2023 Year In Music, Pt. 2
Playlists: overall 2023 playlist, grab-bagging across Europe, and whittling down the amapiano
Yes, I still have content! But it’s the sort of “content” that teachers have in the last week of school — buckle up, kids, we’re about to watch Frozen 2 again.
I’m currently wrangling with all of the data in big year-end playlist, so I’ve decided to parcel out best-of’s as I go, with somewhat arbitrary regional and genre parameters. As always, my playlist mixes have to fit on a CDR, and have to work well as a continuous mix with proper segues.
Before I get into that, I’ll link some of my Singles Jukebox writing that went up since I shared my curated words of the year last week.
Kesha: Eat the Acid — the only serious writing I finally mustered on my album of the year after pecking away at several drafts on it over the past few months. “Gag Order is an album that articulates ugly and beautiful and inconveniently truthful moments in one’s life, the jagged edges and things that can’t be unseen, with unflattering documentary clarity but also a premonition of the eventual grace from having healed from it someday.” (I also want to explore a secondary idea that came out of this blurb, which is that “projection is the second-worst sin of decent parents, after possession.”)
Chappell Roan: Red Wine Supernova — an excuse to write about the experience of watching the (very good) rebooted She-Ra with my kids, and how my ‘90s childhood is in many ways closer to the ‘50s childhood of my parents than it is to my kids’ culture (with Chappell Roan stuck awkwardly between us generationally).
Beyoncé: My House — A so-so blurb, but gave me an excuse to write something I’ve thought about re: Beyoncé’s career for a while without developing it anywhere: “More than any other celebrity archetype, Beyoncé reminds me of a television star of the ’90s who made the prestige move to cinema and never looked back, even as television and cinema merged into the same formless blob of Engaging Artistic Narrative Content: she’s like George Clooney or Jennifer Aniston, carrying the torch of a pop culture upward mobility that everyone says they’ve moved past even though they still treat the legacy holdouts with the reverence of a bygone era.”
OK, playlists!
Best Of 2023 (overall list)
There are many other songs I like just as much as these, and a few I probably like better than nearly anything on this list, which I either decided to shunt off to genre playlists (especially amapiano and baile funk) or associate too much with their albums to take out of context (Kesha’s “Eat the Acid,” say).
Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain)
Most of the best of some well-represented countries in Western Europe. Didn’t really catch a ton of trends in these countries this year, so this is really a grab bag that I still think holds together pretty well. I would call the vibe “Not-in-English Golden Beats,” the kinds of songs I’ve been so lucky to discover throughout the People’s Pop Polls (slowly winding their way to a close as Twitter continues to collapse entirely). Perhaps a few would be fodder for future People’s Pop league games.
Eastern Europe (mostly Poland & Ukraine)
This one plays mostly as alternating Polish and Ukrainian tracks, the vast majority of stuff I heard from Eastern Europe this year. (There’s technically one from Russia, though by a Russian-Ukrainian pop star, Mari Kraimbrery, and one from Estonia, the beautiful closer by Mari Kalkun.) I still don’t have a great sense of what’s going on in Poland, but there’s a new collaborative newsletter, Brzmi w Trzcinie, that I’m looking forward to diving into in the new year. Their first post, a 2023 round-up, is fantastic, though it leans more toward experimental and arty than the crass hyperpop stuff I’m so fond of. But I’m just happy to learn as much as possible.
Amapiano & Beyond
This was the toughest one to cut down — I have a longlist of over a hundred amapiano and other South African songs, most of which I’m confident I did not listen to for more than a minute. And because amapiano song lengths are well over 5 minutes on average, I have fewer slots to work with.
I favored interesting (if not “best”) things from outside South Africa — Japan, China, Suriname, Nigeria, and UK crossover attempts are all included. I open with the biggest song to move away from amapiano proper, Dlala Thukzin’s 3step track “iPlan,” before doubling back to what I believe is the first 2023 amapiano song I included on a mix (“Werser” by Mr. Eazi). Missing from the mix is anything from Mellow & Sleazy or Felo Le Tee — strongly recommend checking out Midnight in Sunnyside 2 from Mellow & Sleazy, and I can only flog The III Wise Men so much before the horse finally kicks the bucket.
I’ve got spreadsheets to finalize and then I will be back next week with more playlists and some DATA. Fun, right? (…Right?)
—Dave Moore (the other one)