I have a playlist for everything. I have a playlist for when I fold clothes.
You can argue that music is timeless and that’s sort of true I guess, but your playlists are firmly cemented into your own personal timeline. They stay in your library and watch you get older. Whether we like it or not, our playlists are the yardsticks by which we measure our past and that special recipe of songs we chose can evoke all kinds of buried feelings. They remind us of seasons, loved ones, stressing out. Our playlists remind us we created a history for ourselves, no matter how uneventful or small. And we carry these things with us.
But why all the nostalgia? Why am I hesitant to delete a playlist? Because I’m deleting my own history? Playlists don’t get old and die; they need to be executed. It’s only a matter of time before someone you care about sees your iPod and asks, “What the hell is the Dance Like Nobody’s Watching Mix?” Oops. We haven’t invented the time machine yet, so now what? Cringe yourself to death? Start killing those playlists, sucker.
Welcome to my Playlist Cemetery.
Originally created to sexify the air around me for that anticipated but never actualized intimacy that has long since passed. Fortunately, I recycled half of these songs in another playlist so The Isley Brothers and Track 7 of The Air Up There soundtrack live to inspire another day.
This mostly techno compilation was doomed from the start as it served only to mock me by being retardo fast and perfectly rhythmic with its cold, hard math. A work out mix will always punk you in the end.
Listening to music in the shower is the best and I totally recommend it but you can only enjoy to Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger so many times before you’ve had any coffee.
I made this one when I was cramming a semester’s worth of work into a 48-hour study sesh. Consequently, the songs became toxic to me. Sorry, Yoshimi. Sorry, life-altering drum fills of John Bonham.
It may be that I’m overly sensitive but I hear this now and I still feel like Missy Elliot (feat. Mike Jones) is calling me a deadbeat. My dark days are over and thus; listening to my sob songs on the way to work seems unfair and perverse.
Nothing destroys your emotional bond to a song like a car wreck. Get in an accident and the song playing will become a Musical Ring Wraith, a creepy predicter of some phantom accident forever.
We all hold onto the past; that’s why we love prequels and that’s why I own a lot of cargo shorts and that’s why my Dad still has AOL. There’s comfort in the things you know. But who really wants to be comfortable all the time? I’ll tell you who. Cats. And you’re not a cat. You’re a person with too many playlists. You’ve got a playlist right now that is burning a hole in your library, I know it. You need to get rid of it, but before you do, just tell me what’s called.
