Mixtapemotions

No Scrubs on This List: Black History Month Playlist

I want to celebrate Black History Month this year, especially when words like diversity, equity, and inclusion are under attack from America’s highest office. As I talked about in my blog posts this year, I’ve taken things like Black History Month for granted. Some scoff and think that America has diversified and no longer needs to celebrate its diversity, that choosing to be colorblind is the way forward in the twenty-first century. These mostly white folks who say this are missing a point as they quickly buy their plane tickets to vacation in the motherland of Europe: even if we’re over racism (we’re not), shouldn’t everyone have the opportunity to learn about their heritage? Shouldn’t everyone be able to discuss freely their past and their unique take on life? And especially important, shouldn’t we learn about the mistakes in the past as humans seem hellbent to try to forget their shameful past until they think everyone has forgotten and then try to repeat it?

Black History Month became nationally celebrated during the bicentennial, 1976. Republican President Gerald Ford declared: “Black History is American history.” Of course, a white Republican president cannot take credit for starting Black History Month. President Ford may have encouraged all Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor” the accomplishments and contributions of Black Americans, celebrating Black History in the United States dates back to 1926 as “Negro History Week” founded by historian Carter G. Woodson. African American educators introduced the history week into first segregated and then desegregated schools. In 1970, the week coinciding with Abraham Lincoln’s February 12th birthday and Frederick Douglass’s February 14th birthdays became Black History Month. 

Having blogged about music for five years, Black History Month is always a little tricky. I used to think that celebrating artists based on their race or during the observed months reduced them to a stereotype. But I’ve also realized that music has been curated in a segregated way called genre. Sadly, many musical genres, including the ones that I write about, were started by African Americans. We wouldn’t have blaring, fuzzy guitars if it weren’t for the Black pre-rockstars in the ‘50s before the British invasion and Elvis Presley’s cultural theft. Another reason I’ve avoided celebrating Black History Month in the past as a blogger is that I was always afraid of saying something wrong and offending my readers. It turns out, saying nothing is actually a lot more offensive, and as for getting things wrong, it’s going to happen. I beg my readers to point it out, I’ll acknowledge it, and we’ll try to move forward. 

For this year’s Black History Month Playlist, I looked back at songs and artists I’ve blogged about or songs that a blog post reminded me of. The songs are old and new, but I don’t go back before the fifties. The artists featured range from the age of Doo-Wop to Hip-Hop and beyond. It’s a playlist I plan to listen to and maybe learn something interesting about the artists within. I hope that I can spend the rest of this month learning about these artists and have a better blog and more stories to share from music that isn’t in my regular rotation. After all, diversity is the spice of life.

Here’s this year’s Black History Month playlist:

1. “No Scrubs” by TLC
2. “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar
3. “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson
4. “Smooth Operator” by Sade 
5. “Therapy” by Mary J. Blige
6. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Diana Ross (Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell cover)
7. “Killing Me Softly with His Song” by The Fugees (Lori Lieberman cover) 
8. “All Night Long”  by  Lionel Richie 
9. “We Belong Together” by Mariah Carey
10. “Bleeding Love” by Leona Lewis
11. “The Wizard and I” by Cynthia Erivo & Michelle Yeoh 
12. “Lucky” by Halsey
13. “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy and Monica
14. “Then He Kissed Me” by The Crystals
15. “Hotline Bling” by Drake
16. “Cynical” by Propaganda ft. Aaron Marsh & Sho Baraka
17. “Take My Breath” by The Weeknd
18. “II Most Wanted” by Beyoncé ft. Miley Cyrus
19. “River” by Out of Eden
20. “A Bar Song” (Tipsy) by Shaboozey
21. “California Love” by 2Pac ft. Roger & Dr. Dre
22. “Saturn” by SZA
23. “L-O-V-E” by Nat King Cole 
24. “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman
25. “I Only Have Eyes for You” by The Flamingos
26. “Somebody’s Watching Me” by Rockwell ft. Michael Jackson
27. “Super Bass” by Nicki Nicki Minaj
28. “Paint the Town Red” by Doja Cat

Listen on AppleMusic.

