Fluxblog Weekly #242: 2019 Survey Mix
December 17th, 2019
2019 Survey Mix
I started making “survey mixes” at the end of the year at the start of this decade, and my approach to anthologizing the year’s music has changed over time. Initially it was all about my favorites, and then there was more of an effort to be as expansive as possible. When I’ve gone back to do previous decades, I’ve tried to be as thorough as I can, which is a little easier with hindsight. This year I’ve been collecting the survey in a rolling playlist in real time, and the result is a playlist of around 1000 songs that’s too much for anyone to reasonably listen to but is also STILL fairly incomplete in my mind. The amount of music produced now is truly staggering and we don’t talk enough about what that volume of material actually means for music culture, especially when the full range and diversity of what’s going on in music is largely ignored by media in favor of celebrity and whoever has serious money behind them. Hopefully these 2019 survey playlists will help you find some things you love that exist outside of all that.
Because the main survey is so large and unwieldy I’ve decided to make three other playlists with specific musical themes in the interest of listenability. The first of which is focused on, loosely speaking, R&B and slow jams. There was a huge amount of excellent music in this vein in 2019 and that chunk of the main survey was one of the things I listened to most frequently.
The second breakout playlist is basically all “indie,” which is defined somewhat loosely – I mean, I have a Taylor Swift song in this one – but I think it all fits together quite nicely.
And finally, here’s just a lot of bangers and bops – up tempo pop, dance music, and rap.
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