History of A Mix
featuring the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, RuPaul, and more!
Today’s mix and newsletter are a little bit different! There’s a lot about 2020 and the pandemic, so if that’s not your jam, I understand!
Have you ever made a playlist so stupid you fear it may have ushered in a plague? My friend Julia (who you may remember from “A Mix for: People Who ‘Don’t Like Taylor Swift’”) and I have!
This week, we are celebrating the 3 year anniversary of said mix, “2020 moooo.” The title of the mix is a typo- we intended to call it “2020 mood,” but we somehow ended up with “moooo” and it stuck. Julia and I were roommates until late May 2020, and remained pod-mates throughout the worst of the pandemic. We returned to “2020 moooo” regularly during this time.
I asked Julia to join me for a discussion of this seminal mix. As this also ended up being a discussion of 2020 generally, we were joined by our third pod-mate, Peter. This is a highly edited and condensed version of that conversation. Bless you if you read this entire thing, but today’s mix is even weirder without the context.
Hannah: Tell me what you remember about making the “moooo” playlist.
Julia: I remember that we were driving back from New Haven [in January 2020] from seeing our friends from grad school. And you were driving. And it was a very fun baby road trip where you get kind of hyper and feel like you’re 15. And I remember we were talking a lot about what we felt to be unrepresented or under acknowledged pop masterpieces from our childhoods. I can’t remember if you started talking about Britney Spears’s “Soda Pop” first?
H: I think you started talking about “Bumper to Bumper” because you had it on a single, right? Cuz I had a single of “Soda Pop.”
J: Right, because I think I rediscovered “Bumper to Bumper” recently to that point. The thing about “Bumper to Bumper” is it’s the b-side to “Wannabe” so it’s not on a Spice Girls record, but I had the single CD with “Wannabe” and “Bumper and Bumper.” And it’s one of those things where I learned all the words when I was like 9 and they’re branded into my mind. Then as an adult I was like, “that can’t be right. This song is FILTHY. I must be misremembering.” So I rediscovered it and realized, “oh my god, that is right.” And not only that, it’s a BANGER. It’s so good.
H: It is SO GOOD.
J: So, I just had that whole journey right before we took that trip.
H: Ok, so it kicked off with “Bumper to Bumper” then I must have said, “do you know ‘Soda Pop’ because I weirdly had a single CD version of that?”
J: Which is also really good.
H: It is, and it’s Britney singing as an alto basically. She’s not doing baby voice.
J: Right, like in all the videos of her singing as a true child, she has a big, throaty belt.
[group devolves briefly into a discussion about what her voice sounds like today, is Britney REALLY free, what other celebrities have been under conservatorships]
J: So I had never heard “Soda Pop” and I was really pumped because it is really good and you said it’s like S Club 7 kind of.
[Hannah launches into a history of S Club 7, their TV show, and their connection to the Spice Girls]
Peter: So were you guys listening to songs like “Bumper to Bumper” in the car with your parents?
J: You know, probably, but I’ll also say that in my particular case- and this takes us to the next entry on the playlist- my father was obsessed with Madonna’s Bedtime Stories album. He would play that on the way to second grade. And he was also playing Howard Stern while driving me to school, so the point is, I was putting the least scandalous things on the CD player.
H: Right. I listened to the playlist today at work and “Human Nature” is wild.
J: I love it so much.
H: I think we listened to “Soda Pop” and “Bumper to Bumper” and were talking about how raunchy “Bumper to Bumper” was, and you said, “ok, well, have you heard ‘Human Nature?’ Because that is raunchy.”
J: Yes, yes. “Human Nature” is one of me and my sister’s karaoke go-to’s because it’s so aggressive. There’s that repeated refrain of “I’m not your bitch, don’t lay your shit on me….”
P: Whoa!
J: Which is super empowering to yell in a room full of your friends and colleagues. The song is kind of shocking. There’s the line, “would you like me better if I were a man?” Which actually takes us to, and now I know why the next song in the playlist is what it is.
H: I think you’re right. The next song on here is “The Man” by Taylor Swift. Which I think… wow, this is a sentence that has never been uttered before: “The Man” is a direct response to “Human Nature” by Madonna.
[Julia and Hannah cackle]
J: On the family tree, the line is straight between those two songs.
H: If we ever meet Taylor, that’s what we’re going to ask her. “Can you verify?”
J: Yep, that’s the one question! [laughs] So, this playlist is pre-Folklore, so now I would probably add “Mad Woman” instead because that’s actually my way-more-favorite Taylor grappling with misogyny and sexism song.