I wasn’t excited about the GRAMMYs this year. They’ve been a documented mess for as long as I can remember, but something about Project 2025 threatening the future of free expression and the wildfires ravaging the largest bastion of liberal dissent didn’t have me in the mood to sigh at the poor choices the music machine would congratulate themselves on during the prelude to the post-apocalypse. It turns out that the GRAMMYs were actually good-ish this year. But rather than the GRAMMYs, it felt more like the People’s Choice Awards because 2025 was finally the year that the academy listened to the backlash and basically gave the people what they would have expected in any other awards show: the GRAMMYs. Beyoncé finally won Album of the Year for Cowboy Carter. She also won Best Country Album after being snubbed by the CMA Awards last year. Best New Artist went to the not-so-new Chappell Roan for her runaway success in 2024. Kendrick Lamar’s Drake diss-track “Not Like Us” won both Song and Record of the Year. This year, the academy also made amends with The Weeknd, who had withdrawn his music from future consideration after receiving zero nominations for his 2020 album After Hoursor its singles. The Weeknd performed two songs from his latest album, Hurry Up Tomorrow. 

LIKE A POEM SAID BY A LADY IN RED…Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift surprisingly went home empty-handed at this year’s GRAMMYs Eilish’s critically acclaimed third album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT produced three major hits last year, and the twenty-three-year-old former GRAMMY winner performed “Birds of a Feather” for the award show. Historic four-time winner of the coveted Album of the Year, Swift was seen clapping for peers, but her album The Tortured Poets Department went uncelebrated, despite her unorthodox announcement of the album in her acceptance speech last year when she won Album of the Year for Midnights. The GRAMMYS have traditionally been only a celebration of music’s past, particularly the last year’s, but Swift transformed her GRAMMY platform to promote where her music was going. Not to be outdone with Swift’s theatrics, Lady Gaga bought commercial time during “Music’s Biggest Night” to air the third single from her recently named album Mayhem. “Abracadabra” is a continuation of the aesthetic Gaga gave us last October with her second single “Disease”; however, the latest single seems to be resonating with her fanbase even more than the second single. The music video illustrates the dark aesthetic of the album, drawing comparisons to Gaga’s Fame Monsterand Born This Wayeras. 

DEATH OR LOVE TONIGHT. As we get closer to March 7th, when Lady Gaga is slated to unleash the full extent of Mayhem, we’re getting a clearer vision of reactionary art in the new Trump era. In her acceptance speech for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for “Die with a Smile” with Bruno Mars, Gaga stated: “Trans people deserve love. The queer community deserves to be lifted up”—a direct response to the barrage of attacks, particularly on the trans community, in the second Trump administration. Mayhem isn’t directly related to the dystopian future in store for us, but rather to the embracing of chaos as an art form.  Gaga told Elle six days after the 2024 election results were revealed: “What’s bizarre is I did not write this album thinking that this would happen. I prayed it would not. But here we are.” With an increase in mayhem, the darker the vision of Gaga’s seventh album gets, making Gaga’s latest offering even more relevant. From the music video of “Abracadabra,” Gaga threatens the dark side of the feral energy Charli xcx gave us with BRAT last summer. The video contains an even more unhinged chant and Gaga’s primal scream not featured in the album version of the song. And with the return of Gaga’s early styles come the complaints of satanism from MAGA parents who conveniently forgot about their own teenage rebellion to the dark imagery of Mötley Crüe or Pantera. Speaking of the ‘80s, “Abracadabra” samples “Spellbound” from post-punk group Siouxsie and the Banshees, proving once again my argument from yesterday’s post that the New Wave keeps giving us new waves of the New Wave. Listeners also have noticed that “Abracadabra” sounds similar to Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” This year is going to be turbulent—unprecedented, chaotic, scary. What we called normal may be completely turned upside down. Embracing Mayhem may be how we survive. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.

