The Year in Review: 2018

ISSUE #35

Hello and welcome to the Fourth Annual Year in Review Collaborative Playlist and Art Celebration. This is something I do every year where I ask my friends to add their Top 10 Favorite Songs of the Year to a collaborative playlist so we all have something to listen to as we drive home on our holiday breaks. As an Earwyrms subscriber, you're invited to participate! Click the link above or below to start, and follow these rules:
 

• Follow the playlist first, I think that’s the only way you can add songs to it.

• Add your Top Ten Favorite Songs of the Year. We’re not asking you to rate the objective best songs, and judgement of tracks should not be doled out as such. I don’t know any professional music critics, and no one else would have the time to listen to everything in the year. These are just the songs that meant the most to you.

• You can place them in any order, but I do mine from the top down, from most favorite to least favorite, and I tend to apply that paradigm to everyone else’s because that’s just my personal lens and bias.

• If you come late, and see that your song is already in the playlist, YOU CAN DUPLICATE. Nobody ever listens to me here but damn it, I really don’t care about duplicates and I like to tally up totals at the end, so any song appearing more than once must be extra good. Skipping songs is a listener responsibility here, not a participant responsibility.

• If the single came out in 2017, but the album came out in 2018, it counts, I go by the album. For example, in a completely legal move, I happened to have a very top song from a 2017 film, but since the official album release was 2018, I’m in the clear and you cannot attack me!

• Watch the songs roll in and enjoy!

Know that you’re here because I want to witness your true emotional connection to art, and it’s okay to be vulnerable, so please don’t be self-conscious! Use your real picks, we have a strict “No Teasing” rule.

If you're a visual learner, here are examples of the previous year's playlists:

The Year in Review: 2017

The Year in Review: 2016

The Year in Review: 2015

For next week's newsletter, I’ll be giving a recap of our picks, counting which albums and artists had the most representation, tying it all up in a bow, etc. Until then, and while we're all deciding what to add, here are some other Best of the Year lists:

Best Quotes of 2018

• "Sluggo is Lit"

• "Shackleton, who had witnessed on the Scott expedition the corrosive tensions among team members, sought recruits with the qualities that he deemed essential for polar exploration: 'First, optimism; second, patience; third, physical endurance; fourth, idealism; fifth and last, courage.'" — David Grann, The White Darkness: A Solitary Journey Across Antarctica

• “Perhaps the music of Avicii — who convinced a wave of jaded music critics that Vegas-oriented dance music could be kind of great after all — is the sound of selling out. But it’s also the sound of willful self-realization, of dragging yourself out to the party because the only other option is too dark to think about.” — Emily Yoshida, Avicii and EDM’s Promise of Post-Recessional Excess

• “[Kanye showed] evidence of an emerging theme—a paucity of wisdom, and more, a paucity of loved ones powerful enough to perform the most essential function of love itself, protecting the beloved from destruction” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye

• “Netflix is a cruiseliner; once you’ve boarded, you can feel safe in knowing that it is as unsinkable as it is inescapable.” - Sean Fennessey, Netflix and Shill (substitute Netflix here for Facebook, Amazon, Fossil Fuels, etc)

• “I got a liberal arts education and it taught me that America is an apartheid state and capitalism is beyond reform.” — David A. Banks, Engineered for Dystopia

• “The hidden 3-D image effect only works when you unfocus your eyes the right way. That’s a metaphor for the process. Being creative is a mix of unfocusing your eyes in the right way, while still remaining focused on the picture.” — Questlove, Creative Quest

• "One thing I love about Buddhism is the idea of fundamental dissatisfaction. Which is the idea that [boredom] is what it is to be human. I think the big lie that comes from [...] all the movies, and lots of stuff, is we tell these people "No, it gets better. That'll go away. That gnawing, empty thing inside of you? That'll go away." And Buddhists are like, "No! That's like a fish saying, 'One day I'm gonna be dry.'" Well, when you're dry, you're dead, fish. And in the same way, for a human to think that that thing goes away is one of the great ways a human tortures itself." — Duncan Trussell, Harmontown Episode 284, "They're Coming to Get You, Barbara"

• “'My advice? Grasp a straw,' he said. 'Work it to dust'" — Michelle McNamara, I’ll be Gone in the Dark

• “And yet I think this is the job of writers right now: to describe what we do not yet see, or what we see but cannot yet describe, which is a condition almost indistinguishable from not seeing. I want to find a way to describe a world in which people are valued not for what they produce but for who they are—in which dignity is not a precarious state. I want to find a way to describe economic and social equality as a central value—a world in which inequality is, therefore, shrinking. I want to find a way to describe prosperity that is not linked to the accumulation of capital. Find a way to describe happiness as a public good, and the current pervasive crisis of mental health in a way that doesn’t involve the frames of norms and pathology, or the language of “fixing” people." — Marsha Gessen, How George Orwell Predicted the Challenge of Writing Today

Best Podcasts of 2018

• Blank Check with Griffin and David

• Night Call

• Unspooled

• Villains

• Keep It!

• Halloween Unmasked

Best Online Reading of 2018

• The White Darkness: A Solitary Journey Across Antarctica by David Grann

• A Business with No End by Jenny Odell

• I'm Not Black, I'm Kanye by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Keep Your Hands on the Wheel and Don't Look Down by Leath Tonino

• Jerry and Marge Go Large by Jason Fagone

• The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy by Matthew Stewart

• How Annhilation Nails the Complex Reality of Depression by Angelica Jade Bastién

• The Madness of King Musk by Jacob Silverman

• What Teenagers are Learning from Online Porn by Maggie Jones

• The Ballad of Ray Arnold by David Sims