While it predates the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying social distancing by several years, José Manuel Ballester’s Concealed Spaces project reimagines iconic works of art without the people in them (like what’s happening to our public spaces right now). No one showed up for Leonardo’s Last Supper:
Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights is perhaps just as delightful without people:
And Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus has been rescheduled:
Ben Greenman, Andy Baio, and Paco Conde & Roberto Fernandez have some suggestions for new album covers:
Designer Jure Tovrljan redesigned some company logos for these coronavirus times.
Coca-Cola even modified their own logo on a Times Square billboard to put some distance between the letters.
(via colossal & fast company)
Update: Some emoji designed specifically for COVID-19. The Earth with the pause button is my favorite. (via sidebar)
Back at the end of 2010, Ben Greenman created a playlist for the New Yorker’s holiday party that featured one song from each year of the magazine’s existence ordered chronologically.
At the party, the mix worked like a charm. Jazz and blues greeted the early arrivals, and as the party picked up, the mood became romantic (thanks to the big-band and vocal recordings of the late thirties and forties), energetic (thanks to early rock and roll like Fats Domino and Jackie Brenston in the early fifties), funky (James Brown in 1973, Stevie Wonder in 1974), and kitschy (the eighties), after which it erupted into a bright riot of contemporary pop and hip-hop (Rihanna! Kanye! M.I.A.! Lil Jon!).
After Greenman’s list was published, others created playlists from it on Rdio, YouTube, and Spotify. I listened to this playlist a lot on Rdio back then; it was the perfect way to time travel through the 20th and early 21st centuries in just a few hours.
I was reminded of the list yesterday after Laura Olin asked about favorite Spotify playlists and discovered that Tom Whitwell’s playlist was still around. He’d created it back in the early days of streaming music services, when Spotify was available only in Europe, so some of the songs had gone missing and others, like those by Michael Jackson & The Beatles, who didn’t allow their music on streaming services then. With Whitwell’s kind permission, I went in and tidied up the list, finding the proper song for every year but 1993 (“Return of the Crazy One,” by Digital Underground, which is available on YouTube…on the playlist it’s represented by “Doowutchyalike”).
Not content to have the list trapped in amber for eternity, I emailed Greenman to see if he had any thoughts on music from the intervening years. Although he’s no longer a staffer at the New Yorker, he generously sent me his selections for 2011-2018.1
2011: “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele
2012: “Call Me Maybe”by Carly Rae Jepsen
2013: “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk
2014: “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)” by Run the Jewels
2015: “WTF” by Missy Elliott
2016: “Hotline Bling” by Drake
2017: “Humble” by Kendrick Lamar
2018: “This is America” by Childish Gambino
You can listen to the full playlist embedded above or here on Spotify. Greenman shared some thoughts on updating the list:
The original list was occasioned by a party: the magazine’s 85th anniversary. Almost a decade has passed, and many things have changed. It feels like a less celebratory time, darker and less hopeful in some ways. But pop music persists. In extending the list from 2010 to the present, I tried to think about how those short bursts of sound still give us moments of joy, and how certain bursts attach themselves to certain moments in history.
I love this playlist and am so glad it’s back and updated. Big thanks to Ben and Tom for making this happen.
P.S. If you duplicate this playlist on Apple Music, Tidal, etc., send me a link. Or even better, if you’re inspired to create your own Songs of the Years playlist, send along those links too. I would love to hear alternate musical journeys through that era — e.g. playlists featuring only black artists or only women would be amazing.
Update: John Stokvis recreated the playlist on Apple Music. Apple had the correct Digital Underground song, but not De La Soul’s “Me, Myself & I”, so Stokvis subbed in “She Drives Me Crazy” from The Fine Young Cannibals. Here’s the Google Play playlist, courtesy of @neuroboy…looks like Google has every song.
A bit off-topic but still within rhyming distance, Aaron Coleman made a playlist of songs with years in the title from 1952-2031. He acknowledges that some of the songs are “terrible”.
Update: I reached out to Ben Greenman for 2019’s addition to this playlist and he picked Old Town Road by Lil Nas X, perhaps the single piece of culture that defined 2019 more than anything else. He had this to say about the choice:
To me, this wasn’t a song. This isn’t a commentary on its quality or some old-fogey dismissal of whatever countrified rap is being called this time around (Yee Haw?). It’s more that Old Town Road’s journey through the culture seems less like the arc of a song and more like a tour of all the ways that things come to our attention these days: the original instrumental sold online by YoungKio, the way that Lil Nas overlaid vocals, the climb through various platforms, the controversy over genre, the remix, the rebirth, the re-remix. If you were teaching a media studies class in 2019 and wanted to touch on all the arms of the starfish, Old Town Road would be your entry point.
I’ve added it to the Spotify playlist. Digital Underground’s The Return of the Crazy finally found its way onto Spotify, so I added that in the place of backup choice Doowutchyalike. Unfortunately, De La Soul’s Me, Myself and I went missing (the group and their label couldn’t come to an agreement about streaming rights), so I replaced it with She Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals.
Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker have collected a group of writers to tell stories about political objects they own.
Batches of POLITICAL OBJECTS stories will appear on HILOBROW before, on, and just after the inauguration, and will continue to roll out through the end of March. The objects include overtly political artifacts both charismatic and absurd, and items whose stealthily political nature will surprise you; the stories range from the uplifting to the poignant to the unexpectedly illuminating. It’s a terrific collection.
Stephen Duncombe wrote about a God Bless Hysteria protest sign and Ben Greenman wrote about a Matchbox car.
Soon enough, I found what I didn’t know I was looking for — a Corvette. This was early May of 2016. Prince had just died. I had just started writing a book about him. I knew that I needed a little red Corvette, somehow, as a talisman. The only problem was that the one from the bin was black. I bought it. I took it home. I went into the closet and found the model paints that my sons no longer use. I painted it red.
For the New Yorker holiday party, Ben Greenman whipped up a music playlist containing one hit song from each year of the New Yorker’s history, from 1925 to 2010.
At the party, the mix worked like a charm. Jazz and blues greeted the early arrivals, and as the party picked up, the mood became romantic (thanks to the big-band and vocal recordings of the late thirties and forties), energetic (thanks to early rock and roll like Fats Domino and Jackie Brenston in the early fifties), funky (James Brown in 1973, Stevie Wonder in 1974), and kitschy (the eighties), after which it erupted into a bright riot of contemporary pop and hip-hop (Rihanna! Kanye! M.I.A.! Lil Jon!). It was rumored, though never proven, that party guests were leaving right around the songs that marked their birth years.
Where the hell is Hey Ya!? Oh, right. Crazy in Love.
Stay Connected