Another Year, Another Wrapped

Norah Jones, Queen of New York

We ad men use to slobber over the headlines of others, the compact phrasing that summed up perfectly a singular, maximalist image that could sit quietly above any city’s rush hour traffic. I admit it’s a much subtler game now, and few brands play it quite like Spotify.

If we all admit we spend too much time on the Internet, and in spite of our better judgement do so to the benefit of brazenly evil tech companies, is there a superior balm than the mirror speaking back to us every December — with the Wrapped playlist that effortlessly reminds us where we were, who we were with, and what we were feeling, when we hit repeat on this song or that. Let’s put aside our Marxist knives for just a moment. Forget for a week or so any unfortunate political mumblings, all the restructuring, all the money we didn’t put in artistes’ pockets — and revel in what the algorithm has discerned about me, you, in 2024. It’s almost Christmas after all.

Here is the sum total of all those breezy commutes to and fro the office, all that tap-dancing post– cheeky DMs, all those moments someone finally noticed your itching foot, your trigger finger, and said here: Taketh the speaker.

I gather, from trademark cursory research, that people are unhappy with this year’s presents. Terrible design! Insufficient data! Inaccurate polling! Fake news! The truth is clearly bullshit, we rally, pitchforks all pointed in the direction of hapless social media managers. People mistake my disinterest in challenging companies’ inability to reciprocate consumer trust for some kind of loyalty or adherence to the broader capitalist machine. Maybe I’m just older. Maybe my room just reeks of tea leaves.

I didn’t hate my Wrapped because I wasn’t really expecting it. I almost got rid of Spotify earlier in the year, less because it’s running on questionable gas than for the fact that Apple Music pays artistes a smidge more money and has (read this carefully, before you redirect the pitchforks) a deeper library of deep cuts. But I stuck around ‘cause I’m lazy too. I click through the Ts and Cs like I’m thrusting my face through a cloud of cotton candy. I marvel at how much music I have in the palm of my hand, at literally any moment, from literally any time, versus what drug wars I fought in my youth just to get hands on the new Arctic Monkeys.

I hate how I consume the music now; with very rare moments of fanfare for new releases, in that I’ve lost the ability to lay my body down on the floor, stare at the ceiling, close my eyes, and absorb all the bass. I merely tuck new music, even new discoveries from across history, up amongst the hodge-podge of all the streaming and reading and gaming you can eat. I haven’t played the new Kendrick Lemar album in full yet, because I have to check my skedge, place a blocker, practise intense discipline to keep from checking YouTube, people’s Stories, my chats on Bumble.

Yet here I am: rewarded by the algorithm, Spotify’s, for 22,000 or so passive minutes on trains and street corners, and also that odd evening with the space brownies. It? He? She? The algorithm says I’ve evolved, even though 80% of the evidence suggests I am a serial repeater, a playlist hamster, caught in a sugar-coated time loop.

Here are ten of the highlights, in no particular order.

Charlie – BODEGA.

Let’s put it this way: I had a tricky summer. Walked home in the sunshine a bunch, alone plenty, overextended at work, overextended in relationships. I wished I could be as silent, as nondescript around people, as I was within my own walls. In the run-up to a Ty Segall show, I let the machine recommend similar artistes, similar tunes, with one of those ‘Radio’ playlists. I hate myself for abandoning snobby, gatekeeping music journalists. I hate when the machine actually finds gems.

The bass that runs throughout this does so like a river, and when the lead guitar briefly shuns the song’s vocals, the collusion somehow spawns a rich, irresistible jam. I don’t know about you but I wish clubs would play these sorts of things at 3am, just as we’re all surrendering. I wish there was a way to plant that bass in the earth, and share it with whoever else never knows what to do with all that sun.

All This Time — Norah Jones.

It appears I would still start a cult in the Mojave Desert in honour of Ms. Jones, who was the artiste I played the most this year. Over the course of two, maybe three solid weeks I couldn’t even pick a favourite song off Visions — and then I heard her slow down the piano keys, during this live performance of ‘All This Time’. Melted every time, because I’m a witch and that little dog’s gonna get it too.

Tommy — Fcukers.

I need very good dance music to do things I’m not even sure I can articulate. It needs to feel as effortlessly cool as hip-hop. It needs to feel as imminently dangerous as heavy metal. If I could choose one thing to transcend my generation, to carry forth and be impeachable by the culture forever, it would be the Prodigy; and I don’t want to be called a boomer for cranking up ‘Firestarter’ at your niece’s birthday thingy in the park. But if that’s what it’s gonna be, fuck it: throw on ‘Tommy’ then for its chopped vocals, its groovy laser beams, and its threatening, toothy bassline.

