2023 Songs of the Year

Another Populist Pop List

The past week or so is one of my favorites in the entire year, with a broad slice of the online commentariat offering takes on the past year’s events and culture, distilling the weeks past into a digestible review.  Though this newsletter has been quite quiet this year, I’ve been filling my ears with all kinds of sounds, and I’m happy to share a playlist of 14 songs with you all, my dear subscribers!

As for how these songs were selected, I did my best to represent a broad range of the population.  As I mentioned in my introductory post, I have a framework where I’ve split the world into 80 regions of roughly equivalent population based on late 2022 population distribution.  These regions have ~100 million members, and thus I refer to them as 亿gions with a nod to the Chinese character 亿 which both visually and phonetically (yì) resembles “re”, creating a multi-sensory wordplay.  I group the regions into Billionishes, and I’ve selected two songs for each Billionish!

A few final notes on s…