I started watching Lisa Frankensteinon the plane a couple of weeks ago. It was a quirky movie that came out last year about a weird teen girl, Lisa Swallows, played by Kathryn Newton, who is an outcast in her school and her own family, composed of her father, stepmother, and step-sister. Lisa is a nerdy girl who loves reading, graveyards, and the New Romantics, a sub-genre of the more popular New Wave and part of the second British Invasion—think Spandau Ballet, A Flock of Seagulls. Her step-sister “Taffy” (Liza Soberano) is the exact opposite of Lisa—popular, pretty in an ‘80s teen film kind of way, socially keen, a cheerleader. As I was watching this movie, I wasn’t thinking about the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley-driven plot, but rather about style and how perception about style changes throughout the years. In the ‘80s, the  English New Romantics and the darker post-punk bands were not as mainstream in America in the ‘80s as television suggests and only started coming to prominence at the end of the decade with pop hits from Love and Rockets and The Cure.  Hipsters in the ‘80s listened to Siouxsie and the Banshees and the earlier work of Joy Division, but the beer-chugging John Hughes jocks were probably listening to Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, or Van Halen. Maybe U2’s popularity paved the way for the English Alternative Rockers, but U2’s Christian identity and radio play distinguished them from the “cred” British bands. 

YOU KNOW IN THE END, I’LL ALWAYS BE THERE. The Napoleon Dynamitevibes Lisa Frankenstein gives are more than its inclusion of the one-hit-wonder “The Promise” by When in Rome, but music is the discussion of the day. This supernatural teen romance between Lisa and a reanimated corpse (Cole Sprouse)—think Dr. Frankenstein’s creature—didn’t keep me watching until the end, but it got me thinking about the ‘80s movie tropes, mainly the social bifurcation between the nerds and the popular kids. The 1984 comedy Revenge of the Nerdsexplored what would happen when gawky young men used their skills to outsmart the jocks. Then twenty-three years later in 2007, CBS aired The Big Bang Theory, a show about socially inept young scientists and their nerdy interests and their (in later seasons) hot girlfriends. What was more interesting than the show itself was the mainstreaming of nerd culture. Suddenly, it was cool to spend your Saturday night playing Dungeons & Dragons or vegging out on video games or collecting comic books or even cosplaying. But what was the ultimate revenge of the nerds? Brains really did beat brawn as the ‘80s nerds are rich from developing our digital world. With that wealth, some of them have bulked up and look much better than the former high school quarterback. Nerds have helped to rewrite our understanding of the ‘80s and what was popular, as they have included some of the more niche bands and cult films into our cultural canon. 

WHEN YOUR DAY IS THROUGH, AND SO IS YOUR TEMPER. I was born in the late ‘80s, so take everything that I just wrote as just pure speculation. I didn’t grow up during that time, and my earliest memories of the ‘80s were sneaking my dad’s coffee, eating dirt, and my parents watching The Cosby Show and Alf—nothing related to music. My understanding about the “weird” music of the ‘80s that has become more popular in post-80s revivals comes from podcasts and conversations with my parents and older friends who lived through that time. Hit Parade’s 2019 episode The Lost and Lonely Edition helped to tell this story. The fact that these groups never got as much radio airplay as the popular music makes the bands feel more legendary. But if you watch revisionist ‘80s shows, Netflix would have you believing that all the cool kids were constantly vibing with New Order or listening to Kate Bush in their bedrooms. In 2014, Taylor Swift released the song “New Romantics.” The title of the song was a nod to the distinctly British movement during the ‘80s with the synth pop and post-punk bands of the time. As a songwriter, Swift has taken an interest in this movement, even drawing parallels between this time and her associations in London, particularly on her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. Whether or not she pulled off the artistic fête is a discussion for another day. But like the music director of Lisa Frankenstein and a number of other films and series, Swift participates in musical revisionist history, elevating the niche ’80s genres to seem bigger than they ever were. You can also find this in the music of bands such as The Killers, particularly in their earlier music. The band named themselves after a fictional band in New Order’s 2001 music video for “Crystal.” Anberlin is another band that derives much of their influence from ‘80s post-punk and the New Romantic pastiche. You can also find post-punk influence in surprising acts as the sound has become intertwined with what we think is cool in the 2020s, from The Weeknd’s “Gasoline” to Chappell Roan’s Kate Bush aesthetic. The nerdy and weird went mainstream, and computer geeks rule the world. But what makes our culture keep digging in this well of ‘80s nostalgia? The ‘80s revival of the ’00s didn’t end in the ‘10s and continues into the ‘20s, giving us more and more experience with lesser known groups, further distorting our memories of that decade. 

