Is This Really Where Music Is Going?

From The New York Times, 25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going:

Here, for a moment, was music that actively dragooned me into paying attention to it, based not primarily on sound, performance or composition, but on the rolling snowball of perspectives, close readings and ideological disputes accreting around it.

The story is accurately described as a ‘spectacular.’ It’s long and involved, but even if you’ve heard these songs, there’s a communal sense to the journey created here. Plus, I’m betting you don’t know all these songs.

We’ve found a way to collect around the handful of songs we all have in common, yoke them with our opinions and make a (mostly) joyful noise. I don’t begrudge Beyoncé or the world one second of it. But it does throw into stark relief the things we have a much harder time talking about, at least with strangers: the way songs make us feel, the things we discover in them that aren’t already on other people’s minds, the obscure pleasures we’re willing to risk trying to explain from the darkness. The ever-larger private life of music. How do we talk about that?