Well, here we are at the end of another exhausting year of disease, death, social upheaval, creeping fascism, across-the-board uncertainty and sundry shades of dread. As seems to have become a tradition in recent times, many people are ready to bid a curt “Bye, Felisha” to this year — as though 2021 itself is somehow the perpetrator of all this nonsense.
But of course we know a year is just a convenient and arbitrary way to mark the completion of another trip around our humble planet’s local star, and has no bearing whatsoever on the travails of the mud-slinging apes on this little blue marble in space. (Sorry, astrology folks.) In the end, a calendar year is useful mostly in retrospect, a thumbnail image of a specific time once can call up for reference, or perhaps more often, for nostalgia.
In the spirit of painting a bigger picture by the numbers of time, Honk Journal is proud to present this Spotify playlist of songs with years in the title. Many do prove to be evocative of times gone by, or in some cases, the future to come. There are fifty (50!) songs in all, with a total running time of three hours, 27 minutes. So if you start playing this tonight at 8:33 p.m., the last notes of Zager & Evans’ “In the Year 2525” will trail off just in time to ring in the New Year!
Thanks as always for everyone who supports Honk. Here’s wishing the best for all of us in 2022!