Read the lyrics of When in Rome’s “The Promise” on Genius.

If we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it. It’s an adage I didn’t believe when I was in school. My childhood was in the optimistic ‘90s. America’s greatest threat had become an ally. I took installations like Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a nice day off of school in February and naively believed that everyone was just as ready to bury racism in the past and move on to an exciting equitable future. Then I moved to the South, where I learned that they told themselves that the Civil War was merely about states’ rights. My mom recalls getting the bird before we changed our New York plates—a Yankee family in a beat-up Chevy Astro was so hated, I wondered what if we weren’t white. The George W. Bush/ post-9/11 era should have been a time when I realized that history could repeat itself, but Seventh-Day Adventist teachings had us more focused on the apocalypse than the socio-political implications of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t remember when the gloom of 9/11 broke and when America began to feel normal again, when everything started to feel less like survival guilt or that another tower was going to fall or that a nuclear power plant would explode, but somehow it ended, and America learned to party again, even legalizing same-sex marriage.

SHE THINKS IT’S SPECIAL, BUT IT’S ALL REUSED. In 2021, Olivia Rodrigo began her pop career with SOUR, a hit album with two number 1 hits and several other top 20 hits from the album. Rodrigo was different from many pop singers as she was able to grab a diverse fan base, bringing fans from her teen Disney career and older fans who found something nostalgic in her music, especially by her third single “good 4 u,” which established the singer as a bona fide rocker. Her second single, “deja vu,” credits Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” as inspiration. Rodrigo’s second single is a sequel to her debut single “drivers license.” That song brought about the discussion about the alleged love triangle between Rodrigo’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series costar Joshua Bassett and the “blonde girl,” most likely Sabrina Carpenter (pre- Short n’ Sweet). In “drivers license,” Rodrigo laments that the one reason she was looking forward to the namesake’s rite of passage is to spend more time with her boyfriend, but this is all for naught since he has moved on to another girl. The sequel, “deja vu,” is a further lamentation on the end of the relationship, listing the fond memories in specific detail of singing harmony to syndicated episodes of the musical dramedy Glee to Rodrigo sharing her love of Billy Joel with him. Those precious moments spent together; however, are then recycled on the next love interest, causing Rodrigo’s frustration. She asks her ex if he ever gets déjà vu when he’s with her. Interestingly, last year when Sabrina Carpenter released the song “Taste,” the song felt a bit like déjà vu of Olivia Rodrigo, though “Taste” is supposedly not about Bassett but rather about Shawn Mendes.

