My Definitive Millennial Playlist

BlueSky, leave me be! I’m glad there’s a methadone clinic for recovering tweeters, but ugh! One day, I'm distracted by people mourning the "good" billionaires who could only share their frightening world views in Playboy interviews and settled for crushing competitors and branding film preservation when the government wouldn't let them colorize movies. The next, everybody's sharing and dunking on the latest dork's grand theory about how music critics went DEI in the ‘00s. Then the New York Times is mean to Billy Joel, but not in a nuanced, thoughtful way that enlightens everyone. And, of course, I can always trust my feed to share the latest in depressing gaslighting from our elected officials, inspiring me to point out the problem with neoliberals and nihilists to pals who've heard it all before.

But the best thing on BlueSky is when a random knucklehead dares to ask something idiotic. Pedantic Answers To Stupid Questions is always the main course or the mashed potatoes on a day I spent too long on social media. So, failing the wisdom of staying offline when you have to stuff to do, I'll at least try to get laughs and blog content out of it.

Case in point: some ding-a-ling listed a bunch of '00s hipster shit and asked which was the "definitive millennial" song. My former editor Maura Johnston was unsurprisingly the first person I noticed to state the obvious: it's "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers. Plenty of people younger and older love it, but none love it as much as people currently between 45 and 30. It's a big whooshing hit about a cuck feeling emo as fuck, who remembers by the chorus that he can't let this keep him from the birthright of cultural dominance, and everything he's ever seen in an '80s movie. It's the greatest gift to the world from bandleader Brandon Flowers, a Vegas-raised Mormon whose desire for liberation through rock & roll was so desperate, everyone less repressed assumed he was also hungry for sex & drugs. But no, showbiz & starting a family has him hollering incoherently like a coked-out twink at 1am, dressed like Born In The USA Bruce Springsteen for Halloween. So while many olds thought the Killers would go the way of Flock Of Seagulls, millennials have stood by this passionate man they wish they could be, or this man they wish was a coked-out twink, or this man who stands in for the coked-out twink they wish was sexually attracted to nice girls. He is their avatar of lunatic squareness, equal parts eyeliner and Alex P. Keaton. "Mr. Brightside" is their shared anthem.

Of course, "generations" are hogwash. This nonsense, important mostly to marketing companies, is often used as a chance to erase gender, geography, class, race, education and other factors that influence experience far more than what age you were when cultural product came out. That's part of why the original BlueSky post (which I won't link to, please) got people going. It was all MGMT and Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Postal Service and other milquetoast, hipster, post-9/11 Meet Me In The Bathroom business, as if the biggest generation since the boomers could be defined by a song that took over a year to go platinum. Older hipsters were mad the millennials were claiming all cool stuff from the '00s, while poptimists and other woke baes clucked their tongues at the bougie whitebread of it all. Oh, the takes inspired by the whims of some utterly random schmuck of zero significance.

TV critic Judy Berman was the first person on my feed to note the best response to this kind of burp-turned-bait is a joke, and I'm embarrassed I hadn't realized it myself. But I quickly made up for lost time, posting a Top 25 Definitive Millennial Songs List that - after some input from other mutuals - I've now turned into a playlist.

Two big caveats here. One, these songs are coded millennial in terms of their primary market, rather than the age of the marketer. It is downright embarassing when people go on about how actually Bob Dylan is from the silent generation or Julian Casablancas is Gen X or phbbbbt. Of course cultural influences tend to be a notch older than those learning from them. Saved By The Bell wasn't for high schoolers, it was for aspiring AC Slaters and Jessie Spanos. So miss me with that "actually." Two, this is a joke. What little rules I followed - "all things Danger Mouse are too appealing to olds," "millennial country has to come later than millennial pop by defintion" - are to improve the joke. And if you don't get the joke, that's ok, too. You're probably too young, too old, too square or too hip.

So here's My Definitive Millennial Playlist, in ascending order of sorts, forcing the listener to earn "Mr. Brightside." And not via Franz Ferdinand. you vain dorks. Spotify for your ears, YouTube to include your eyes (truly, I dare you), and individual song links if you just want to dip your toes in.

My Definitive Millennial Playlist
(YouTube Link)

1. Simple Plan, "Perfect"
2. Blackstreet feat. Mya, "Take Me There"
3. Will Smith feat. Dru Hill, "Wild Wild West"
4. DJ Sammy, "Heaven"
5. City High, "What Would You Do?"
6. LFO, "Summer Girls"
7. Gwen Stefani feat. Eve, "Rich Girl"
8. Jesse McCartney, "Beautiful Soul"
9. Cheap Trick, "That 70's Song"
10. Kings Of Leon, "Use Somebody"
11. Florida Georgia Line feat. Nelly, "Cruise"
12. LL Cool J, "Luv U Better"
13. Dashboard Confessional, "Vindicated"
14. Vitamin C, "Graduation"
15. Smashing Pumpkins, "The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning"
16. Chingy, "One Call Away"
17. Donny Osmond, "I'll Make A Man Out Of You"
18. Avril Lavigne, "Sk8erboi"
19. Linkin Park feat. Jay-Z, "Numb/Encore"
20. Good Charlotte, "The Anthem"
21. The Game, "Dreams"
22. Weezer, "Butterfly"
23. Crazy Town, "Butterfly"
24. Britney Spears, "Lucky"
25. P.O.D. "Youth Of The Nation"
26. The Killers, "Mr. Brightside"

If you feel like you have something important to share, you can e-mail it to anthonyisright at gmail dot com. But I want you to watch the entire YouTube playlist first. There will be a quiz.