Marcel Winatschek

Everything That Happened in 2012, Four Minutes at a Time

Every December someone assembles the year’s pop into a mashup and the 2012 version is almost too dense to process—Call Me Maybe, Somebody That I Used to Know, Gangnam Style’s inescapable loop, fun.’s We Are Young, all of it compressed into four minutes of video that somehow stands in for an actual year of lived time. What a mashup does is show you how much you absorbed without consenting to any of it. I didn’t choose these songs. They just happened to me, in cars and supermarkets and bars with bad sound systems. And now they’re the sonic wallpaper behind a year I remember in other terms—not in the music, but in whatever was happening while it played.