2020 year in review: Best albums came as COVID-19 made music more essential than ever in a year we d all like to forget mdjonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mdjonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
When weâre able to look back at 2020 with something resembling perspective, weâll surely refer to it as âthe year of Covid.â And though it might not have been the intention of any of the artists while they were crafting and releasing their music, we will quite likely refer to the records released in 2020 as âCovid albums.âÂ
Remarkably, during a year that saw the music industry decimated by a raging and freely moving virus, 2020 ended up being a fantastic year for the music itself.Â
These plentiful new releases landed with additional weight in 2020, particularly if they hit the virtual streets after mid-March. Music was not âjust musicâ this year. It often arrived like a virtual life raft, a proverbial beam of light refracted through the barred window of a prison cell. We
Dear Club kids,
It’s fascinating, Chris, to hear that the population’s collective shattered nerves were so plainly reflected by the Billboard chart stats. It’s unusually immediate evidence for pop culture as a seismograph of broader social shifts; often cultural historians have to wait years to track those patterns in retrospect. Of course, the other way the arts reflect social change in real time is by explicitly addressing it. So it’s time to talk about 2020 as a year of musical protest, as I noted in my year-end list. It’s been building for the past half-decade, of course, but it really culminated this year.
Dear Lindsay, Brittany, and 2020’s guest Music Clubbers,
Last year, the likes of Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish suggested a potential new musical dawn, from a new generation, and maybe a fresh matching energy in society, if it could hold on long enough. Then came 2020, and that light at the tunnel’s end turned out to be a freight train. It’s hard to cast a vast surveying gaze across the cultural landscape when for months you’ve dived down and flattened yourself against the tracks, holding your breath in hopes that the steel wheels on either side will pass you by and the undercarriage won’t snag you and drag you around the next bend. At best you can strain to detect more distant vibrations amid the general clatter and roar.