My Own Personal Radio

I make a lot of Spotify playlists. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone reading a post/article/newsletter accompanied by an actual music playlist, but it’s true: music playlists — mixtapes, I like to call them when I’m clinging to past conventions — are a pretty important part of both my life and my history.

People make playlists for any number of reasons, but I make them for the following:

• Artist playlists: Sometimes, I want to make a personal “greatest hits” for an artist I love. Sometimes, I want to make a speculative “greatest hits” for a band I’m starting to get into. Sometimes, I want to make a data-driven “greatest hits” based on streams to get an idea of what an artist is about.
• Setlist playlists: Sometimes, I want to create a playlist that mirrors the setlist from a show I attended.
• Genre playlists: Sometimes, I want to immerse myself in a specific style, but I don’t want a streaming service to assume what I think that style is. For instance, when I want to listen to country but don’t want to manually select an artist or album, I need (and, man, the need in this sentence holds more weight than I’d like it to) for any genre study to steer clear of both modern pop country and scratchy 1950s hillbilly.
• Historical playlists: Sometimes — in a very “men always think about the roman empire” way — I find myself thinking about the connections and impact of various moments in music history: the rise of the Beatles, the impact of SoundScan, the primal urge of each generation to champion and idolize boy bands. Sometimes, this leads to playlists like my “Decade” playlists, in which I add 20 songs per year, no repeats from a single album, adding up to 200 songs that help define the wildness of that specific decade. Cool stuff, I know!
• Historical playlists; personal: Sometimes, I make historical playlists that are actually personal playlists.
• Seasonal playlists: Sometimes, it’s Christmas.
• Random playlists: Sometimes, I write newsletter articles and need something to accompany them.

NO, WAIT, DON’T RUN AWAY. I know that talking about playlists is exhausting! It’s like hearing someone talk about writing or talk about theory. I know this because I’ve seen the faces of my family, the light behind their eyes slowly extinguishing as I continue discussing why I added specific songs to a playlist about 90s second-wave emo.

The point is this: once a playlist is complete, it becomes a tool to shape and influence our environment without too much fussiness. It allows us to customize our world. Playlists can be, to be as cliche as possible, the actual soundtracks to our lives. And sometimes, we create one that hits all the right notes and feelings.

I spent the weekend in St. Paul with my friends. I did all the Important Minnesota Summer Things: I went to the Minnesota State Fair and a Twins game. I ate a cuban sandwich on a patio, and I bought some punk records. Every time we got into the car, my friend threw on the same playlist: an ongoing, always-in-progress playlist that collects his favorite song from every album. The rules are simple: when he thinks of an album, he adds a song from that album — but ONLY if he’s listened to the entire thing. Double albums get two songs. Greatest hits albums are, like, bonus songs. At first, it seemed very random — Megadeth, followed by Tracy Chapman, followed by Rufus — but as the weekend went on, I kept thinking about it as a kind of resurrection of a once-common format: pop radio, and specifically pop radio in the form it took as our monoculture began to explode into a billion pieces.

My most formative music years were the late–80s through the mid–90s — peak MTV, just as the monoculture began to entirely disappear. While most pop radio in the 60s followed a single format (rock, soul, R&B), the pop radio I remember was a weird post-SoundScan mix of country, hip hop, rock, and adult contemporary. Where Duran Duran’s big comeback butted up against “O.P.P.” and Garth Brooks. It was curated to appeal to the broadest number of people. It introduced many of us to the paths we’d follow: we became hip-hop kids, country kids, rock kids, or pop kids.

And then, personal mobile music devices — and, eventually, the internet — made it disappear. We took control of our music. We made our own lists, dubbed our own tapes, burned our own CDs, and eventually made our own streaming playlists. We moved away from the limitations of radio (no choice), physical media (set length), and the monoculture itself (lack of diverse styles). This element of control felt incredible — as Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow says in her Object Lessons book Personal Stereo, “…One common theme to Walkman use was a sense of control. We could exert influence over our emotions, playing the Monkees to chase away a bad mood or Erik Satie to wallow in it. We could modulate our interactions with others, discouraging strangers from approaching us if we wanted to. We could reclaim our times so that the commute to work was not wasted, but an opportunity for rapture.”

However, she continues, “The iPod and then the smartphone vastly expanded our power to customize our daily lives. But unlimited choices can interfere with our ability to fully enjoy any given experience.” She discusses how endless opportunities for rapture are stunted because we want to keep exerting our choice — skipping songs after a first listen, overthinking our mood, and suffering from a lack of commitment. We have everything with us whenever we like, at the risk of having to think about everything whenever we like.

Sometimes I don’t want to think. I want that gigantic playlist that’s just, like, everything I like. Sometimes I want the randomness and spontaneity of the radio back, but on my own terms.

For me, this has always been one of two playlists — an omni-playlist of all of the newsletter mixtapes I’ve made, which is great because I’ve vetted all the songs, but it’s lackluster in that it’s meant for discovery and so it doesn’t have any nostalgic warm or old favorites; and an omni-playlist of all of my decade playlists, which is great because it spans six decades, but it’s lackluster in that it’s a bit too “Time Life Presents The Hits Of The Century.” One is curated to be cool but not always familiar; the other is curated to be important but not always personal.

That’s what I found so freeing about my friend’s “one song per album” playlist — it’s personal radio. It harkened back to the promise of everything everywhere all at once — of taking your iPod and just throwing the entire pool of ten thousand songs on shuffle, letting your personally curated version of fate take the reigns. So that’s what I did, with one caveat: my list is one song from every album I own on vinyl. Essentially, if I’m willing to spend some money to own an actual copy of it on a shelf in my living room, it’s warranted a place on the playlist.

There were some other rules (there always are) that I won’t bore you with, but I can tell you now that I have a 65-hour-and-three-minute playlist with 941 songs that I know and love enough that I’ve paid for them twice (streaming, physical) at minimum. It’s my personal version of The Current. It’s a lot of fun. I recommend it.

To curate a playlist is to have an opinion. What goes in. What stays out. It’s both a declaration of taste and a safety net. It helps create a personal definition — a definition of a style, or definition of what’s considered good, or a definition of a memory or feeling before it’s gone. It’s deeply personal, though it’s sometimes meant to be shared, bragged about, or commented on.

It’s one of the few places where we still have some semblance of nearly total control. Which is funny because it’s also … nothing. It’s nothing, at least, beyond what you want it to be. It’s both essential and frivolous.

And I can see your eyes glazing over, too. God, I love making playlists — almost as much as I like talking about them.