| 1 | Karine Polwart | "Chance" | single | I don't really know how Big Country ever became slightly popular despite the crushing weight of Stuart Adamson's honesty, |
| 2 | BiSH | "MORE THAN LiKE" | CARROTS and STiCKS | but then, I don't actually know why anything becomes popular or doesn't, basically, and if somebody were going to know, it's as likely to be me as anybody. |
| 3 | LiSA | "Gurenge" | Gurenge 5 | It can't help that it's not usually what I want to know, |
| 4 | Tsuki Amano | "Tsukigasa" | Five Rings | but the deeper problem, I think, is that if I had a method for predicting or explaining hits, it couldn't reasonably rely on me listening to songs personally, |
| 5 | DAOKO | "千客万来" | single | and if it worked and weren't based on listening, I'd probably end up spending my time not-listening along with it, |
| 6 | AZKi | "from A to Z" | single | and if I wanted to spend my time not listening to music, I'd be somebody else. |
| 7 | MEMAI SIREN | "Shuujin No Dilemma" | Shuujin No Dilemma 5 | If you spend your present betting on the future, |
| 8 | All Good Soldiers | "Daylight" | single | your future will be a mixture of failure and relief, |
| 9 | [ALEXANDROS] | "月色ホライズン" | single | and I want a future that is more of a mixture of ebullience and catharsis and suspended fourths. |
| 10 | AKi | "Monolith" | Monolith +3 | I hear a song I don't know and didn't expect and feel exhilarated, |
| 11 | Yutaka Furukawa | "ゲッコウとオドリコ" | epoch | and the exhilaration is self-contained, or mostly. |
| 12 | メメタァ | "間違い探シンドローム" | 間違い探シンドローム +3 | Or that's not entirely true, I guess, as there's an element of my exhilaration that is based on imagining the individual song as an examplar of songs, |
| 13 | coldrain | "COEXIST" | single | and myself as a representative human listener, |
| 14 | MY FIRST STORY | "King & Ashley" | single | and thus believing in the possibility of music as a medium of human connection, |
| 15 | YUZUKINGDOM | "Jail" | DADAISM | and when I believe this I definitely believe it doesn't operate solely by connecting each single song to a single listener. |
| 16 | KREVA | "無煙狼煙" | single | I play these Japanese songs and imagine both that they are strange and unknown to the air around me, and that there is another air that they fill. |
| 17 | Scarlxrd | "ASK" | single | But I play other songs exactly not knowing whether they are famous in other air, |
| 18 | PRXJEK | "Bury All You Lames" | single | but for the challenge of imagining what would have to be true for them to be, |
| 19 | Drown This City | "Stay Broken" | Alpha // Survivor 6 | and thus expanding my idea of the possible scope of truth. |
| 20 | Sexyy Red | "Don't Trust 'em" | single | Sometimes you think you know, |
| 21 | Ayben | "Rap Benim - Remastered" | single | sometimes you think you have no idea, |
| 22 | Soledad Vélez | "No Vuelvas" | single | and both of these can inspiringly wrong |
| 23 | ERIEL INDIGO | "Geronimo" | single | and you might not be sure until it's way too late. |
| 24 | Esoterik | "Usurper" | single | You learn something about yourself when you understand whether this spell freezes or frees you. |
| 25 | Aisha Devi | "Two Serpents" | S.L.F. 5 | There are two serpents in your path. |
| 26 | Monica Naranjo | "Doble Corazón" | single | There are infinite serpents. |
| 27 | Twinnie | "Social Babies" | Social Babies +3 | There are infinite paths. |
| 28 | Megan Golden | "Faster" | single | Some of the serpents are cats or eagles or cake. |
| 29 | Sœur | "Do What I Want" | single | Some of the paths were made by paving vectors of panic or retreat, |
| 30 | Skunk Anansie | "What You Do for Love" | single | but maybe not in the direction you will walk them. |
| 31 | Alessandro Cortini | "AMORE AMARO" | single | On the ground, you are at the mercy of storms; |
| 32 | Roll the Dice | "Head Drop" | single | from a height, you can see them coming. |
| 33 | Mattia Cupelli | "KOGARASHI" | KOGARASHI +1 | But increasing your elevation doesn't monotonically increase your visibility into terror. |
| 34 | Haiku Salut | "Firewood" | single | After a while you rise above the storms, and realize that perspective is definitional. |
