A Pandemic Distraction: A Spotify Playlist About Emojis 🎶🎶🎶

March 31, 2020 · by · in General

I am sharing a Spotify playlist about emojis that I prepared last summer. To prepare Spotify thematic playlists, I do keyword searches to assemble a super-set of candidate songs (in this case, I think it was over 400), and then I listen to each and every song to assess its topical fit. This means two things: (1) this process takes me deep into Spotify’s long-tail, which has a lot of weird stuff that doesn’t appeal to anyone outside of the targeted audience niche, and (2) I didn’t screen any songs for merit, only for topical fit, so a lot of the songs are terrible. Like, really, really terrible.

In particular, this playlist has many songs with anti-social content, such as rampant misogyny and phrases that would make George Carlin blush. I cannot stress this enough: THIS PLAYLIST IS COMPLETELY, UNAMBIGUOUSLY, 100% NSFW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Indeed, I didn’t enjoy listening to most of these songs, and I wouldn’t choose to listen to them again. Still, the exercise was a fun way to capture the zeitgeist of emojis in music circa summer 2019. To that end, superstar RA Jess Miers put together a helpful chart of the emojis referenced in the songs. (Given the inscrutability of some of the lyrics, this is only an approximation). I also have the chart as an Excel spreadsheet–email me if interested. According to Jess’ tally, the most-frequently-referenced emojis in this playlist:

Hearts: 27
Heart Eyes: 23
Eggplant: 20
Blowing a Kiss: 18

As usual, if I’m missing any songs that you think belong in the playlist, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope 🎶👂😊.