How I Learned To Love Spotify Wrapped Despite Everything
Or, “B-but I Used To Be Into Really Cool Music, Honestly.”
From the age of about 10 until when I was seventeen or so, I would make a daily top ten chart of the songs I’d listened to.
This was based on a very scientific metric of how many times I hit rewind or gently reset the needle on my folks’ record player, plus how awesome it was.
And then every year I would make a chart based on that exercise book filled with lists and work out my favourite song and artist of the year. Spoiler: it was pretty much always the Cure when it wasn’t The Smiths because I grew up in the 80s and was a stereotype of a sulky, bookish teen.
That obsessive tracking of music stopped, not entirely coincidentally, around the time that I lost my virginity — although I continued to make lists of what I listened to over a year and would make my annual top 20 via a very scientific metric of how often I hit replay, plus how awesome it was.
By that time I was also starting to write about music professionally, so I could pass it off less as being a weird ritual and more as the responsible cataloguing of the state of the culture by an assiduous critic.
Once the iPod years began the cataloguing got less idiosyncratic and more streamlined because I could sort…
