The Ultimate Playlist

My obsession with playlists started back in the bad old days of cassette players. I would borrow my grandmother's dual tape radio player and would spend hours listening to the radio, waiting for my favorite songs to play in order to lunge at the record button. I'm pretty sure there's a word in German for the feeling of crushing disappointment you have when you manage to catch your new favorite song only to run out of tape before the song is over. I made grainy, choppy, staticky mixtapes for everything. Mixtapes for waking up in the morning, mixtapes for homework, mixtapes for sleeping, you name it. If it was even remotely noteworthy, I probably had a mixtape for it. I tried to catch every fleeting emotion and transcribe it into the vocabulary of Dick Casey's top 40.

With the advent of CDs came a brief period of time when mixtapes became an even more precise science of trading CDs with friends so you could get the maximum amount of music with the minimum amount of monetary outlay. Didn't love Pearljam but really liked a couple of the songs on Vitalogy that weren't playing on the radio? Go hit up Matt, no not that Matt, Matt on the swim team...no, not blond Matt, tall Matt on the swim team, he had it. This method was still subject to running out of tape before the song ended and required a significant amount of planning. This is when I discovered mixtapes as conversation and would drop the subtle (or not so subtle) mixtape in order to tell my crush that I wanted to be more than friends. This is also when I discovered that mixtapes are not a great way to communicate. What I thought was an eloquent and well-thought-out confession of unrequited emotion was taken for an ok mixtape ("I don't really like R&B but the rest was great, thanks.").

Then came the ripping and burning of MP3s and MP4s, Limewire, and oh so many forums to get really bad quality Britney Spears and Limp Bizkit sound files (along with a bunch of malware if you were incautious). I loved all of it. I'm rarely an early adapter to tech but every time there were new music storage and sharing platforms, I would check them out. This is when the playlist truly became The Playlist. The digital storage of music made it easier to compile musical lists and play them in order, for hours! Making new playlists became a simple matter of dragging and dropping, the combinations were endless. There were no limits! Want to get your mope on and listen to R.E.M's Losing My Religion on repeat all day? Not a problem...for you anyway, anyone else who lives with you will probably lose their religion by proxy if you weren't wearing headphones.

My current choice for compulsive playlist building is Spotify, but I've dabbled with Google Music, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, and anything else that's popped up over the past 10 years. I'm not as enthusiastic as I used to be about learning new platforms and recreating old playlists, it's a hassle. I've slowed down in the last 5 years, at last count I've created mere 37 playlists. I've found that I really enjoy listening to the playlists curated by other listeners. I like to imagine that they too sit and scroll through music, selecting and discarding songs like pieces of a musical wardrobe, trying to find the right fit. Maybe they're inspired by an emotion, something they're going through at the time, or perhaps by an impending road trip or event. Maybe they've just discovered a new artist and want to pair their music with music by older, better-known artists in the perfect genre mix-up.

I want to imagine that there will always be some version of the playlist out there, that there will always be people taking snapshots of emotion, time, and place and converting them into lists of songs. I know that I will always be able to go back and listen to a playlist and know exactly where I was and how I was feeling when I created it. Playlists do something pictures have never been able to do for me, bringing back memories of people and places I'd long forgotten. For me, like The Dude, the playlist abides.