Everything That Happened in Pop This Year, in Six Minutes

Daniel Kim does this every December and every December I feel the same strange mix of recognition and exhaustion—all those songs compressed into a single track, the year’s worth of earworms sutured together into something that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. The 2013 edition of his Pop Danthology is up, and it’s the usual epic collage: Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus doing whatever Miley Cyrus was doing this year, and yes, the Harlem Shake, which I had successfully suppressed until approximately forty-five seconds in.

There’s something melancholy about it, actually. Heard individually, spread across the year, each song had its own context—a specific Tuesday, a specific drive, a specific person you were thinking about. Stitched together like this, they flatten into artifact, into the sound of a year rather than the songs themselves. Kim wrote up his process on his blog if you want the behind-the-scenes of how he built the thing. I’d rather just sit with the weird nostalgia of hearing songs I was already bored of and somehow missing them anyway.