When I started my year by pressing play on Bombay Bicycle Club’s ‘Everything Else Has Gone Wrong’, I didn’t necessarily expect to be listening to a prophecy. But here we are 11 months later, and can safely decree that in 2020 has been an absolute binfire, saved only by the bounty of Netflix, Music and yes, – for its sins – Twitter.
In some ways, Coronavirus and pandemic life has been a real societal leveller. Unless your name is Rita Ora, celebrities and normal folk alike had to stick by the rules, abandoning tours mid-cycle and cancelling studio sessions with no real sense of when they might be able to resume. Suddenly, stars we were used to only seeing on stage in mega-arenas were live-streaming from their bedrooms, or taking to the streets in masks to show their support for the BLM movement. They were tweeting more, and we were tweeting more back at them; ‘Cancel Culture’, ‘Fancam’ and ‘Virtue Signalling’ were all phrases that solidified in our vernacular as the result of more and more time spent online, and all three of them were levelled at that God-awful ‘Imagine’ video.
Confined to home with nothing but their instincts to keep them company, the songwriting of 2020 (and the material released during it) seemed to be united by a shared vulnerability. No longer could you hide behind expensive sets or in-person PR junkets – you had to get creative, both in the making and the marketing. For some artists, this was a good opportunity for a well-earned step off of the release treadmill, but for others, it was an opportunity to do things a little differently. From Charli XCX’s ‘how i’m feeling now’ that put fans in the Zoom board meeting of its creative direction right through to Little Simz’s diary-entry of pent-up quarantine frustration (the impeccable ‘Drop’ EP), 2020 carried a real ‘fuck it’ energy, where all bets were off and the usual faff of release schedules was far less important than simply getting the work in front of the people who needed it.
As summer rolled around, we were struck with another reality – the realisation that once again, we had let racism creep up to fever pitch. For people of colour, the increased mainstream attention around the Black Lives Matter movement was a necessary but harrowing and confusing time, where music helped to make some sense of the often well-meaning-but-ham-fisted attempts to assuage guilt from within the industry. Lil Baby nailed the track of his career with ’The Bigger Picture’, while Anderson Paak captured some sense of hope with ‘Lockdown’, immortalising the feeling of solidarity and change prevalent in the crowds of the LA protests. Here in the UK, Stormzy (as ever) showed immense class and inspiration with a beautifully-animated video for ’Superheroes’, eclipsing anything the John Lewis marketing department could ever offer in the tear-jerking department.
From Hayley Williams’s near-whispered “I spent the weekend at home again” on ‘Petals For Armor’ to Moses Sumney’s opus about isolation (‘grae’), plenty of the material written pre-pandemic also proved to be painfully relevant upon its release. Confronted by daily death tolls and late-running governmental briefings, we fell in love with material that offered both darkness and light – a trick so often turned most efficiently by women. With ‘Women In Music Pt.III’, Haim delivered a powerful mediation on depression and misogyny while also running Zoom dance classes, while Fiona Apple’s comeback had even the most misogynistic of indie bros grumbling into their banana bread over its indisputable quality.
Propelled to genuine superstar status with ‘Punisher’, Phoebe Bridgers gave us endless laughs in her perpetual bid to capture the mood of the nation, always straddling the line between melancholia and memes. And boy was it a great year for musical memes – Harry Styles feeding the goldfish, the Fleetwood Mac fan cruising down the highway with his ocean spray, Dionne Warwick finding her inner Grandma sass as she took the industry’s youngers to task. Many hours were lost to watching TikTik videos on loop, not least the guy with the uncanny ability to make any musician sound like anyone else.
More so than ever, the music industry relied on that balance between catharsis and escapism. While some artists went all out on the coronavirus-referencing content (Ben Gibbard’s ‘Life In Quarantine’ and BTS’s ‘Life Goes On’ being the least-repulsive), others knew that the answer was to dance through the pain. As with Gaga & Ariana’s ‘Rain On Me’, hearing ‘WAP’ for the very first time was a true release valve, a reminder of just how much of a tonic a dose of eccentric, profane pop can be during a rough time. Though most of us will never know what it is to have the unflappable composure of Megan Thee Stallion, the thrill of watching her win time and time again throughout 2020 was truly something to behold. Equally satisfying, if not thrilling, was watching rock’s many dinosaurs out themselves as the tired old bigots they are – Morrissey, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, you may escort yourselves out of the building.
Over in Ariana Grande camp, things were also getting locked down with ‘Positions’, an intoxicating ode to sexytime that felt equal parts intimate and ambitious. It wasn’t a record released to her usual fanfare, but it was the one that felt right for 2020 – an honest depiction of where her life is at, with a shimmering effervescence that celebrates the all-conquering feeling that good love should have. Not everyone was accomplishing the same mathematics as she was on ‘34+35’, but there was something relatable and timely in her reminder to hold loved ones close. Maybe not that close though…
And so we reach December, battered and bruised but hopefully still healthy, with a Spotify Wrapped playlist that pays ode to all the little at-home wins and losses along the way. End-Of-Year lists were filed, and then Miss Taylor Swift comes along and scuppers it all in the way only she can, dropping a second record on top of the already incredible one she gave us in the summer. She’d written it, so she thought we should have it – “not a lot going on at the moment”. It was the perfect end to an unprecedented year, a fever dream of Dolly Parton vaccines and socially distant festivals and true artistic humility. Twitter, as predicted, went completely wild. All alone in our bedrooms, we were united once more by some of the only certainties that 2020 had to offer – great music is great no matter how it’s packaged, and artistic integrity will always win. Now for the love of God, get us that vaccine – there are a million and one gigs next year that we simply need to see.
READ MORE: THE 45 BEST ALBUMS OF 2020
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