Playlist Curated by Hilary Plum
1 Swet Shop Boys, “Aaja,” ft. Ali Sethi
Come for Riz’s multisyllabic rhymes about Super Mario (“fuckin green dungarees”), stay for Heems’s deadpan “Adobe Photoshop.” The sample at the end—sweet, suddenly poignant against the silence—is Qandeel Baloch, “the Pakistani social media star who was murdered by her brother in a so-called ‘honor killing’ a few weeks after we made ‘Aaja.’”
2 Sinéad O’Connor, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
Killer pauses. For Sinéad, the pause says: you think I’m going to say something else, but I just mean what I’m saying, like I said. “Maybe I was mean / But I really don’t think so / You asked if I’m scared and I ………… said so.” Later it’s like “You asked for the truth & I … told you.” Sinéad’s always in the truth-space—still, again, like she already said: “Everyone can see / what’s going on / They laugh because they know they’re untouchable / Not because what I said was wrong.”
3 Hole, “Credit in the Straight World”
Courtney Love on the benefits of work: “look your dealer in the eye.”
4 Van Morrison, “Ballerina”
This is a playlist about pauses? Holes? “And if somebody, not just anybody / wanted to get close to you” [… PAUSE …] “for instance, me, baby.” Damn. All you gotta do is… step right up.
5 Riz Ahmed, “Mogambo”
“Why you bring a Tweet to a gunfight?” Riz calls this “a middle finger you can dance to.” Yes. And if you haven’t seen his new movie Mogul Mowgli, do that. Working right now this is an artist, restless and ambitious, exploring the full range of his powers and everything he can challenge.
6 Eminem, “Square Dance”
The song I should include on this playlist is “White America” but it’s a hard listen, except for that ending, “fuck you, Ms. Cheney, fuck you, Tipper Gore,” which anyone could love. Whether I’m exactly right or not, I always remember “Square Dance” (from 2002’s The Eminem Show) as a protest against the Bush administration, its warmongering and war crimes (“Yeah, you laugh till your motherfuckin ass gets drafted” “Crazy insane or insane crazy? When I say Hussein you say Shady”), and, through Em’s sick do-si-do parody, Bush’s pernicious fake folksy Texan just-one-of-the-guys aesthetic. Though b/c this is an Eminem song, he doesn’t just let you sit comfortably and feel, like, liberal or affiliated—get ready to get implicated. When will I finally know how I feel about Eminem? Somewhere in this lifelong journey I listened to Tori Amos covering “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” which in being one of the worst covers ever made helped me understand what the man might be doing.
7 Das Racist, “Rainbow in the Dark”
I’m old and I miss these guys. How does this song keep accelerating? Then there’s the ending, “tried to go to Amsterdam but they threw us in Guantánamo,” but also there’s the whole song.
8 M.I.A., “Amazon”
The book quotes M.I.A.’s “Sunshowers” but this is the song of hers I think about the most. “Hello? This is M.I.A. Could you please come get me?” It’s the twist—the moment she doesn’t want to be rescued anymore, fuck you, she’s crossed over, “Hello? This is M.I.A. It’s OK you forgot me.”
9 Swet Shop Boys, “T5”
SSB and Sinéad are going to appear twice because I listened to them so much for so long. This song is a great intro to SSB and how they’re going to go about doing what they need to do: “Oh no, we’re in trouble / Always get the random check when I rock the stubble.”
10 Sinéad O’Connor, “Three Babies”
One of the saddest and most beautiful songs, one of the greatest music videos. “The face on you / The smell of you / Will always be with me.” O’Connor says in her memoir Rememberings that this song is “about three miscarriages that I experienced. It is also about the four children I did have, though the song is perhaps a prophecy of not being the perfect mother.”
11 Van Morrison, “Astral Weeks”
“If I ventured in the slipstream…” Here’s what I wrote about this album & this song in Hole Studies: “I’m often listening to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks every day. I mean my life has seasons like this. Once I was completely sober—it was morning—when I walked into the quiet kitchen and told my husband that the reason it’s so beautiful, toward the end of the first track, when Van sings about being born again in another time, in another place—it’s so beautiful because you know, from how he sings the line, that he knows there is no other time, no other place. He offers the idea of a time and place beyond this one because the idea is what we may offer each other. If there were another time, if there were another place… Sometimes—I often think, as I put the album on again—you have to get back to basics. You always have to get back to basics. Death is coming. All this complexity has the simplest end. There is no other time, there is no other place. Here you are.”