a wee bit of remembering 2016, if that is okay
I can't help but love the 2016 nostalgia wave. Being nostalgic is one of my weaker points—your girl loves to REMINISCE—so when the nation gets together to nostalgize in harmony, I have to chime in. In the absence of monoculture, we can engage with monostalgia.
I had an extremely 2016 2016. I was working at Snapchat, and had been since the prior year. There was a time for a while where, if you went to post a photo or video on your Snapchat Story, and you lived in a big city, went to a name-brand college, or were in the right place at the right time for an event or holiday, you also had the option to submit your Snap to be on a Global Story. And in a strangely under-decorated office in Times Square, a small group of people watched all of those stories. I was one of those people.
You know in The Dark Knight where there's a surveillance network that lets Batman see everyone's cell phones all over the world or whatever? That was the desktop view of the stories submission page. Rectangles on rectangles. Sometimes when something important happened, all of the rectangles would show the same thing: a skyscraper in Dubai on fire on New Year's Eve, or a home run at Yankee Stadium.
This bird's eye view of what people under the age of 25 were recording on their phones meant I was tapped into youth culture in a way I had never been before, and probably never will be again. It felt like I caught trends and memes at their point of genesis. Damn Daniel, "what are those," etc. Music burbled up from the digital cauldron in the same way. "Panda" by Desiigner, lots of Drake and Justin Bieber. It was DJ Snake's year, that guy was everywhere. The previous year, OMI's "Cheerleader" swept the phones like a virus. When I edited the college stories, every Tuesday my computer would fill up with dazed kids at the library, playing "Club Goin' Up On A Tuesday" in an ironic fashion.
The legality of using music in the stories that got published to the app was a little dubious—we were only allowed to use 3 second snippets of songs, if people had them playing in the background of their snaps. I experienced a lot of music, but in little discombobulated bursts. Pressing play, pressing pause. I started thinking in Snapchats. Everything around me became a potential Story. My brain was shrinking, calcifying around the concept of a snippet of a visual and a pithy caption stretching across its horizon. Once I saw a fire hydrant leaking and submitted it to the New York story with the caption "listening to the new Adele album 😭." It was accepted.
2016 was a transitional time in video. Instagram ripped off Stories in the middle of the year. Vine stopped allowed uploads in October. Public Snapchat felt like a halfway point. People were starting to learn to perform, rather than observe. By the end of Vine, it was no longer enough to observe something funny or interesting happening—you had to make it happen yourself. Meanwhile, Musical.ly already existed, it wasn't TikTok yet. Soon you would need to lip sync for your life if you wanted any attention at all.
Besides listening to tinny music in tiny staccato bursts from thousands and thousands of unknown teenagers's phones, the other music I got into in 2016 was a little more justified and ancient. I had started dating my now-husband Chris the year before, and one of his favorite bands was LCD Soundsystem. I had enjoyed their singles but never really dug into the albums. When LCD announced a reunion and a Coachella headlining show, I got to work. I listened to The Long Goodbye on long runs. I started appreciating the transition from "Movement" to "Tribulations." I started finding meaning in the phrase Eat it, Michael Musto. By the time April came around, I was very hype. On the polo fields, the dust almost claimed my corneas, but it was worth it to watch Chris watch his faves come back to life.
When it comes to relationships and taste, this is what I always say: you don't have to like the same things, but it really helps if you like things in the same way. Chris and I have some overlapping tastes (basement rock shows, disco, hot dogs) and some individual ones (guess who lives on each side of the Ken Burns / Lisa Vanderpump divide) but we have a similar approach to our passions: not quite slavish devotion...sensible fanaticism? Ambient obsession? No one band or genre overtakes our consciousness, but when the time is right, we go absolutely balls to the wall, hand in hand. We might have met in 2015 but 2016 is when that mutual approach to liking stuff really solidified. So I can't help but be a little romantic about that year!
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