Ahead of the Grammy Awards on Sunday, the
New York Times Magazine
is out with its annual Music Issue, which features a list of ”
19 Songs that Matter Right Now
.” Among them are smashes by Grammy nominees
Dua Lipa
and
Taylor Swift
.
Dua’s hit “Levitating,” from her Grammy-nominated album
Future Nostalgia
,
is described by the magazine
as “the latest and possibly greatest” of a “seemingly never-ending stretch of incredible singles” that Dua has put out in the past year.
Being released, as it was, at the end of March 2020, notes the
Times
magazine, “
Future Nostalgia
offered a soundtrack to precisely the type of wild night that had gone extinct by the time the record actually reached listeners.”
By making the album we didn’t know we needed, the magazine says, Dua gave us all a “Master Class in Pop Ubiquity” by creating music that was “everywhere, even in a year when we went nowhere.”
As for Taylor, her Grammy-nominated hit “Cardigan”
has made the list
because it’s a standout track on her album
folklore
, which, like its sister album
evermore
, featured Taylor collaborating with
Aaron Dessner
of the indie-rock group
The National
.
“The collaboration…has been so well received…that it’s easy to forget that, just nine years ago, such a partnership would have overwhelmed our nation’s music-critic think-piece resources,” the magazine writes.
Thanks to Taylor, the magazine writes, “The taste politics that once defined pop and indie have been flattened out of existence,” just as “the internet and streaming demolished every other form of stratification in music.”
Other artists whose songs “Matter Right Now,” according to the mag, include rappers
Cardi B
and
Megan Thee Stallion
, singer-songwriter
Phoebe Bridgers
,
Drake
and country star
Sam Hunt
.
By Andrea Dresdale
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