Favorite Music of 2019

Another good year for WXPN-type music (although my favorite radio station for some reason decided not to do a listener poll this year). Other songs, not so much. And most of my favorite folks released albums last year, rather than in 2019.

 

Songs (AAA division) 

1. Outside Of This Town – Christone “Kingfish” Ingram (#82, WTMD Top 89)
2. Harmony Hall – Vampire Weekend (#5)
3. Keep Your Head Up – Preservation Hall Jazz Band
4. Juice – Lizzo (#73)
5. You Got It Wrong – Jeb Loy Nichols
6. Falling Down The Stairs Of Your Smile – New Pornographers (#20)
7. Saw Lightning – Beck (#29)
8. Armor – Sara Bareilles (#80)
9. When Am I Gonna Lose You – Local Natives (#23)
10. Trouble In Paradise – Rufus Wainwright
11. Hello Sunshine – Bruce Springsteen
12. Goin’ Back To Philly – Tommy Conwell & The Young Rumblers
13. Overexcited – Guster (#26)
14. This Life – Vampire Weekend
15. All Your’n – Tyler Childers (#51)

 Songs (other) 

1. Circles – Post Malone
2. Better – Khalid
3. Old Town Road – Lil Nas X
4. thank u, next – Ariana Grande
5. Good As Hell – Lizzo

 Albums 

1. Blinded By The Light – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
2. Kingfish – Christone “Kingfish” Ingram (#20, mvyradio Top 25)
3. Daylight – Grace Potter (#8)
4. Western Stars – Bruce Springsteen (#21)
5. 40 – The Stray Cats

Defining the 2010s

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/26/s-were-decade-what-exactly-six-columnists-tell-us/?arc404=true

 

The Washington Post asked six of their columnists to characterize the past decade. Two particular quotations stood out for me.

 

From Dana Milbank:

The rise of social media — Facebook and Twitter — aggravated and amplified the fissures [within America]. Though it gave voice to millions, it proved ruinous to traditional media and, with it, any sense of a shared, objective truth. It gave rise to demagoguery, gave an edge to authoritarianism and its primary weapon, disinformation, and gave legitimacy and power to the most extreme, hate-filled and paranoid elements of society.

 

From Molly Roberts:

[W]e soon found we weren’t only giving each other access to our photos and thoughts, our likes and our loves. We were allowing the [social media] platforms access to a whole mess more, and those platforms were letting third parties see it, too. To maximize our engagement, those platforms played on the preferences all our sharing revealed — which meant shoving inflammatory content in our faces and shoving us into silos. All that connection ended up dividing us.

Big Brother on campus

A truly scary Christmas morning article:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/24/colleges-are-turning-students-phones-into-surveillance-machines-tracking-locations-hundreds-thousands/