WATCHING RERUNS OF GLEE. Maybe nothing’s new under the sun, as King Solomon complained. Maybe “strawberry ice cream with one spoon for two” feels like an original date idea when you’re 16, but eventually we run out of ideas. Last year, something eerie happened: more and more of us started to experience déjà vu. It’s like we were reliving the year 2016 and 2020 at the same time. The Super Bowl felt like déjà vu with the same teams playing from 2020. South Korea faced impeaching a president. Faker won the League of Legends championship in both 2016 and 2024. And of course, “Weird Al” Yankovic pointed out this phenomenon in The Gregory Brothers “songifying” of the June 27th presidential debate. “Deja Vu” (But Worse) highlights what many Americans were thinking: the prospect of two power-hungry presidential candidates arguing about their golf scores in what should be a nursing home, but it was really on America’s cable news network, CNN. Yankovic asks, “Have we fallen under a wizard’s curse / to suffer déjà vu, but worse?” In the middle of the song, Yankovic, exasperated, lists all of the sequels this pairing of presidential candidates is worse than. He even asserts: “I think Olivia Rodrigo would agree, this is worse than your ex eating strawberry ice cream.” Since the cursed presidential debate and Biden dropping out of the race, Harris’s campaign couldn’t help but feel a little similar to Hillary Clinton’s cursed 2016 candidacy, mainly the establishment vs. the antiestablishment, and it turns out people really hate the establishment. Now the déjà vu seems to have been reset to a time before I was alive; it’s a combination of pre-Civil Rights marches and pre-Nazi Germany. The very free world that most of us have taken for granted is under attack. It’s the most dreadful case of déjà vu imaginable. It’s like watching Groundhog Day, as the same people repeatedly make the wrong choices. Bill Murray is trapped in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, forever doomed to miss Andie MacDowell. Meanwhile, the news broadcasts reveal the gradual erosion of our rights, leading to our assimilation into the tools of the oligarchs. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.

It’s finally here. I’ve been a terrible blogger since I’ve gotten mixtapEmotion off the ground. The first year that I wrote my NewYearsDayProject blog, I had new content every day, but the second year I found that I could start reposting. With my new blog, I thought the very least I could do was to post my playlists on time. But after goodbyes to my family in North Carolina on January 31st, I arrived in Korea on February 1st at 6 p.m., exhausted. I’ve been exhausted ever since.

Excuses aside, I’d like to explain this year’s February playlist. Last month’s playlist devolved into angst-ridden rock music. This month we start with one of my least favorite Anberlin songs from their classic album Never Take Friendship Personal. The sugary, down-on-your-luck pop-punk sound of “Stationary Stationery” embodies a playlist that is hopeful at times and spiteful at others. I wanted to leave the desperation and hopelessness in January and focus on what we can do about the current situations. 

Next, to represent Groundhog Day, more specifically, the Bill Murray/ Andie MacDowell classic about being stuck in a time loop, we will hear Olivia Rodrigo’s “deja vu.” When in Rome’s “The Promise” follows, sweetening the “strawberry ice cream” from Rodrigo’s SOUR break-up song and attempting to celebrate love as a build-up to Valentine’s Day. 

My original version of the playlist had Mary J. Blige’s “Therapy” as the fourth track, but during a commercial break at the Grammys, Lady Gaga premiered the music video for her new music video from her upcoming album Mayhem—“Abracadabra.” Mayhem seems to be the key word for 2025, so maybe the zeitgeist album of the year?

I wanted to make a better attempt to celebrate Black History Month, especially when it has never been under attack in my lifetime, so I made a greater effort to include songs in the playlist from Black artists from TLC’s “No Scrubs” to Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” at the end of the month. I recognize that any effort I make is insufficient and controversial, but I think in 2025, we have to do what we can. 

This month’s playlist is a mixture of old and new, like always. The ‘70s is represented more than I usually include them with songs like Led Zeppelin’s synth ballad “All My Love” and Diana Ross’s cover of the 1967 Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Every decade after the ‘70s is represented as well with several songs from the ‘80s including Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” and A Flock of Seagulls’ “And I Ran” (So Far Away), the ‘90s with The Fugees’ cover of “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” the ‘00s with “Mutemath’s “Picture,” the ‘10s’ Paper Routes’ “Love Is Red” (With Every Shade of Blue), and several songs from the ‘20s including last year’s “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar who won record of the year and will perform at this year’s Super Bowl Half Time Show.