HIT THE FLOOR — Denzel Curry ft. Ski Mask the Slump God.

The data says I afforded Denzel Curry more minutes this year than any other rapper besides Vince Staples. I know exactly why: Curry seems to have approached his late summer release, King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2, intent on recording a collection of bangers only. This one comes at you through heavy, filthy static, and sets you dashing across the streets like Sub-Zero riding nothing but clean ice and sweet contempt.

Obi Toppin (Darling) — Heems, Lapgan, and Kool Keith.

I tried to explain the beauty of this song to my girlfriend at the time, who (bless her) had just got off the phone to her mom and always did her best to understand.

“So there was this basketball player on the Knicks. We, the fans, loved the guy because he was young, kind of a highlight machine and we really wanted him to succeed — but the coach never really gave him the minutes a young player needs to develop properly. Sports is a cruel business, and eventually New York traded him. I don’t have the evidence to prove this, but calling what sounds like a love song ‘Obi Toppin’, way after we traded the guy … it’s the most beautiful way a fanbase, a rapper, could say we still love you, man — and we know it was never your fault.”

Man Overboard — Blink 182.

This may or may not turn out to be a prescient rediscovery — but I was walking to and fro the laundry room in my old building one afternoon, and the hook to this old Blink 182 song emerged from some memory of staying up late at night gorging MTV. It’s about the band having to release their original drummer because he had a drinking problem – but I feel like the song can mean all kinds of different things if you lower your shoulders and presume it’s you they’re talking to.

Out in the Streets — The Shangri-La’s.

I really wanted to hate … no. I felt like I was supposed to dislike The Bikeriders, an hour or so into watching that movie. Jodie Comer’s dodgy Midwest accent. The overly stage-managed photo ops repeatedly presented to Austin Butler, who I’m not fully convinced is even a real person. But Tom Hardy brought that shit home with a patient, persistent, blue-collar performance. After this song rolled up the credits I walked home under a bit of drizzle and felt, as I often do, that a grizzly brand of solitude is in fact my purpose.

Get Out the Way — Dizzee Rascal & BackRoad Gee.

No one does a comeback quite like Dizzee Rascal. Enlisting BackRoad Gee, a man who will gladly snarl his way through an entire verse, for this summer send was another smart piece of business by the Mayor of East London. I sent this bar to a workmate, a fellow believer in grime, immediately:

Big man on my Jack Jones,
Black Union Jack I'm back home/
Say you're a gangsta,
Stop all that goddamn crying/ and grow you a backbone.

I want to pause and say: Jesus. But I would rather pause to say: Dizz.

Slow Hot Wind — Penny Goodwin.

I’m something of an explorer. I’m sometimes dissatisfied by the joy of simply finding amazing things, and like to go one step further by unearthing whatever or wherever, or whoever, those initial amazing things come from. Last year Tyler the Creator re-released ‘Hot Winds Blow’, featuring Lil Wayne, and I couldn’t get enough of what syrup he’d made of this delicious sample. The original song by Penny Goodwin winds in a manner that in warm enough temperatures, beside a sea, will make you hallucinate the presence of mermaids.

I don’t say this lightly: genius of this magnitude makes me want to write. To make something in response and revel (even) in falling short.

The Start of Your Ending (41st Side) — Mobb Deep.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the 2000 joint, Boiler Room, directed by Ben Younger and starring a bunch of machismo speeches by Ben Affleck. How the bravado of that movie, and its casual relationship to hip-hop, explains how and why black men respond competitively to the unreasonable “fuck you” of capitalism. We — and I very much want to say ‘we’ — can’t help but respond to the cards we’re dealt, because we rarely get to choose which game we play. So if everything’s going to be a challenge, with the cards inherently stacked against us, not only are we going to bite back and win: we’re going to plant a flag in the middle of your field.

Mobb Deep is hip-hop that captures the essence of winning by any means necessary, even if the means happen to be insider trading. (That’s a Boiler Room reference, please calm down …) Play ‘Crawlin’, off 2001’s Infamy, to hear what a beat sounds like when it’s fashioned in the shadows, with crystals. Play ‘The Start of Your Ending (41st Side)’, do it now!, to hear hip-hop at its glimmering best: life lived as exuberantly as possible, because death is round every corner, as narrated by arguably the silkiest bards to ever rock a mic.

(Rest in Peace, P.)