| 35 | KOKOKO! | "Malembe" | Fongola | Weather is a name for things you don't control. |
| 36 | [ówt krì] | "Lucid Dream" | single | But most of the things we name, we don't control. |
| 37 | Happa | "Only Light" | single | Naming things is our consolation for loss of control, especially when the loss is preemptive. |
| 38 | Lara Sarkissian | "Peninsula" | Peninsula +1 | Naming the dysfunctions of our tormentors is a way of planning for how we will not simply become them by defeating them. |
| 39 | Madder Mortem | "He Who Longed for the Stars - 2019 Re-Recording" | single | Taxonomy is a systematized optimism: |
| 40 | Second to Sun | "Pages from a Manuscript" | single | it will matter to have ways to categorize curses and defeats |
| 41 | Immortal Bird | "House of Anhedonia" | Thrive on Neglect | because we will have that much time and that much peace |
| 42 | Noctem | "The Black Consecration" | single | after the liberating repeal of these corrupt edicts. |
| 43 | Foscor | "Cel Rogent" | single | We will take our hammers to the monuments erected briefly by fascists for themselves, |
| 44 | Dispyt | "Men åndå ska man dit" | Livsglädje 6 | but not without noting aspects of the sculptor's style. |
| 45 | Finsterforst | "Ecce Homo - Short Single Version" | single | Our oppressors are us. |
| 46 | Vorna | "Maa martona makaa" | single | The beneficiaries of the patronage of oppressors are us. |
| 47 | Berried Alive | "Fruit Punch" | single | The hammer sellers are us. |
| 48 | Thorr | "Light Em Up" | Light Em Up | The blows are ours, |
| 49 | Erik Ekholm | "Maverick" | single | and the world will be different again in a moment. |
| 50 | Alex Yarmak | "Hydrogen" | single | We hold these truths to be elemental, |
| 51 | Nunatak | "Mi gran virtud" | single | or rather they hold themselves, and we pose underneath them in postures of imaginary strength. |
| 52 | Black Tape Lion | "Glow" | single | And then we step away, and they stay up, |
| 53 | Skay Beilinson | "La Estatua de Sal" | single | or they fall like they were going to fall with or without us. |
| 54 | Schattenmann | "Schlag für Schlag" | Epidemie | Trading blows institutionalizes a conservation of violence. |
| 55 | Erdling | "Im Namen der Krähe" | single | Collect the blows and give them names so we can tell them all apart. |
| 56 | Merta | "Pirut" | single | Violence aspires to anonymity, in order to exist below reason, |
| 57 | Killerpilze | "Letztes Leben" | single | to cultivate victims and the lies that cannot resist us, |
| 58 | Narnia | "You Are the Air That I Breathe - Single Version" | You Are the Air That I Breathe 2 | to convince them that they can only breathe particular air. |
| 59 | Bauda | "Lúmina" | single | In this disingenuous reductivism |
| 60 | My Life Story | "Taking On The World" | single | the air refuses to be implicated. |
| 61 | Belle & Sebastian | "Sister Buddha" | single | You have the right to control what enters your lungs, |
| 62 | Sam Fender | "Will We Talk?" | single | but you have the responsibility to control what escapes them. |
| 63 | Rapalje | "Long May You Run" | single | You are forgiven your personal ignorance, but liable for the contagion of sharing it. |
| 64 | Iron Heade | "The Fall of Khazad-dûm" | single | You are forgiven your nightmare dreams of empire, but accountable for every ray of darkness cast in your name. |
| 65 | NanowaR of Steel | "Norwegian Reggaeton" | single | You look ridiculous, and the question is only whether the strange color of your skin is because you're rotting or molting or about to be in an amazing and ridiculous video or something else. Or maybe that's not the only question. I don't know who originally thought this song was a good idea, and I can easily imagine myself trying to talk them out of it. Surely we could have predicted how badly this would go. But my arguments against prediction aren't based on confidence. It won't all necessarily work out. But effort and confidence are both aspirationally self-fulfilling, and and if you let your actions model your future as chance, all of the paths are low. |