Because the playlist is not stationary, but rather under constant threat of revisions, I will write down the original playlist and the February 8th edited version. I update my playlist as I become aware of new releases or another song’s relevance superseding the planned song. This doesn’t always make the playlist better. Last month’s addition of Tom MacDonald and Roseanne Barr’s “Daddy’s Home” was a blight on the playlist, but I felt that it added to the story of what January was. So here’s this month’s playlist before it goes crazy:

1. “Stationary Stationery” by Anberlin
2. “deja vu” by Olivia Rodrigo
3. “The Promise” by “When in Rome
4. “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga —originally “Therapy” by Mary J. Blige
5. “No Scrubs” by TLC
6. “Picture” by Mutemath
7. “drinks or coffee” by ROSÉ
8. “Bed Chem” by Sabrina Carpenter
9. “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar
10. “Cherub Rock” by The Smashing Pumpkins 
11. “All My Love” by Led Zeppelin 
12. “Love Is Red” (With Every Shade of Blue) by Paper Route
13. “Your Love” by Tyson Motsenbocker cover of The Outfield
14. “a thousand years” by Christina Perri
15. “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac
16. “Hallelujah” by Shawn Mendes
17. “Fortnight” by Taylor Swift ft. Post Malone
18. “Archangel” by Olly Alexander
19. “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins 
20. “And I Ran” (So Far Away) by A Flock of Seagulls 
21. “JUPiTER” by Coldplay 
22. “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” (A Man After Midnight) by ABBA
23. “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson
24. “Smooth Operator” by Sade 
25. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Diana Ross (Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell cover)
26. “Killing Me Softly” by The Fugees (Lori Lieberman cover) 
27. “Red Wine Supernova” by Chappell Roan
28. “All Night Long” (All Night) by Lionel Richie 

Check out the AppleMusic version.

One thing that Linkin Park’s 2000 genre-bending debut album Hybrid Theorydidn’t contain was profanity. This was unusual for the band’s hard rock genre, specifically the Nü Metal sub-genre which was prominent in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. The band kept the Parental Advisory sticker off their albums until their third album, 2007’s Minutes to Midnight. Linkin Park’s sound was defined by aggressive instrumentation, morose lyrics, and vocal trade-offs between the emotionally grounded Mike Shinoda and the powerful, cathartic voice of Chester Bennington. From the start, the lyrics reflected pain, regret, and sometimes nihilism in songs like “Crawling,” “One Step Closer,” and their cross-over Hot 100 hit “In the End.” The rap-rock essential number-2 hit speaks about the futility of “trying so hard” to get “so far.” Ultimately, effort betrays the speaker who relies on an unnamed subject who lets him down.

IT STARTS WITH… “In the End” is a pessimistic song and a staple in Linkin Park’s catalog. The band’s delivery of a mellow and melodic blend of rap-rock made the song appeal to mass audiences on pop radio. Compared to the hits that shared the radio with Linkin Park’s top hit, “In the End” was a darker song. When the song impacted pop radio in 2002, the radio was transforming from electro teen pop—boybands and Britney Spears to pop-rock and R&B, with artists such as Nelly and P!nk’s rock transformation being some of the top groups. Along with Linkin Park, rock acts like Nickelback and Puddle of Mudd scored mainstream pop hits that year. But none of the pop hits by rock bands were as dark as “In the End.” “Blurry” is a song about a father missing his son in the midst of a divorce. “Hero” by Chad Kroeger of Nickelback and Josey Scott of Saliva was the biggest song from the Spider-Man motion picture. The song from the pre-Disney Marvel franchise seemed to be the product of a more hopeful time at the cinema. But while the realm of pop-rock and  R&B was on the more optimistic side in 2002, rock music embodied a range of emotions with hits contemporary to “In the End” being Weezer’s “Island in the Sun,” Tool’s “Schism,” and Jimmy Eat World’s “Bleed American.”

