I know that, as someone who considers himself a (shitty and half-baked) Critic of Music, I’m supposed to absorb music in the same vein that I would paintings or movies: as objects independent of their surroundings, as objects to be consumed, observed, and evaluated while blocking out everything that isn’t explicitly related. And even when you have artists like Childish Gambino that want to tie other mediums of art into their music, the general response is shut up and focus on making good music the rest of your artsiness can wait. Unless you're Kanye West, in which case your name is a deus ex machina and you get a free pass for everything.
But anyway: that’s how I feel obligated to consume music, but in reality that’s rarely how. You’d be hard-pressed to find me sitting down and doing nothing but listening to music, because that forces me to gather up all of my attention and pinpoint-focus it. And that never goes well. I’ve always preferred the notion that music exists as a companion and not the main attraction.
I’m lucky enough to be in Destin, Florida right now, and I just spent about half an hour staring at the tide listening to my favorite album (the album itself is irrelevant), and yesterday I spent hours sitting in the sun letting my summer playlist shuffle through, and it’s become increasingly obvious to me that my favorite music parallels my life. I can’t listen to Blu’s “j e s u s” or Kendrick Lamar’s “Blow My High” without instantly being transplanted into 80 degree weather, while Flume’s “Holdin’ On” and Grande Marshall’s “Thuggin Shidd Pt. II” sound infinitely better at night.
I’ve tried to make summer playlists before for Cypher League, but it’s never gone too well. And there’s a reason, I think, that hip-hop’s relatability is often cited as one of its main appeals (and sometimes even as a requirement). It’s tough to make a universally appealing summer playlist, because my summer playlist maps out, song-by-song, to my life. It’s possible on some level, I guess (lots of DJs pretty much do this for a living), but I see it as pretentious more than anything.