There's a reason Y2K is sneaking onto my playlists
Spotify wants to play Guster. The algo is only partly to blame.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music from my high school era lately. Not because the Y2K music is particularly good (though some of it is), but a worm has weaseled it’s way into my Spotify.
When I was 15 and 16 years old, the world cracked open. Suddenly, I had friends who had drivers licenses and access to cars. Soon enough, by the winter of 2002, I did too. (The guy angrily gave me a pass, even though I hit the curb while backing up the car, since they hadn’t plowed the streets yet.)
Music was such a key part of the teenage driving experience, fumbling to figure out who we were while also controlling a motor vehicle. Burning CDs (!) off of Napster (!!) and stacking them up in the giant book under the front seat was a weekly ritual. I poured my personality into the perfect playlist, lasered onto a sliver disc. The guy at Staples knew my name because I went so frequently to buy the stacks of blank CDs.
I recently got married in my hometown in Rhode Island. When I got engaged to my now husband (!), I wanted to get married where we live, in San Francisco; he suggested Rhode Island.
“Ugh, why,” I remember saying. “Where would we get married, the dump?”
(I’m obsessed with the dump – I’ll save it for a future draft.)
“I love Rhode Island,” he told me. “I think it will be a good way to look at your hometown with different eyes.”
We chose a venue that was new – one that was once a rich lady’s home and a secluded Catholic convent when I was growing up – and started the wedding planning process. Of course, music was one of the most important parts of the experience. We spent hours building playlists for specific parts of the evening, as well as a Save the Date playlist that was more than 12 hours long. (Whoops.)
In the week leading up to the wedding, we stayed on site at the venue. My Spotify radio kept coming back to old favorites – Guster, the Cranberries. I believe in synchronicity, in that I probably needed to hear those songs at that moment in time, and also the algorithm, in that Spotify calculated that I was spending more time with these songs even if I didn’t recognize it. There was one moment driving through town listening to “Barrel of a Gun” that really washed over me, recognizing that the town I was in was exactly the same and yet, entirely different. The dump is still there (of course), but there’s now a Pride Parade (adorable). I think it’s a group of kids walking down the sidewalk, but still – I never could have imagined that in 2001.
When I was 16, so many of the artists I listened to – and the songs – were taken from queues from Gen X, the kids in college or upperclassmen just enough older than me to know what was cool. Of course, I listened to Britney and the pop music that was popular with the kids my age, but I naturally drifted toward REM, 10,000 Maniacs, and other staples of early 90s college radio. The songs were from the Brown University station, WBRU (RIP), or from other artists that had long gone off the radio but VH1, rather than MTV, called “foundational.” I was looking for a space where there was something different than the small town I knew, a college environment that was more open, someone to tell me that yes, I belonged, that I in fact was interesting and wanted.
It’s not lost on me, to really hit it on the nose, that part of why I’ve been drawn to this music lately is that I’ve become that person – that through the process of wedding planning and redefining my hometown, I’ve revisited that person from 20 years ago after ignoring him for so long. Sure enough, it does get better; there is a place to belong. Some of the music isn’t even that good (I still will not touch Dashboard Confessional or the Get Up Kids, lord help us), but there’s a grieving process in listening to this music at this moment of shift in my life, and welcoming that boy back. Of course, it’s a celebration, too. And for that, I’ll hit play.
Anyway, here’s a playlist of some of the songs I’m talking about.