H: Right, but I feel like that would be almost too serious for this dumb-ass playlist. Because I think by the time we got to adding “The Man,” we said, this is the vibe for 2020. We’re channeling, “I’m not your bitch, don’t lay your shit on me.” This our ENERGY of this year! Bring it on!
P: [concerned] This is all happening during one road trip to New Haven?
[more cackling]
H: Ok, and this is where the playlist takes- if it wasn’t stupid enough already- a wackadoo turn. The playlist started out as just 7 songs: the first four we’ve mentioned, “Future Nostalgia” by Dua Lipa, “Pynk” by Janelle Monae, and “MOOO!” by Doja Cat. And “MOOO!” is only on here because you misspelled “mood” in the title of the playlist, so we kept that. Yeah, so this was at one point, 7 silly, but contained, songs. Then we lost out minds during the rest of 2020. We realized we’d made some kind of grave mistake by making this playlist and ushered some bad vibes in…
J: Cursed the world.
H: So we just decided to double down. The last things we added to the playlist are the songs that come next. My memory is that these additions were influenced by the Las Culturistas podcast episode where they created a “New American Song Book.” And they put the theme from Jurassic Park in their Great American Song Book. So, we said, “wouldn’t it be funnier if in the middle of our stupid playlist, we didn’t just put the theme from Jurassic Park, we put the theme from Jurassic Park twice. Back-to-back. And you should listen to them sequentially.”
[Julia and Hannah repeatedly applaud themselves for being so funny as to think to include the song twice]
J: So during this time [mid-to-late 2020], I realized I only experienced true joy through the most dumb things. Like when we watched Cats on Halloween and I felt more pure joy than I had felt in a year.
H: We watched a lot of dumb stuff just to feel joy. I made you watch Schitt’s Creek from the beginning so that we could watch the season that was airing live in 2020. That was one of the few “normal” things going on, that there were new episodes of a TV show. So, we watched all of that Schitt’s Creek and decided that we needed to add the song, “A Little Bit Alexis” to this playlist.
J: You know what, I think every song on this playlist is actually really good. And “A Little Bit Alexis” is actually really good.
H: The part where she says “everybody has a horse” and then repeats that later on as if we all do?!
[more laughter]
H: We were on a schedule for appointment television in a way I don’t think I had been in years. We were tuning in for Schitt’s Creek, on Saturday nights we would watch a movie from our running list, and on Friday nights we were tuning in for a double header of RuPaul. Both a regular Drag Race season and Secret Celebrity Drag Race. So the last song on here… was it the runway song for the season we were watching?
J: It might have been the song they play at the end when the queens dance around and sometimes hold signs that say like, “vote!”
H: So the full title of that song is, “Sexy Drag Queen parenthesis dootdoot…”
[Hannah attempts to get through the title of the song and cannot. Julia and Hannah laugh.]
H: “Dootdoot doot-swift remix.”
[laughing continues]
J: And this led to us just walking around the house singing, “sexayyy, sexayyy drag queen.” This is when you had your… breakthrough about how you wish to be laid to rest.
H: Well, someone in my family has said on multiple occasions they would like to be lowered into the grave while “Waterloo Sunset” by The Kinks plays. So I jokingly said, “I would like ‘Sexy Drag Queen (dootdoot doot-swift remix)’ played as I’m lowered into the ground at my funeral.”
J: Which I think would be just transcendent.
H: For someone who was never a drag queen [hysterical laughter from Julia and Hannah] I think it would be really funny.
[brief, morbid discussion of how this would logistically happen]
H: Wow. Well, any last thoughts on the “moooo” playlist? Any songs you think should be on here but aren’t?
P: I think the playlist sort of encompasses the entire timeline from when the world felt like it was ending to we-finally-made-it-through-but-not-entirely-through-but-we-can-go-out.
J: I think about what was our psychological state such that we needed this playlist?
H: The last two songs we added to the playlist, the back-to-back Jurassic Park themes, were added in January 2021. Almost a year to the day since we originally created the playlist. In that time, we had descended into full madness.
[reminiscing on “unprecedented” times]
H: Do you have a favorite song on this playlist?
J: [laughs] That’s tough. I’m gonna go with “Theme from Jurassic Park.”
H: That’s your favorite?!
J: Well, I would say, “what captures this playlist?” And the answer is “that, twice.” I really love it. Thank you for making this work of art with me.
H: Thank you for making it with me.
[THE END]
If you’ve made it this far- thank you! This was a special edition of Made You A Mix, and I hope you found something funny here because we sure did.