Looking back over my shoulder

The Year In Music (according to me)

The 1975 at Madison Square Garden, November 2022

I’ve been wanting to get back to writing for a while, writing really being a place where I can think outloud in a way I don’t seem to do elsewhere. Maybe part of that is, as Johann Hari notes in his good but meandering (and preachy) Stolen Focus (more on this later) that our incessant need to be entertained every waking hour is interrupting those moments when we could be thinking, but who has that sort of time for reflection anymore?

One event that continues to insert itself into our lives to enforce that reflection is Spotify’s annual Wrapped series where they sum up the year in music. I first wrote about this in 2016, which as far as I can tell is the first year they executed the review in the format we now know. Something that seems to have remained the same is the music that comes to mind unaided isn’t necessarily the music reflected in the associated playlist or interactive summary available in the app. In fact the playlist, if I may say so, is loaded with songs I would swear I’d never heard before and have no desire to listen to now.

The album I’ve gone back to more than any other this year is Gang Of Youth’s Angel In Realtime, and the ironic thing is I loathed it when it first came out (some of us still do). Maybe “loathed” is a bit much, but this is a band I believe could be the biggest band in the world if they would just. Write. A. Fucking. Single. Frontman Dave Le’aupepe’s insatiable desire to show of his vocabulary and use a dozen words when five will do is the thing standing in the way of this. Everything else, from production to melodies is already in place.

Gang Of Youths make consistently terrible videos, but this song is a gem

Their main rival in this endeavor are the more established The 1975. Separating them in world-beating ambition is frontman Matt Healy’s insatiable desire to disappear up his own asshole. This year they coupled that talent with hiring Jack Antonoff to ruin Being Funny In A Foreign Language, a record that should have been a return to form after the instantly forgettable Notes On A Conditional Form. We’ll get into this another day, but it seems the best way to score a minor hit these days is to have a major one, and then hook up with Jack Antonoff. His Bleachers-fication of every act he comes in contact with only succeeds in helping more famous acts come down to his level (Yes, Taylor Swift is an outlier here, but she is an outlier in everything).

Happiness (or the one 1975 song Jack seems to have kept his hands off)

Anyway, what, according to Spotify, actually happened?

• I listened to 36,921 minutes. Some of that is going to be podcasts, or podcast — the very specific and excellent 60 Songs That Explain The 90s; to channel the host Rob Harvilla, just go and listen. Or don’t. This is not the place to seek reasons or hear out arguments. That is not the vibe, this is not what we are about.
• My top five genres were, in order, Indie Folk, Indie Pop, Indie Poptimism (what?), Rock and Indie Rock. It’s unclear to me where Spotify draws the line at “Indie”, but it’s fair to say if I were to have looked up the Billboard Top Ten any given week this past year I would not have known a single song/artist in it. This does not bother me, for middle-aged, cis-gendered white men are far from the target market of acts looking to make a dent in the Billboard charts
• I played 5,169 different songs, and this may be the only number that is up on 2016’s tallies; the delta in minutes listened (6,000) is likely (definitely) occupied by basketball podcasts from other middle-aged, cis-gendered white men, for whom I am the exact target market
• Patrick Droney’s When The Lights Go Out was my top song over all, weirdly a song my therapist put me onto when she sent me a link to his live performance on Colbert. That a song this good can sink with out a trace leaves me with little hope for pop music (but again, who in their right mind is making pop music for me?)

• I listened to 2,422 artists, almost double 2016’s total — so there you go, wrong again. This broader but shallower trend is interesting, particularly in light of not recognizing so many songs in my year end playlist. My most listened to artist was, despite me moaning about the production, The 1975. I definitely got back into the older stuff over the summer, and buoyed by the release of new (even if disappointing) material, they claimed my top spot for what feels like a decade-running
• Spoon, Harry Styles and Patrick Droney rounded out the remainder of my top 5. I couldn’t tell you with any certainty when the last time I put either of the latter two on, so again, what I remember and what Spotify’s data says doesn’t seem to match
• Last but not least, my music personality, according to Spotify, is The Adventurer, constantly seeking out new artists and songs. I was in Chicago right before Christmas with a group of similarly aged people, most of whom were bemoaning the “fact” that nobody is making good music anymore. Ignoring for a moment a statement that is comically untrue, it also belies a predictable lack of self-awareness, as if the generation before mine didn’t say the same thing, so on and so on

The only act not reflected above who should have been was Sam Fender, whose excellent Seventeen Going Under actually dropped in 2021, not 2022. If you can forgive (or ignore) the overt Springsteen mimicry, not to mention 5–6 songs we could have done without (nobody in the age of streaming needs to release 17 track albums) you are rewarded with great songwriting, and if the earnestness of his voice starts to grate after a while, well, what did you expect from a 28 year old singing about being a teenager?