, the majority of the songs are not made by cis men (nothing against cis men, but it’s a challenge I’ve given myself for the past 10 years or so), and it’s the length of an average CD (80 minutes), because it’s simply the perfect length. I hope my strange obsessive compulsive tendencies around music at least lead to an enjoyable listen.
Until next time, xo-J