About this Playlist
Three Days Grace blares through my earphones as I curate a 90s nostalgia playlist. The band triggers a memory of another collection—one I’d made, or at least began compiling, somewhere between March 2020 and December 2021, a stretch of time, in retrospect, that feels like a single, endless, elongated day. Fifty songs that I’d paired back to 29 a few months ago, after purging those without the edge and humor I wanted to keep. I’d forgotten about it until now.
Covid. I call it up on Spotify and relabel it Plagueground after pulling the title from one of my hundred thousand Google docs, where I stockpile playlist concepts I might eventually get to. On the next-door terrace, my neighbors’ kids’ feet hit the tile, seemingly running in circles. Their screeching joy—more like bloodthirsty laughter—suddenly cuts off, reminding me of the silence of that now alternate timeline where Sarah Connor is gripping her chain-link fence, watching nuclear fire consume a playground as parents chat obliviously on benches, except it’s not bombs, but invisible contagion and jungle gyms swarming with spike proteins and children shrieking their recess death knell as they climb and touch, and breathe it all in. That’s probably where my mind went when I slapped the initial playlist name at the top of my Covid doc. Obviously, it still does…
I’d first considered ‘plaguelist’—direct, functional, a simple descriptor for a collection of pandemic songs. But ‘Plagueground’ summons abandoned swing sets, hazard tape, the strange emptiness of public spaces during lockdown. It also matches the sounds in the collection—some songs playful in structure, some grim in content.
Recently, I’ve been purging my digital life—a protest against Musk and Zuckerberg that has evolved into a quest (see obsession) for order. Today, I’m targeting Google Docs—the playlist detritus accumulated and forgotten—and I’ve started with this one. Humor is my primary filter, though I’m keeping tracks with a sound that fits the playlist vibe. I discard seven songs, returning them into the algorithmic circulation where my unwanted music serves other users but not me, at least not on purpose.
This isn’t a playlist you’ll listen to unless trapped in another pandemic or you somehow feel nostalgic for the plaguealypse. I’m not sure that I’ll ever listen to it again, but it’s got some great tracks like Creepy Crawlers, Lockdown Blues, and Toilet Paper’s Gone, which captures the absurd horror of watching humans devolve over the privilege of wiping their asses.
When Peaches intones, “My pussy wear a mask, my pussy don’t play, my pussy wear a mask, takin’ cover from the spray,” I laugh and tug my earphones off to share with my partner. I love how this playlist’s songs divide that endless, elongated day into distinct moments: tracksuit fashion and ill-advised hook-ups, toilet paper wars, and sex (or the lack thereof). I love how any playlist can compress memories into timestamps —of absurdities, in this case.
My finger hovers over the share button while news about a Texas measles outbreak tickers across the bottom of my TV screen. Trump sits in the White House again. Robert Kennedy Jr. heads the Health Department. History never repeats exactly, but it often rhymes in sickening cadence. I’m acutely aware that I’m at the beginning of another stretch of time that will eventually collapse into another playlist of timestamps—absurd, horrific, or something else.
As the final notes of Zen, a collaboration between X Ambassadors, K-Flay, and Grandson fade—that desperate plea of “Someone gimme gimme fucking zen”—I watch parallels forming in 2025. Parents arrange picnics beneath mushroom cloud skies, lawmakers debate whether radiation is just liberal propaganda and half of the world clutches to chain-link fences, throats raw from screaming warnings that the other half doesn’t bother or is too angry or afraid to hear, and I click share, not from any delusion that a pandemic playlist matters, but because documenting our collective stupidity feels like the least I can do while history masturbates to its own reflection.
Track Listing
- Vaccinate Me Baby – Chicks On Speed
- Pussy Mask – Peaches
- Quarantine Speech – Lady Leshurr
- Lockdown Blues – The Tiger Lillies
- Lockdown (Sjöblom Remix) – Clan of Xymox
- Quarantine The Sticks – Yard Act
- Gnat – Eminem
- Mask, Gloves, Soap, Scrubs – Todrick Hall
- Bored In The House – Tyga
- Creepy Crawlers – Viagra Boys
- Tracksuit – Frankie and the Witch Fingers
- Toilet Paper’s Gone – Day by Dave
- Quarantine (In My Place Of) (B-Side) – Manic Street Preachers
- Pandemic Blues: I Can’t Take It! – Chris Isaak
- Sunshine (Covid Song) – Snoop Dogg
- Coronavirus – Only Fire
- Quarantine – blink-182
- Going to Live – The Cat Empire
- Stay Inside – Gemma Ray
- So Called Life – Three Days Grace
- Free Again (From Endless Dungeon) – Lera Lynn
- Zen (with K.Flay & grandson) – X Ambassadors
Want some fun playlists about space and apocalypses? Check out Jane Does Space or Apocalypse in Soho. Find your zombies here and great tracks with a political bend here.
