It's the end of the world and I can't stop listening to 80s music
A Good Folk February playlist.
Hello folks,
I don’t know quite when this shift happened for me, but somehow this year, I have found myself blasting 80s music at all hours of the day. It’s bad. Like, I think that What is Love is going to be in my top played songs this year and it’s only February type of bad. Here is my thesis on this: the world feels strange and wrong and upside down and the only sounds that seem to reflect that for me are included in the equally strange and weird music of the late 70s and 80s. Is this in part due to the prevalence of Stranger Things in pop culture the last few years and the dystopian worlds it shows hiding in plain sight? Is it because, like the 80s, the dreams of the decade before seem to be falling away fast and all that is left is to lean into hyperrealism and absurdity as a coping mechanism? I don’t know. I want big hair and big hoops and brightly colored eyeliner. I want the strangeness of my everyday life to reflect the strangeness of our political systems, the way so much of our country is willing to turn a blind eye to mass global suffering, the way everything we do seems to be stuck on an endless loop, a trap we can never get out of. I want that mix of horror and hope that I seem to feel when I listen to this playlist on repeat. I want our world—and our art—to not be able to look away from the reality we have created, to recognize the absurdity of continuing to live through all of this as if it is normal or acceptable. I couldn’t tell you why 80s music does this for me. But it just feels right somehow.
In the spirit of not looking away (keeping my finger on the pulse of the cultural vein!), we’re going to be curating a new monthly playlist of what we think is some of the best music being released across the South, by Southern artists, or by artists working in the South today. You’ll see many Good Folk friends in this first edition because, what can we say, we have good taste. But we’ll be shifting it up every month to bring you the hottest new artists you need on your radar. Send recs to us for your favorite artists at goodfolksonly@gmail.com.
You can find the February edition of the mix below. It’s a pretty wide-ranging edition in terms of genre, so there’s something for everyone there.
Happy Monday, yall. Go get out in the sun today and listen to the music. That’s where we’ll be.