Bright Lights, Big City

ISSUE #65

These are songs that paint an impressionist's portrait of the big city, something I've been living in a lot lately and can't stop thinking about. I could die any day on these streets, mainly because of these cars everyone’s always driving around (and me, I’m one of the worst culprits). I would be much less likely to perish if I'd stayed in the cornfields, just by traffic statistic standards.

At least there's access to a lot of stuff here. Kids who were born in the city always had more of a chance to be something. They were born with shows to go to, art movies to see, then they get older and have way more people to show them cool things and make out with. I was just thinking today about how often I was forced to hang out with this Sioux City kid named Kyle every time I visited my then-girlfriend during one college summer. He wouldn't stop calling me "Meff" and kept spending nights in jail. Some kids had friends who showed them Derek Jarman. Some were painters! One thing I learned from Kyle was how to bomb a mailbox.

My favorite works of art about the city are the paintings of Edward Hopper — basic, I know, art history 101 — and this playlist is filled with songs that I think get near the emotion of his work, the dark windows and lonely beds, the pallid green street lamps, the "dangerous visual intimacy of urban living,” as Olivia Laing called it. This playlist is all that, but with more dancing.