The Retrographer, Issue 48 (1 0 0 2 0 1 8)

December 30, 2018

The top 100 songs of 2018, plus best albums, videos, weird internet stuff, and more.

The Retrographer, Issue 48 (1 0 0 2 0 1 8)

I started The Retrographer based on my experience that context gives music meaning. Meaning is an unpredictable alchemy: The right place, and the right people, at the right time, and a song is in your life forever. It’s a pin in your past. I’ve never gotten past the way music sounded from the back seat of a friend’s car aimlessly tracking my little town’s side streets. Or in college, where it was a standing topic for every visit to the dining hall and parties at the end of the week. Even as a kid, music was with my parents and in my room. Places and people made music matter.

When I moved to New York after college, life lost incidental contact. The corners where I’d share music with others dissolved into a more solitary existence, in earbuds on the subway or seated at my desk at work. I noticed this among others, too. I started to hear friends complain that they just didn’t have time to discover music anymore, or felt they were getting out of touch. “Kids these days”, “back in my day”-type stuff. Maybe you feel that way. It’s natural, as I see it, to how life changes: Away from communities and toward a personal life.

But I stayed deeply dug into music. Its mark was on me. It had lit the connections in my life like a string of Christmas lights and I knew there was some way to keep that alive, even as circumstantial significance became harder to come by. That’s the idea of The Retrographer: To repackage my love of music, its prismatic emotional power, into a way to bring people together. It’s here to keep you, the people who read this thing every month, gathered around its glow.

You don’t make a memory with an email. It’s not like turning the volume up at a house party. Not even close. But maybe it equips you, like it does for me, with the material to make memories with. As music changes and we drift further from our old shores, it’s all too easy to fall into the fallacious trap of believing, as many do, generation after generation, that music simply was better before, that things are worse than when you paid attention. This is the path of music: It matters to you when it mattered to people around you. It loses meaning when taken out of context. So maybe music is better at certain junctures in your life – times when it can catalyze with the people and discoveries you meet.

I listened to more music in 2018 than recent years. I considered thousands of songs, culled to a list of over 750 candidates – hundreds more than any other year – and finally widdled it down to the enclosed 100. But somehow, I ended in an unsettling place: For the first time in memory, I felt like 2018 was weaker than years past. Was I failing at my own goals? Am I too far from the spaces that give this music meaning to me? I listened, but did I let it in? Was my heart as open as my ears? A year’s music is a swirling, endless ocean. Everything I need is there. Why did I find less when I looked more?

In June of this year I shut down my startup, Cymbal. It was a social network where friends could find musical soulmates and discover the songs that were central to their lives at any given moment. When we announced its end, I heard from scores of users who told me they discovered favorite songs, made new best friends, and even fell in love. One listener wrote to say he was moving from his home in California to Australia to live with a girl he’d met through the app. Their vessel was songs.

In finishing my list, it started to come into focus. Hard as it was to end that project, it reaffirmed the truth that had led me down that, and this, and so many other paths in my life. The hole it left in my life only affirmed how important community is, and how music can mark its path.

I learned, in 2018, what I already knew: To give music meaning, let it in. To fulfill its power to mark the past, keep listening.

And...

