Weekend Kickoff - Year in Review 2016

Twenty-eight tracks pulled from a year of Friday-night listening. For most of 2016 I made a weekly playlist for the group chat — six to eight of us who’d been swapping music for years — and at the end of December I went through the twelve months of editions and pulled the songs that had stuck. The ones a friend asked me to send again. The ones that came up in conversation. The ones I caught myself replaying on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing was supposed to be on.

Red Hot Chili Peppers “Dark Necessities” opens because that was the song of the year for the group chat. The bass line is the part everyone hummed without meaning to. Drake “Controlla” is the back-half pull from the same June when the album came out and the patio season started. Marian Hill “Got It” sits a few tracks in — a band one of the friends discovered first and then sent to everyone with the message “this is what 2016 sounds like.” She was right.

The Jayhawks “Comeback Kids” is in here because it earned its way in. The band has been around for thirty years and the album that came out this year was their best in a decade. Roots-rock for people who outgrew their alt-rock phase but couldn’t go all the way to country. Kungs vs Cookin’ On 3 Burners “This Girl” was the dance-pop pull that the group chat agreed on without anyone having to argue — the original is a Melbourne soul track from 2011 and the Kungs version found the way to bring it into a pop-radio context without ruining it.

Mid-rotation pulls in the rap-and-soul side of the year. Mac Miller “Weekend” with Miguel. Anderson .Paak in two separate features. A Tribe Called Quest from the November comeback album that gave the whole friend group a reason to call each other on a Friday night and play the same song at the same time over speakerphone. The Tribe was the year’s most-anticipated reunion and it didn’t disappoint — “Electric Relaxation” is on here as the catalog reach-back and “We the People” sits later as the new cut that everyone was screaming along to in November.

The Strokes “OBLIVIUS” is the indie-rock-revival peak. The band released a short EP that year that nobody quite expected and that landed harder than the year-end critics gave it credit for. Five songs, all sharp, all worth the wait. The Killers’ new record was in the rotation too — “Wonderful Wonderful” was about to drop the next year but the singles were already starting to leak.

Marshmello “Alone” handles the EDM-festival end of the rotation. The song was inescapable from May onward and the friend group’s reaction split clean down the middle — half of us couldn’t stop playing it, half of us couldn’t believe the other half couldn’t stop playing it. Kaskade “4AM” is the deeper-house counterweight. I put both on the year-in-review because both got played, and the methodology is to be honest about what was on, not to curate the year retroactively into something more flattering than it was.

Destructo “Techno” was the wildcard that one of the friends in the group chat insisted on every week. He was right to insist. Trick Daddy “J.O.D.D.” with Khia is the Miami-bass revival cut that the November edition built around — a song from 2017 in spirit but released right at the year-end and that the rotation absolutely had to honor as part of the year-in-review even though it was technically out of the calendar window.

Twenty-eight tracks lands at about ninety minutes. The right length for a Friday-evening playback in late December when the group is doing year-end texting and the playlist needs to be the conversation starter rather than the conversation itself. I sent the link to the group on Christmas Eve and the replies came back through New Year’s — friends arguing about which songs should have been on it, friends remembering specific moments from specific weeks, friends asking when the next year’s editions were going to start. They started the first Friday of January. They always did.

This isn’t the year’s critical-canon best-of. It’s the friend group’s collective rotation as we actually lived it. Some of the songs aged well. Some aged less well. The year as we heard it, in the order it stuck.