Own Your Spotify Wrapped, Cowards!
It’s Spotify Wrapped season! That delightful time of year when you’re blaming your streams on your kids or trying desperately to manipulate them. As Twitter user @HeavenlyGrandpa reminded us last month, in these last few last weeks of the year, “this is your last chance to binge listen to trendy things that won’t embarrass you.”
Or, if you’re like me, you’re doing absolutely nothing at all because you like what you like, others’ opinions be damned.
It took me some time to get here.
As a teenager, I was “one of the goth girls” at my small-town Catholic high school, pairing sometimes bold fashion choices with a newfound love of alternative music — not always acceptable in small-town Pennsylvania. Although my graduating class had a reputation for being friendly with each other, teenage scrutiny is inescapable, and some of my peers were hell-bent on making sure I knew how they felt about my taste in music and the way I dressed.
By my early 20s, I thought I’d done my time and had become immune to letting others make me feel bad about things I loved. But once, someone asked me to put on some music and told me not play “that shit” I like, specifically referencing one of my favorite bands at the time.
Even if you love something wholeheartedly, there’s a pain in hearing it dismissed not just by your peers but also people you’ve let into your life by choice and whose opinions you value. Judgments of things you like feel like judgments of you, especially coming from a friend. It was hard not to interpret my favorite band being called “shit” as a judgment about my taste in music, and it was hard not to spiral that into judgments of me as a person, especially as it was the latest in a series of insults that had been hurled at me by this person for months. If my favorite band is shit, that means my taste in music is shit, so then what does that say about me?
It can be a powerful sentiment even for the strongest of personalities, morphing into internal pressure, to the point that it’s almost impossible to separate the two and distinguish one from the other. No wonder society invented the concept of the guilty pleasure: the implication is it’s something you’re not supposed to like, and you sure as hell shouldn’t admit to liking it.
Of course, this is ridiculous. But maybe Spotify Wrapped is it the easiest place to start rethinking why we care so much about others’ opinions.
Wrapped gives us a snapshot of our listening habits, and it brings all the trappings of social media and online life with it. By making the information public, it creates yet another opportunity for people to feel like they have to present themselves a certain way. The not-insignificant amount of attention posts like the aforementioned one get suggests the sentiment really resonates with people, that there’s something performative about Spotify Wrapped — even if you’re listening to something alone in your home, you need to convey to the world that your listening habits actually look a certain way. And Twitter users cracking jokes aren’t the only ones aware of it — as of early November, Google results for “Spotify Wrapped” were dominated by news articles warning it was too late to attempt to manipulate your results, as Spotify’s cutoff for the data is Halloween. Much like year-end best-of lists that seem to come out earlier and earlier each year, this ignores a solid two months of listening and new releases. Swifties barely had enough time to get Midnights in their top streams.
Every year, I’m surprised by what Wrapped tells me. I use it mostly for music discovery, streaming new releases to decide what to buy — yes, I still buy, and if you know me personally or have been following my writing about music, you may be rolling your eyes right now and thinking, “Yes, we know” — and listening to new artists or what my friends are into in a feeble attempt to keep up with the ever-changing landscape. And so my Wrapped results are almost never indicative of what artists excited me or what album I think is nearly perfect from beginning to end or what song gets stuck in my head a few times a week, which is generally why I don’t share them. It’s not because I’m embarrassed by my results; it’s that for me, they don’t present an accurate picture of me musically. Sometimes, I’m actually surprised to see songs make the list that I barely remember having listened to. It’s like the algorithm was desperate to round out my playlist and settled for anything I played, even if it was just once.
Otherwise, Wrapped couldn’t possibly present me with a result I won’t admit to. I tried to think of a hypothetical scenario where my results showed thousands of streams for an artist I consider a guilty pleasure, but I failed. Now, many years later, I think maybe it’s precisely because I’ve had people make fun of me that I’ve swung so far the other direction, being unashamedly open about what I love. Those years helped build a foundation where the most important opinion was my own. I’m not up for the inauthentic, performative task of curating a version of myself that will be approved by others. You can’t make me feel embarrassed about what I love because I don’t see why I should be. There’s no argument convincing enough to make me deny music, or anything else, for that matter, I genuinely love.
(Note: I did try to include my Wrapped playlist here, but for some reason, it’s not working right and is displaying a playlist that is most definitely not mine.)
People and pop culture are both too complex to be narrowly defined, especially when it comes to music. Music is so often hailed as a universal language, and those of us who go beyond just being casual listeners hold it in high regard as a crucial aspect of our lives. Even for those who aren’t as intense about it, music can still hold meaning, with songs serving as markers throughout life. We can chart our lives with the hits of any given year, from songs that came out when we were little kids to the songs we danced to in high school to what we played with friends at parties in college. Nowhere is this more apparent than the role music can play in romantic relationships — couples often have “their song,” sometimes ruined forever after a breakup, and weddings often feature a carefully chosen first dance.
Music is to be enjoyed, played at a high volume while you sing along at the top of your lungs, lyrics expressing things you can’t or in a way you hadn’t considered or maybe articulating your feelings perfectly so that you feel less alone, playlists curated carefully to reflect every possible mood or event, shared with the people you love. Not hidden and denied because it doesn’t fit with someone else’s idea of what’s “cool” or “trendy” or, really, who you are. Because in a way, that’s what the pressure of the concept of a guilty pleasure is — someone else’s opinion of what you should like based on their impression of you.
I long for the day when the “guilty pleasure” is a relic of the past. Spotify Wrapped in particular is supposed to be something fun, a look back at the past year, rather than a metric for how cool — or not — listeners are. Own your results this year, you cowards! Live your life. Go listen to music and love it.
