A Playlist for Poetry’s July/August 2017 Issue

For our July/August 2017 playlist, we asked contributor Tarfia Faizullah to curate a selection of music for us. You can read about her approach to creating the playlist below. Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

This past November, I started making playlists on Spotify in earnest—something had frozen in me, something that I couldn’t explain to others, or even engage completely with myself. I had started to feel like I was becoming someone whose thoughts didn’t feel like my own. When I wasn’t working, I was listening and playlisting, trying to use any generation and genre of music to unfreeze whatever in me refused to thaw. I began to ask myself this question: Do we know what we like when no one is watching? Both this playlist and my participation in the current issue of Poetry is motivated by a desire to answer that question as honestly as possible through the filter of “Asian American,” which, as co-editor Lawrence-Minh Búi Davis eloquently says, can be seen as “a fabrication, a blinkered prayer for something like solidarity.”

This playlist was also constructed using the following additional filters: 1) songs by artists I already love (“Like a G6”—my 2010 jam!); 2) songs by artists I’ve never heard of (“Sunlight”: my new artist motivation jam!); 3) artists my friends, a few contributors, and/or the internet recommended (“Space Foreva”: whew/wow!). I love how many of these songs, also, are collaborations (“I Know” by Big Sean and Jhene Aiko, what a great duet!) between and across genres and cultures: a reminder that these filters are only as useful as they ring true. As Curtis Mayfield sings in “We the People Darker than Blue,” the final track on this playlist: “I know we’ve all got problems/that’s why I’m here to say/keep peace with me and I with you/let me love in my own way.” Something I noticed along the way: so many of these musicians name-check other countries and cultures, and name-check themselves, too. I’m fascinated by the moment of encounter, and why music can cause something in us to melt and move to make new grooves.