Weekend Kickoff - DEC 2017

Thirty-one tracks for the last Friday of 2017 — the year-end edition of the rotation, sent to the group chat on December 22 with the message “end of the year, last one for a while.” The songs that had survived the twelve months of editions, with a handful of late-rotation singles from November and December that hadn’t been on a Weekend Kickoff yet but that needed to be.

Wale with Major Lazer, WizKid, and Dua Lipa “My Love” — the Major Lazer VIP Remix specifically — opens because the song is doing the thing the late-2017 rotation kept asking it to do: bridging the rap-radio rotation and the dance-pop crossover and the dancehall-revival side and the slick-pop side in a single track. The collaboration shouldn’t work and it does. The placement at first-track signals the entire rotation’s aesthetic within the first ninety seconds.

The Beaches “Money” follows because the Toronto band’s catalog had quietly been in the group chat’s rotation for half the year. The track is the kind of post-Strokes alt-rock that the genre keeps producing without quite getting credit for, and “Money” is the cut where the band’s catalog clicks into its actual identity. Tash Sultana “Jungle” sits a few tracks in — the Australian one-person-band whose loop-pedal performances had been my favorite YouTube discovery of the year. The studio version captures less of the live energy than the live versions do, but “Jungle” specifically translates.

The Revivalists “Wish I Knew You” was the slow-burn radio hit of the year. The song had been out for over a year before it actually crossed over into mainstream rotation — the kind of track that takes its time finding its audience. By December 2017 the song was inescapable, but the playlist’s placement is honoring the audience it actually had in the group chat, which had been on it from the beginning.

Lauv “Easy Love” is the deliberate-saccharine pop pull that the rotation absolutely commits to. The track is built around the kind of melodic hook that the streaming-era pop catalog kept producing — short, melodic, the kind of song you sing in the shower without remembering where you heard it. The placement is honest about the year’s pop-radio rotation rather than pretending the friend group only listened to the cool stuff.

Busta Rhymes with Vybz Kartel and Tory Lanez “Girlfriend” carries the dancehall-rap-radio crossover. Busta’s catalog had been quietly excellent through the second half of the decade in a way that the streaming-era’s working-rotation has tended to undervalue. The track is doing the thing Busta has always done best — riding a Caribbean rhythm with the kind of vocal velocity that nobody else in the rap canon can quite match.

Foo Fighters “The Sky Is A Neighborhood” is the rock-radio anchor of the rotation. Grohl writes for arenas and the song earns the description — the chorus is the kind of thing you can hear three hundred yards away from a stage. The placement late in the rotation is sequencing the back-third for the post-dinner energy lift.

Jasmine Thompson with Eden Prince “Mad World” — the Eden Prince Remix — is the closer. The original “Mad World” is a Tears for Fears song from 1982 that Gary Jules covered for the Donnie Darko soundtrack in 2001 and that Adam Lambert covered on American Idol in 2009. The Thompson-and-Eden-Prince version is the dance-floor remix of the Gary Jules cover of the Tears for Fears original. The chain of covers is a small bit of music-history archaeology that the friend group appreciated when I pointed it out.

Thirty-one tracks. About two hours. The right length for a late-December Friday-evening rotation that runs through dinner-prep into the post-dinner kitchen-cleanup, with the music doing the work of being the soundtrack to the year-end texting that the group chat does every Christmas Eve. The replies came back through New Year’s. Some of the friends were arguing about which tracks should have made it, some were sending their own year-end picks, one of them was at his in-laws’ house and texting from the bathroom every twenty minutes about what was playing in the kitchen. The rotation does what it’s supposed to do. That’s the metric.

The December edition was the year’s last formal Kickoff before the holiday hiatus. The friend group’s tradition was that the December edition got texted out on Christmas Eve and the replies ran into New Year’s. The 2017 December tape produced one of the year’s longest reply threads — friends sending their own year-end picks, friends arguing about which songs should have made the cut, friends asking when the next year’s editions would start.