December Talking Meme: Day 10

[jaggedwolf]

belacqua asked "As detailed as you'd like: Rank the new albums you listened to this year. I don't care if this is only the three from that one very gay day. Also rank every Taylor Swift album"

I said I wouldn’t consider all the new-to-me albums of the year, but I since learned that I could a download from Spotify a JSON of all the tracks I’ve listened to this past year. Wrangled that into album form and added the stuff I listened to elsewhere, and now I have a spreadsheet that tells me I’ve listened to at least 35 new-to-me albums this year. :O

You are not getting commentary on every one of those because I’m even less of an album person than I am a music person, most of those albums didn’t get second listens. Have some caveats:

• I listened to a lot of stuff by Sea Power (Formerly British Sea Power) at the beginning of this year (between Disco Elysium and realising Tugboat is by them), but I have no separation in my head between any of their albums. Their stuff is good though.
• I did not include in my spreadsheet albums where I’d listened to a bunch of the songs before this year, even if not in full album form. This only affected CRJ and Taylor Swift.

Honestly, I don’t have a ranking between my top 5 albums here because these are literally just the albums I listened to more than once or twice as a signal of my enjoyment. I am much more of a song-looper, and all of these albums had bits I disliked per my petty, simplistic tastes — talking interludes, production (I think?) choices, etc. So, in chronological order of listening:

• Tickets To My Downfall - Machine Gun Kelly
• [REDACTED] because of a personal connection LOL, if you know me IRL I’ll tell you
• Crybaby - Tegan and Sara
• The Loneliest Time - Carly Rae Jepsen
• Midnights - Taylor Swift
  

Okay time to rank TSwift albums. Spotify Wrapped already had Swift as my top artist because of the trivia preparation + Folklore looping, the listening I had to do for this has cemented that further.

1. Folklore: An album I looped endlessly

2. Evermore: An album I looped for a little bit

3. 1989: I first listened to this album while experiencing heavy turbulence on a plane but I do actually like it for itself, I looped Out Of The Woods a ridiculous number of times in 2015

4. Midnights: Is this recency bias/"listened to it more" bias? Perhaps.

5. Red: We are now in the era of TSwift where I associate the songs more with their memetic value than themselves: the goat parody of I Knew You Were Trouble, that one dude in the We Are Never Getting Back Together video who is having an insanely good time, the annoying catchiness of 22. Memetic value still counts.

6. Fearless: Only gets the edge on (7) for having You Belong With Me, which I think is the first with Swift playing two roles

7. Speak Now: Again this and (6) do not exist as separate entities in my memory

8. Reputation: The only song from this I ever remember is Look What You Made Me Do, I dunno

9. Taylor Swift: It’s ok lah

10. Lover: I spent an entire day listening to all ten albums (for the aforementioned Taylor Swift trivia night) and Lover contained the only song I skipped. Nothing on this album can compensate for the dual horrors of ME!! and You Need To Calm Down.

Comments

[belacqua]

I since learned that I could a download from Spotify a JSON of all the tracks I’ve listened to this past year. Wrangled that into album form and added the stuff I listened to elsewhere, and now I have a spreadsheet that tells me I’ve listened to at least 35 new-to-me albums this year very nice :D

Cosigned on Folklore being #1. I respect your justifications here, memetic value is a legitimate metric. I'm fascinated by you ranking Midnights so highly since I feel like I saw so much negativity for it. I don't think it'd be in my top 5 but I've been looping way more songs than I expected on first listen.

Thanks for indulging me. I'm curious about the personal connection!

[jaggedwolf]

Oh, did you see a lot of negativity for Midnights? I have no sense of whatever the popular opinion on it was, beyond knowing that a lot of people listened to the album (and relistened). You will learn about the personal connection one very shortly.