For a long while, the idea was that young people could use music to shape their style - their clothes, their haircuts, their sense of cool. One of the great tricks of pop music is that no matter how much we like to imagine it’s about musicians expressing themselves, it tends to be more useful as a way for listeners to figure out their own identities: Each song lets us try on a new way of being in the world.

When and where will we listen to it? Will other people be there? Should people own music? Who should write it - the performers? What’s a normal amount to release at once? How will we find out about it? Will there be pictures? Are you absolutely, definitely sure we have to pay money for it? For the moment, there’s only one answer to these questions that seems to connect strangers in a truly monocultural way: We shall gather in huge, fawning riots around towering pop singles to trade politicized takes on them.

We’ve spent the past century or so trying, in creaky and convulsive ways, to figure out what music is even for, and how we intend to use it. It’s songs that do this now individual songs and mass opinion, working in tandem. The point being: Here, for a moment, was music that actively dragooned me into paying attention to it, based not primarily on sound, performance or composition, but on the rolling snowball of perspectives, close readings and ideological disputes accreting around it. Either I needed to dutifully consume this object of conversation and develop an opinion about it or I needed to develop a defense of why I hadn’t yet done so. It’s just that Beyoncé released “ Formation” on a Saturday, and then performed it at the Super Bowl on Sunday, and as of Monday I hadn’t gotten around to it, for reasons that are incredibly uninteresting: I happened to have been doing other stuff, which seems as if it’s probably among my rights as an American.īy then, though, the song had become such an intense focus of discussion at the digital water cooler - to the point where it felt difficult to turn on a computer without someone’s views about “Formation” and its various sociopolitical valences reaching out and grasping for your throat - that my not having heard it acquired some kind of political dimension. It’s not as if I made some principled choice not to listen to it. 24 Sunday Candy Chance the Rapper Full Track.23 Stressed Out Twenty One Pilots Full Track.22 Weh Dem Feel Like Vybz Kartel Full Track.19 Partita for Eight Voices Caroline Shaw Full Track.18 Untitled Pharrell & J Balvin Full Track.15 Hymn for the Weekend Coldplay Full Track.

12 The Blacker the Berry Kendrick Lamar Full Track.

7 Hurtin’ (On the Bottle) Margo Price Full Track.

4 Get Away Syd Tha Kyd & The Internet Full Track.

2 Say No to This The ‘Hamilton’ Cast Full Track.

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