Hits by Dua Lipa, Taylor Swift among ‘New York Times Magazine”s list of “Songs that Matter Right Now”

John Edmonds for The New York TimesAhead of the Grammy Awards on Sunday, the New York Times Magazine is out with its annual Music Issue, which features a list of “19 Songs that Matter Right Now.”  Among them are smashes by Grammy nominees Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift.

Dua’s hit “Levitating,” from her Grammy-nominated album Future Nostalgia, is described by the magazine as “the latest and possibly greatest” of a “seemingly never-ending stretch of incredible singles” that Dua has put out in the past year. 

Being released, as it was, at the end of March 2020, notes the Times magazine, “Future Nostalgia offered a soundtrack to precisely the type of wild night that had gone extinct by the time the record actually reached listeners.”

By making the album we didn’t know we needed, the magazine says, Dua gave us all a “Master Class in Pop Ubiquity” by creating music that was “everywhere, even in a year when we went nowhere.”

As for Taylor, her Grammy-nominated hit “Cardigan” has made the list because it’s a standout track on her album folklore, which, like its sister album evermore, featured Taylor collaborating with Aaron Dessner of the indie-rock group The National.

“The collaboration…has been so well received…that it’s easy to forget that, just nine years ago, such a partnership would have overwhelmed our nation’s music-critic think-piece resources,” the magazine writes.

Thanks to Taylor, the magazine writes, “The taste politics that once defined pop and indie have been flattened out of existence,” just as “the internet and streaming demolished every other form of stratification in music.”

Other artists whose songs “Matter Right Now,” according to the mag, include rappers Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, Drake and country star Sam Hunt.

By Andrea Dresdale
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

By ABC Audio on March 11, 2021

John Edmonds for The New York TimesAhead of the Grammy Awards on Sunday, the New York Times Magazine is out with its annual Music Issue, which features a list of “19 Songs that Matter Right Now.”  Among them are smashes by Grammy nominees Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift.

Dua’s hit “Levitating,” from her Grammy-nominated album Future Nostalgia, is described by the magazine as “the latest and possibly greatest” of a “seemingly never-ending stretch of incredible singles” that Dua has put out in the past year. 

Being released, as it was, at the end of March 2020, notes the Times magazine, “Future Nostalgia offered a soundtrack to precisely the type of wild night that had gone extinct by the time the record actually reached listeners.”

By making the album we didn’t know we needed, the magazine says, Dua gave us all a “Master Class in Pop Ubiquity” by creating music that was “everywhere, even in a year when we went nowhere.”

As for Taylor, her Grammy-nominated hit “Cardigan” has made the list because it’s a standout track on her album folklore, which, like its sister album evermore, featured Taylor collaborating with Aaron Dessner of the indie-rock group The National.

“The collaboration…has been so well received…that it’s easy to forget that, just nine years ago, such a partnership would have overwhelmed our nation’s music-critic think-piece resources,” the magazine writes.

Thanks to Taylor, the magazine writes, “The taste politics that once defined pop and indie have been flattened out of existence,” just as “the internet and streaming demolished every other form of stratification in music.”

Other artists whose songs “Matter Right Now,” according to the mag, include rappers Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, Drake and country star Sam Hunt.

By Andrea Dresdale
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

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