(Worlds I have heard)Twenty a year2006–2025

Music

Every year I have been alive, twenty songs at a time. 2006 is the first one because that is the year I was born, so this is not a list of what I liked at the time: for the first stretch of it I was a toddler and had no opinion at all. It is what was playing while I was here, which is a different and more honest thing to put on a page.

The lists are the Billboard Year-End Hot 100, top twenty, which is the closest thing there is to a neutral record of what a year actually sounded like in America. They are somebody else's ranking rather than mine, and that is the point of starting here: it is the raw material. What I keep, cut and argue with comes after.