When Your 2023 Spotify Wrapped Is a Howl From the Abyss
Accidentally created a playlist that drags listeners into the 5th dimension? Here's what to expect from your first week.
It's been an interesting year.
Thanks to 12 months of self-(un)employment, you’ve leaned into what you’re calling an “extreme minimalist lifestyle” which consists of selling all your sneakers on Poshmark and subscribing to a lot of blogs about fermentation.
You’ve been sober for a year and attend Tabata Ultimate Fitness classes four times a week to strengthen your glutes and core in preparation for your next on-set gig or a zombie apocalypse, whichever comes first.
Whilst you’ve never been this physically fit, you are now, unfortunately, 100% present to your life at all times. You are so awake, so alive, with so much time on your hands, that you actually read whole books and the fat content written on food packaging, and are becoming increasingly interested in how the government spent all the taxes you gave it back when you had money.
You have a resting heart rate of 30bpm, apart from when you think about your future and it spikes to an unmanageable 300. You’re basically a retired boomer trapped in the body of a frontiers woman who sheers sheep at a competitive level.
Since you’re now paying attention to the news and the economy, your mind is a chaotic hellscape and music is one of the few self-soothing tools you have left. Instead of numbing yourself with alcohol, you now access a state of zen through “blissed-out ambient grooves” that contain no lyrics or discernible tune.
The more you listen, the more the Spotify algorithm sends you, and it floods your Discover Weekly with ever-more obscure music as the year goes on.
And this has had a cosmic and terrifying effect on your 2023 Spotify Wrapped…
This year, as most of the population cringe at finding Mambo No. 5 or Skrillex on their playlist, your Spotify Wrapped is so abstract, so pretentious, and so profound that it's literally upending the lives and psychic equilibrium of anyone who dares listen to it.
When you look at your Top 100 songs, you’re faced with track names like In i Skogen by Sagor and Swing, Caves of Altamira by Spang Sisters, or 0000 871 0003 by 00110100 01010100.
One of your top songs is a Bonobo track called Polyghost (shout out to everyone still trying to be ENM in the afterlife!) which features stirring violins over the dreadful creaks and moans of an abandoned submarine. It's from an album called Fragments, which is how people will describe their egos after listening to your 2023 Spotify Wrapped.
When you see someone else’s Spotify Wrapped includes Sitting on the Dock of the Bay and A Horse With No Name, you’re reminded that songs used to be named after lyrics, and a singer’s name could just be their legal name and almost never made up entirely of numbers.
Where most songs in the canon are about loving your baby, missing your baby - or as country songs go, shooting your baby in the head - the majority in the your Spotify Wrapped can be best described as My baby is the noise made by a Casio watch or I have no baby because there is no baby since everything is pure love radiating from the infinite energy generated by the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.
You’re forced to Google almost all of your top 5 genres and take detailed notes on the subtle differences between the two ambient categories.
Fourth World
Music that attempts to express liminal spaces between reality and sleep: dream states, utopian fantasies, or the feeling one might have whilst flying or dying. Music made by white people sometimes sampling the ancestral sounds of brown people to express their vision of a new world that’s probably just what the current world would be like if the white people hadn’t been so genocidal and turned everything into a Starbucks.
Compositional Ambient
Similar to Fourth World but with even more atmosphere and even less form - LET’S GET QUIET!!! Melody and lyrics are a big no-no. Tribal flutes played over a fax machine are a big yes-yes. Someone is always repetitively hitting one low note on the piano.
Indie Soul
Indie Soul makes an appearance every year as the one recognizable genre sitting in the middle of your musical hamburger of pretension. It’s appearance in your yearly playlist represents the burst of vivacity you experience every 14th day of your menstrual cycle when you're compelled to blast Jazmine Sullivan, Erykah Badu, and D’Angelo from your SONOS speakers, and gyrate orgasmically in the space between the fridge and the dining table, performing what you think is a body roll but is actually daggering.
This is when you are most fertile.
Chamber Pop
Anthemic and stirring, definitely with lyrics, usually about how everything is wrong but if you just climb out of your childhood bedroom window at midnight and ride your bike around a very safe suburban neighborhood, you will feel a deep oneness with all living things. This music gives major yearn.
The bands in this genre are usually made up of between three and twelve men and one enigmatic woman who is depressed in a godlike and sexual way. She either has a completely shaved head or hair so long she can sit on it. She is the alpha.
These bands are possibly cults.
Pastoral
Banjo music.
Despite not knowing any of your favorite artists, you’re strangely proud of this depressing and inaccessible playlist, and share it on your Instagram without much thought as to how it might impact the collective consciousness of humanity…
24 Hours After Sharing Your 2023 Spotify Wrapped:
You get a couple of likes in Instagram and a few friends reach out for a wellness check but it’s otherwise a pretty lukewarm response to your Spotify Wrapped this year.
But before the day is done, a new follower reaches out to say that she was so moved by the ethereal plinks and plonks of your top artist, Gia Margaret, that she booked an appointment to get three tiny tattoos of a ribbon, a lamb, and a Smith & Western pistol on her temples.
48 Hours After Sharing Your 2023 Spotify Wrapped:
Your old chiropractor, Dr. Greg, starts following you on Spotify (a quick look on his Facebook page reveals he’s going through a messy divorce) and shortly after listening to your 2023 Spotify Wrapped he invites you to something called Mushroom Church.
Three Days After Sharing Your 2023 Spotify Wrapped:
Your dad Googled “Fourth World music” and now he wants to take peyote with you in Ecuador but you only have enough Delta SkyMiles to fly him out for a 2 hour shamanic ceremony in a yoga studio in Williamsburg. When he arrives two weeks later, he decides against the ceremony after discovering his insurance doesn't even cover people over 60 for mild yoga-related injuries let alone accidents caused by trans-dimensional hallucinogenic travel.
Four Days After Sharing Your 2023 Spotify Wrapped:
After listening to your Spotify Wrapped non-stop for four days, an old colleague calls to say she’s quit her job, is moving to a small homestead in Oregon, and now identifies as an energy healer called Stardust Modem.
You are invited to your fifth ecstatic dance class this week.
Five Days After Sharing Your 2023 Spotify Wrapped:
Listening parties have started to spring up all over major cities where swarms of music fans lie down on bean bags and listen to your 2023 Spotify Wrapped in total darkness. You attend the inaugural New York gathering as DJ and guest of honor, presiding over 850 attendees from an inflatable neon sofa propped up on apple boxes.
The event overruns because you fail to notice the playlist has stopped and everyone has been listening to the low, atmospheric hum of the AC unit for three hours. As people file out of the space at 3am, a woman comes up to you to tell you she saw God.
Six Days After Sharing Your 2023 Spotify Wrapped:
Spotify invents a new genre of music playlist to describe your “work”: The Post-Melody Vague Noize Collection. You get 2.8million new followers overnight and Gen Z starts a new trend of listening to your 2023 Spotify Wrapped backwards whilst speaking in tongues.
Oprah would like to meet you but only if its on the astral plane.
One Week After Sharing Your 2023 Spotify Wrapped:
People have started to build a religion around your 2023 Spotify Wrapped, dubbing you its enigmatic leader, “Mother Taste”. Loyal followers evoke your spirit by playing Youtube videos of Alan Watts speeches from their phones placed inside the body of a cello.
You are now registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit and are tax exempt.
Despite becoming the most famous and influential playlist creator in music history, you are still technically unemployed and will be moving in with your parents after Christmas.
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