That’s A Wrap
By: James Beck
Tags: Blog, Humour, Spotify, 2020

That’s A Wrap

This week my social media has been flooded with people assuming I care about their top artists and songs of the year as they share the details of their ‘Spotify Wrapped’.

And I do care, I care deeply.

Genuinely — Is there anything more revealing than your top #5 songs over the course of a year? I don’t think so. And, frankly, I’m just glad we haven’t all spent the year listening to Mad World by Gary Jules on repeat…

I find it kind of funny… I find it kind of sad… (Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash)

One artist that we have all been listening to is Taylor Swift — she is ubiquitous. Everybody seems to love her, myself included. Her latest album, folklore, has a universal appeal — the timing of the release (the middle of lock-down), the whole vibe of it (also lock-down) and the fact that it is a genuinely good album all helped propel it towards the top of people’s lists.

Aside from listening to the 1 on repeat, this year I apparently found time to discover 569 new artists. Please don’t ask me to name them. Over 1.5 artists a day over the course of a year seems like an awfully high number, but this morning I have discovered three new bands as a result of other people’s lists, so maybe it isn’t so outrageous. Plus, add into the mix that I am a really cool, young guy with his ear to the ground and…

OK, I’ve pushed my luck there and I know it. I do have cool friends though, and many of the new discoveries are due to the Cultural Exchange we started in early lock-down — we all found we were getting bored of the music we were listening to and so took it in turns to share an album per day that the others hadn’t heard. It was good — I have discovered some amazing new records that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise.

That said, there are still some old favourites that I will keep coming back to. I am apparently in the top 0.05% of Elbow fans worldwide. Having listened to 3,679 minutes (or 2.55 days) of their music, I am now finally confident that I can tell my arse from my Elbow. Like Frightened Rabbit and Bob Dylan, Elbow are a band that I fairly regularly fall down a rabbit hole with, listening to nothing else for most of a day. For me they are another band with a bit of a lockdown vibe. They’re a Manchester band, who confess to regularly ‘finding themselves writing drinking anthems to friends’ so they remind me of home, my family and friends. Basically, they remind me of the pub.

God I’ve missed you. (Photo by Montse Monmo on Unsplash)

Given some of the other genres Spotify claims exist, I am amazed that Reminiscent Pub Music isn’t one of them. Apparently I listened to 531 genres this year, but my top five featured the word ‘indie’ three times.

A friend of mine had Chamber Psych in his top #5 genres. Not only does he not know what that is, I don’t think Spotify do either. I’ve just looked up a playlist called The Sound of Chamber Psych — one of the songs on there is Black and White Town by Doves… a good song, sure, but Doves are hardly the standard-bearers of Chamber Psych. Actually, they might be. I don’t know what it is.

My dad has an argument that the Spotify figures are warped by oft-used playlists, e.g. my Sunday Morning playlist. I would counter that with two points. One, my Sunday Morning playlist is now comfortably over 24 hours long and therefore so vast that no song could possibly force its way into my top #5.

And two, that theory does not account for the presence of the Icelandic Eurovision Song Contest entry for 2020 in my top five songs of the year. What does account for the presence of Daði Freyr’s Think About Things, though, is that it absolutely slaps. It is a banger. (Although on that basis, Library Takeout by MicrOpaqu3 should be in the top #5. Probably the best song about a university library service I’ve ever heard…)

Think About Things was a sure-fire winner of Eurovision and the fact that the contest was cancelled and Daði Freyr was robbed of victory is, for me, the biggest travesty of 2020.

Step One: Reqqquuuuueeeesssssttt… (Photo by Susan Yin on Unsplash)

I am joking of course, 2020 has been honking for so, so many reasons. But it is getting better, slowly. The Spotify figures were released on the same day as the news that a vaccine has been approved for use in the UK, America seems to have finally seen some sense and I am getting to see my family over Christmas. Spotify Wrapped has forced me to have a look back over my weirdest year yet and amongst all the horrible stuff there have been some real positives.

I won’t go into them in detail here, but a lot of those positives can be boiled down to this; we are closest when we are forced to stay apart.

Maybe I am looking at it with a rosy hindsight, but sometimes I think 2020 hasn’t been so bad. And then I remember that Think About Things was robbed and I’m confused and angry all over again.