Aretha Franklin

Top 10 Albums of 2018

  1. Saba, CAREFORME

  2. Mitski, Be the Cowboy

  3. Ian Wayne, A Place Where Nothing Matters

  4. Soccer Mommy, Clean

  5. Earl Sweatshirt, Some Rap Songs

  6. The 1975, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships

  7. Ovlov, Tru

  8. Kacey Musgraves, Golden Hour

  9. Yves Tumor, Safe in the Hands of Love

  10. Eric Church, Desperate Man

Top 10 Songs of 2018

  1. “Slow Burn”, Kacey Musgraves

  2. “HEAVEN ALL AROUND ME”, Saba

  3. “Confirmation”, Westerman

  4. “Love It If We Made It”, The 1975

  5. “Azucar”, Earl Sweatshirt

  6. “Exist”, Promnite

  7. “Girlfriend”, Ian Wayne

  8. “I Always Want to Die (Sometimes)”, The 1975

  9. “This Old House is All I Have”, Against All Logic

  10. “Believe”, Amen Dunes

The 1975's Matt Healy 

Top 10 Music Videos of 2018

10 Older Albums that Meant a Lot to Me in 2018

  1. Kate Bush, The Sensual World

  2. John Coltrane, Impressions

  3. Big Pun, Capital Punishment

  4. Morton Feldman, Rothko Chapel

  5. Arcade Fire, Neon Bible

  6. Dave Matthews Band, Under the Table and Dreaming

  7. Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding

  8. The Blue Nile, A Walk Across the Rooftops

  9. The Notorious B.I.G., Ready to Die

  10. Talk Talk, Spirit of Eden

Amazing and Weird YouTube Videos from 2018

Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes 

And Finally: A Meticulously-Sequenced Playlist of the Top 100 Songs of 2018

Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

  • “Come Back to Earth”, Mac Miller

  • “Slow Burn”, Kacey Musgraves

  • “HEAVEN ALL AROUND ME”, Saba

  • “Seventeen”, No Rome

  • “High”, Young Thug and Elton John

  • “The Distance”, Mariah Carey and Ty Dolla $ign

  • “Anywhere”, Anderson .Paak, Snoop Dogg, and The Last Artful Dodgr

  • “OTW”, Khalid, 6LACK, and Ty Dolla $ign

  • “R.E.M”, Ariana Grande

  • “Ever Again”, Robyn

  • “Knock Knock”, Tobi Lou

  • “Potato Salad”, Tyler, the Creator and A$AP Rocky

  • “A$AP Forever”, A$AP Rocky and Moby

  • “Noid”, Yves Tumor

  • “Azucar”, Earl Sweatshirt

  • “KIEFER NO MELODY”, Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes

  • “Come Together”, The Internet

  • “Trying Not To Die”, Louis Cole and Dennis Hamm

  • “Street Fighter Mas”, Kamasi Washington

  • “24k Gold / Sanctified”, Joey Purp, Ravyn Lenae

  • “Skrawberries”, JID and BJ the Chicago Kid

  • “This Old House Is All I Have”, Against All Logic

  • “Exist”, Promnite

  • “Nice For What”, Drake

  • “Infatuation”, Takeoff and Dayytona Fox

  • “Make Me Feel”, Janelle Monáe

  • “Short Court Style”, Natalie Prass

  • “Nobody”, Mitski

  • “Time of My Life”, KEY, DRAM, and Kenny Beats

  • “No Angel”, Charli XCX

  • “ZEZE”, Kodak Black, Travis Scott, and Offset

  • “thank u, next”, Ariana Grande

  • “Runaway”, The Shadowboxers

  • “Off Da Zoinkys”, JID

  • “God’s Plan”, Drake

  • “My My My!”, Troye Sivan

  • “I LIke It”, Cardi B, Bad Bunny, and J Balvin

  • “Dancing’s Not A Crime”, Panic! At The Disco

  • “When You’re Ugly”, Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi

  • “The Light”, Jeremih and Ty Dolla $ign

  • “Star Treatment”, Arctic Monkeys

  • “92 Explorer”, Post Malone

  • “After The Storm”, Kali Uchis, Tyler, the Creator, and Bootsy Collins

  • “The Mint”, Earl Sweatshirt and Navy Blue

  • “Plug Walk”, Rich The Kid

  • “1539 N. Calvert”, JPEGMAFIA

  • “Come Back Baby”, Pusha T

  • “King’s Dead”, Jay Rock, Kendrick Lamar, and Future

  • “Slick Talk”, JID

  • “SICKO MODE”, Travis Scott and Drake

  • “APESHIT”, The Carters

  • “Jet Lag”, Future, Juice WRLD, and Young Scooter

  • “Slide”, Curren$y, E-40, and Ty Dolla $ign

  • “Firm and Strong”, Popcaan

  • “Hope”, Blood Orange

  • “Hookers”, Tierra Whack

  • “Wouldn’t Leave”, Kanye West, PARTYNEXTDOOR, and Ty Dolla $ign

  • “PROM / KING”, Saba

  • “Miki Dora”, Amen Dunes

  • “Desperate Man”, Eric Church

  • “All the Reaching Trims”, Daniel Romano

  • “Pillar of Truth”, Lucy Dacus

  • “A Place Where Nothing Matters”, Ian Wayne

  • “Wayside”, Renata Zeiguer

  • “Only Acting”, Kero Kero Bonito

  • “Love It If We Made It”, The 1975

  • “Lich Prince”, Foxing

  • “Spright”, Ovlov

  • “5% TINT”, Travis Scott

  • “We Appreciate Power”, Grimes, HANA

  • “symbol”, Adrianne Lenker

  • “Pirouette”, Jam Som

  • “Darkness”, Pinegrove

  • “The Hammer”, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever

  • “Cool”, Soccer Mommy

  • “Girlfriend”, Ian Wayne

  • “Self”, Noname

  • “To Be”, Foxwarren

  • “IDGAF”, Sam Evian

  • “Believe”, Amen Dunes

  • “Lemon Glow”, Beach House

  • “Seeing Aliens”, DJ Koze

  • “Confirmation”, Westerman

  • “Desire”, Ought

  • “The Good Side”, Troye Sivan

  • “Anytime”, Snail Mail

  • “Me & My Dog”, boygenius

  • “Life”, Phil Cook

  • “Higher Wire”, Eric Church

  • “Lonesome Love”, Mitski

  • “womb”, Adrianne Lenker

  • “Fiar Annie”, Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore

  • “Fish”, Mountain Man

  • “Patterson & Leo”, Pinegrove

  • “The Last Great Washington State”, Damien Jurado

  • “Wildflowers”, Soccer Mommy

  • “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)”, The 1975

  • “Me&My (To Bury Your Parents)”, Andre 3000

  • “Yefikir Engurguro”, Hailu Mergia

  • “get well soon”, Ariana Grande

Best-Of Playlists

Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream. To see which tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."