(Though there is, in certain genres, plenty of all that as well.) Read through this list, and what you’ll often see instead is a very earnest, very serious desire to find the right reaction to a world that feels tense and high-stakes - an ambient conviction that music should be looking for ways to cope, ways to protect ourselves, moments of escape, hard reckonings with our collective responsibilities, ideas for how to make the world feel less brutal. What’s amazing is that the musical expression of all this isn’t always some big swing toward darkness, or anger, or anxiety. “The music kids are listening to is heavy! Maybe it’s hard to be positive and optimistic at the moment.” The Swedish singer Robyn acknowledges that “pop at the moment is depressing” in an interview midway through this issue. “Life is pretty tumultuous right now for all of us,” said the crossover country star Kacey Musgraves, while accepting a Grammy for the Album of the Year. At some point it became a routine conversational tic for all sorts of people, of all sorts of persuasions, to express, with an incredulous gesture, that things feel a bit grueling and frantic lately, don’t they? Musicians are no exception. There’s an oddly strong in-the-moment consensus on how everyone is feeling these days, and it is not good. It takes a certain amount of hindsight to notice how all the wildly different reactions people had to the moment were still, in the end, reactions to the same thing all the different poses they adopted were still being struck against the same backdrop.īut this era - this year, and the last one, and one or two before that - might be an exception. It usually takes a while - a decade or two - before we can look back at a particular era of American life and see it as something coherent, something whose every aspect is marked by one overarching mood. 25 ‘My Queen Is Harriet Tubman’ Sons of Kemet Full Track.23 ‘Can’t Knock the Hustle’ Weezer Full Track.22 ‘Love It If We Made It’ The 1975 Full Track.21 ‘Assume Form’ James Blake Full Track.16 ‘Girls Like You’ Maroon 5 Full Track.15 ‘I Shall Love 2’ Julia Holter Full Track.10 ‘Slow Burn’ Kacey Musgraves Full Track.6 ‘Why Did You Do That?’ Lady Gaga Full Track.2 ‘Thank u, Next’ Ariana Grande Full Track.1 ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ (2018) Bruce Spring.

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