The Eternal Playlist 🌠
Lessons from Spotify on the fluidity of memory
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My Spotify account is nearly 10 years old.
I find Spotify endlessly frustrating as a platform. From its labyrinthine playlist interface to its broken shuffle mechanism to its refusal to pay artists appropriately, there is much to resent about the audio behemoth.
But it is also undeniable that Spotify and the music streaming era it helped bring about have allowed myself and millions of others to discover countless songs and artists we never would have found otherwise. My Liked Songs library will soon surpass 4,000 saved tracks, and thanks to Spotify’s discovery features my personal catalog is made up of songs of all popularity levels, from those famous the world over like Bad Bunny’s “Me Porto Bonito,” to “500 Miles” by Canadian rapper YYZ, a song included on my Discover Weekly seven years ago for which my siblings and I make up at least 1% of its 36,805 total streams.
Music has always been the art form most strongly associated with my memories. I remember going to the movie theater to see The Menu with my girlfriend, but re-watching The Menu doesn’t transport me back in time to our date.
But all it takes is a few seconds of the staccato beat and heavy breathing that kicks off YG’s “Why You Always Hatin?” to bring me instantly to the rec soccer fields of Amman where she first showed me that song. Whether I’m sitting in a coffee shop or lifting weights at the gym, the track functions as an instantaneous multisensory rewind. I can feel the chilly nighttime Jordanian air numbing the tip of my nose and the beads of sweat trickling down my back as I stalk the goalie box. In my head, Kamaiyah’s West Coast flow is punctuated by the incessant honking of taxi horns and calls for the ball from boys scrimmaging on neighboring fields.
For people like me for whom a music library doubles as a diary, the advent of streaming services has expanded not just our audio discovery capabilities, but the level of detail contained within our digital journals. With or without Spotify, the Dreamville collaboration “Costa Rica” would have always been associated with playing beer die in the backyard of my house as a college senior. But thanks to Spotify’s database functionality, I know precisely which date — September 3, 2019 — I was introduced to the song. By cross-referencing my other digital archives, like my photos and calendar, I can create a more accurate memory of my introduction to the track.
My Google Calendar for that date tells me my last class ended at 3:30 p.m., and that I didn’t have a work shift that Tuesday afternoon, which means the sun I feel on my skin when “Costa Rica” comes on is that of the slow sunset of the last days of the fleeting South Bend summer, while according to my photo album, the rough wood I can feel bristling my arms while the track blares is from the not-quite-finished beer die table my roommate was constructing.
In large part due to the aforementioned UI gripes I have with Spotify, I haven’t created as many playlists as you may expect from someone with hundreds of hours of saved music, often preferring to shuffle all my tracks or listen to albums straight through. But during my first semester of college, I attempted to take advantage of the rare opportunity provided by freshman year to reinvent myself as a playlist guy.
For reasons even my combined digital archives cannot answer, I decided each of the playlists I created that fall would have a single emoji as their title. With one exception, I have mercifully abandoned this habit and these playlists. That exception is 🌠, which has become my eternal playlist.
One reason 🌠 has persisted where most of my other playlists have failed is that its emoji is the best summation of its emotional vibe. My earliest recollections of listening to 🌠 are associated with 3:00 a.m. bike rides back to my dorm from the library after all-night cram sessions. Its songs are generally sad, but sad in varying ways. It is not a breakup playlist. The collection includes rap, pop, rock, reggaeton, country, and soundtrack songs from two shows, a movie, and a video game.
Since 🌠 is so me, capturing the essence of a feeling I am struggling even now to put into words, it has persisted across cities, jobs, and relationships, only a year younger than my Spotify account. Tracks are added in fits and starts — July 2019 was particularly fruitful, leading to 13 new songs, while 2021 saw no songs saved at all — and occasionally stricken from the list when I no longer feel as though they fit the 🌠vibe.
The endurance of 🌠 means the playlist is now a memory artifact in the same vein of the songs that comprise its existence. I turn to 🌠 when I am overwhelmed, alone, nostalgic, melancholic, or simply awake late at night and trying to fade into my nocturnal background. Some of the songs on 🌠 are also among my all-time favorites, while others would never have been downloaded if it were not for their inclusion on 🌠.
As a member of the oldest cohort of the first digital-native generation, I am fascinated by the ways in which our digital platforms age with us. Sorting 🌠 in reverse chronological order and slowly scrolling lets me to watch myself devolve emotionally, reliving bouts of homesickness and solitude and angst through the lyrics and beats I turned to for support. And by tying together the various other fragments of digital archives I have at my disposal, I have the power to improve the accuracy of my memories Black Mirror-style, no eyeball implant needed.
But is this a good thing? Is it an improvement to be able to cite the exact time and place at which a memory took place, or am I tethering myself unnecessarily to the rhythms of the past?
My answer has changed as I have grown. If the sole function of our digital memory assistants like Spotify was that of a scribe, recording dates and times just for the sake of remembering, then I would say precision was a net negative, one that arbitrarily confines our collective realities to the abject truth. In a court of law or the press, objective reality is a necessity, but when recounting stories with friends or waxing poetic about heartbreak, there is a certain power in allowing our minds to exaggerate and obfuscate like a grizzled fisherman spinning tall tales about the one that got away.
Thankfully, humans are imperfect, a fact which is mirrored by our digital tools. Over the course of maintaining 🌠, I’ve changed my mind multiple times about the inclusion of the same song, adding and removing certain tracks at a whim. But Spotify is limited to recording only the most recent date of song’s addition to a playlist, making 🌠 an imperfect archive of my emotional state still susceptible to my personal narrative’s reconstructions.
I hope to keep 🌠 going for at least as long as I have a Spotify account. Ideally, I would export the playlist and bring 🌠 with me to whatever my next musical destination is. But I don’t want Spotify or whoever else guards my audio to expand the playlist’s data capabilities. As it functions now, the playlist is a flawed snapshot of my emotional lows, supporting me through rough days while still allowing me the freedom to get lost in reverie now and again.
Technology is best when it expands and improves our artistic and mental capabilities, supplementing rather than supplanting. Spotify and its track listings provide a treadmill for memory lane, not a body camera to document my every thought and feeling as it happens. I like it that way.
Things I Recommend This Week
(500) Days of Summer is a Revenge Movie | Sloan Stowe (YouTube)
International Law Strikes Back at The 'Rules-Based International Order' | Forever Wars
Democratic Elites Blame Everyone But Themselves for Historic Collapse | In These Times
Inventing the Perfect College Applicant | Intelligencer
Inside the use of LLCs by high-profile CFB coaches | The Dallas Morning News
It’s always a bit nerve wracking when I click publish on one of these posts that’s more emotionally raw. Since I always schedule to publish the morning after I finish editing, I usually endure at least one wave of terror the night before where I become convinced that whatever I wrote is stupid and pretentious.
Which is all to say I am more appreciative of you reading my work than you will ever realize! I hope your week is off to a great start.