I PUT MY TRUST IN YOU, PUSHED AS FAR AS I CAN GO. In their attempt to connect genres, the band also forged friendships with ‘90s rock titans, metal bands, and rappers. The pessimism of Linkin Park’s “In the End” seemed to connect the dark themes in nu metal, grunge, the 2000s version of post-grunge, and emo. The band’s sound fit in with the “angry white boy” sub-genre of rock, although Linkin Park wasn’t composed of only white musicians. It seemed that music was dark at that time, reflecting a time of uncertainty, disconnection, and dissatisfaction toward life around the turn of the millennium. Lead singer Chester Bennington struggled throughout his life with depression, eventually taking his life in 2017. Linkin Park’s music documents Chester’s inner turmoil, which in later albums plays out as a projection of the global anxieties of nuclear war. Yet, as rock music’s popularity diminished in the more optimistic ‘10s, despite remaining one of the biggest rock bands active at the time, it sank in cultural relevance. In the final months of Bennington’s life, the singer expressed disappointment in the state of rock music and in the band’s unsuccessful attempt to transition into a pop-rock band. Darkness was looming in the late ‘10s, with the rise of populist politics, but pop music stayed apathetic to politics, instead keeping in a hedonistic club culture, ignoring the problems at stake—until COVID.

WATCH IT COUNT DOWN AS THE PENDULUM SWINGS. The message that Linkin Park’s  “In the End” conveys is nihilism, a philosophy centered on “nothing matters.” Some have said that nihilism is more of a feeling or even a temporary position rather than a philosophy. Nihilism was explored in 19th and 20th century authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, and Bret Easton Ellis. In the ‘90s, Seinfeld explored the concept of a “show about nothing,” taking a comical angle on the philosophy. Nihilistic rock music is rarely quite as humorous. It’s the soundtrack of hard work met with futility. It’s the conclusion of living as if everything can or will be taken away. The aforementioned “angry white boy” music voiced disappointment in the ‘90s with Kurt Cobain raging about social issues. In the ‘00s, the nihilistic lyrics of Staind, Seether, and Three Days Grace conveyed anger, fear, and shame. While not all of the songs by these artists could be summed up with a nihilistic worldview, many of them reflect a speaker who feels that he is inadequately prepared to face the absurdity of life, be it because of misunderstandings between a loved one, feelings of personal lacking, or even an economy that seems designed against the speaker.

TIME IS A VALUABLE THING. Poor, depressed teenage dudes sitting in their gloomy basements, smoking, drinking, experimenting with drugs—that’s what the post-grunge and nu metal genres bring to my mind. I can close my eyes and picture the faces of classmates who bought into the nihilism of ‘00s rock music. As a teenager, struggling with my sexuality in a small town, I resonated with these songs sometimes, but my Christianity brought me back to a position of hope. Musical trends pass, and the “basement dweller” may have gone unnoticed for several years in the mainstream. Last year, Linkin Park reunited and announced a world tour, breaking their seven-year hiatus following the death of lead singer Chester Bennington. The world had gotten a lot more absurd in the time since they had been away. I’ve personally found myself digging into the “break the system,” protest, and sometimes nihilistic lyrics of rock bands, including Linkin Park after last year’s election. Every day I asked myself what matters in a world which tolerates and rewards impropriety. What do laws matter to the lawless leaders? What does diligence in daily life amount to? I’ve fallen behind on my writing, and I have so little motivation to catch up because nothing seems to matter. When I chose “In the End” as the third song in my January playlist, I was anticipating the constant groaning of Trump’s return to office. Two weeks into his second term, it seems that the fear was underestimated. Chaos rules, and institutions we once believed in and took for granted are disappearing. It feels like the end, and it feels like all our efforts never mattered. It feels like when we tried to live good and decent lives with the morals taught at home, church, and school were a sham when subterfuge, lies, and betrayal win. I’m finding it harder and harder to pull myself out of my news doomscrolling and stop catastrophizing about a future that is far from determined. While I feel nihilistic these days, I have to cling to a belief that things are only getting worse before they can get better. I have to believe that in the end, something matters, even if my expectations are underwhelmed in life. And that’s the best I can offer my readers at this time before I spiral into the oblivion of 2025. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.