I started writing this as a laboriously longer piece about, once upon a time, being the youngest person in an office environment — being called “kid,” and noted for my youthful, scrappy take on life. Gradually, that changed. I started working with people younger than me and blah blah blah.
I’m going to spare you from having to plow through several chunky paragraphs and needless, sepia-toned preamble and fast forward to 2020.
I now work with a gaggle of people from whom I am separated by a yawning generational chasm. Both them and myself regularly make pop-cultural allusions we each consider universally recognizable, but haven’t the foggiest clue what each other are talking about.
When it comes to music and the appreciation thereof, we are practically from different planets. For them, people like Britney Spears, Beyonce and Kanye West are like faces on Mount Rushmore, and late-90's hip-hop acts I'd considered derivative and redundant at the time are practically considered venerable oldies acts to them. We share virtually no common parlance in this realm. They have no clue (nor interest in) who, say, Lemmy, Adam Ant, Cop Shoot Cop (pictured above), GG Allin and/or Bob Mould are, and I have no clue (nor interest in) who SZA, 2 Chainz, Lil Uzi Vert and Earl Sweatshirt are. Andy Warhol’s banana from the sleeve of the debut album of The Velvet Underground and Peter Saville’s ubiquitous artwork from the sleeve of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures are just Urban Outfitter t-shirt designs to them. Likewise, iconography from their musical touchstones mean nothing to me.
I may have mentioned her before, but one young colleague of mine — Lyndsey — had a refreshing take on a New Year’s resolution. Instead of giving up something as some sort of penitent punishment, she got her herself a coffee-table book of allegedly canonical albums and planned to devote each month to listening to and immersing herself in a new (for her) record, thus broadening her knowledge and experience of this celebrated music. I thought — and still think — that was genuinely very cool.
She ended up sharing this exercise with our mutual colleague, Tegan, who sits in her adjacent cubicle. I’d walk by and hear comparatively incongruous music coming from their part of the office, like the Monkees, Iron Butterfly and Revolver by the Beatles. I started chatting with them about it, and we struck on a new idea.
Tegan made a primer Spotify playlist for me of music that she — being unfathomably younger than myself — considers worth knowing about and/or appreciating with regards to what’s happening for her generation. Similarly, I was tasked with making one for her and Lyndsey of the type of music that I am fond of.
So, yeah, if you think that explanation was long, you should have seen the one I scrapped. But it was just basically to tee up the playlist below. Now, while I don’t generally get my fingers dirty on Spotify — being no fan of streaming, I — this was for a good cause. Plus, it was fun.
Yes, it’s still missing a lot of crucial stuff, but should you care, … enjoy.
Might I suggest listening on "shuffle."
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