A Playlist for the April 2020 Issue

For our April 2020 playlist, we asked contributor Tishani Doshi, whose poem “They Killed Cows. I Killed Them” appears in the issue, to curate a selection of music for us. Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

I created this playlist in a COVID-19 lockdown. On campus at NYU in Abu Dhabi, classes had been moved online, large gatherings were out, social distancing was in, and people returning from high-risk zones had to self-isolate for fourteen days. It was, is, an unsettling time. I had been commissioned to travel over spring break, to write a piece about the ancient land routes of the Silk Road that cut through Uttar Pradesh, the current hotbed of Hindu nationalism in India. I cancelled. Instead, I read about how the Black Death arrived from China to Europe along caravan routes with silk and spices, only for a more virulent strain of it to be exported back to Asia decades later. Commerce and bacteria stop for no one. I read about cordon sanitaires and plague journals, how people risked their lives out of boredom and loneliness to see friends, sew their son’s shirts, make love. Two sisters in Florence, Maria and Cammilla, danced their way through the spring of 1629 while their mother was in the plague hospital.

I rarely write or read while listening to music. If I do, it’s always instrumental, because word on word confuses me. For my playlist though, I picked just two instrumental pieces, “Variant IV” by Joel Cadbury and Paul Stoney, composed for the choreographer Wayne McGregor’s Borderlands, and Astor Piazolla’s “Libertango.” In all the other tracks, the human voice is center stage and defiant: Farida Khanum, Nina Simone, Mariza, Gigi, Layla Mourad, Maria Callas, Tupac Shakur.  

In a time of face masks, foot shakes instead of hugs, Zoom meetings, rising domestic violence and isolation, displacement, and loneliness, the poems in this issue reminded me of our avenues of survival. “It’s been proven difficult to dance to machine gun fire,” Ocean Vuong writes. Elsewhere, the lines are almost instructions: “She makes herself a dancer move out of her way”; “If we keep drowning we’ll learn to breathe in the through-beneath” (Harmony Holiday).

And so, I chose music that made me want to dance like those Italian sisters dancing through the plague. Not necessarily all boogie woogie à la Paolo Conte—although there’s music that will make you want to tap your feet, roll your shoulders, sway and twirl around your lonely balconies—but, simply, music that soars through the “body’s hidden cord” (Nelly Sachs, translated by Joshua Weiner with Linda B. Parshall).

These are weird, uncertain times. Perhaps the times are always weird and uncertain and the dance is always the danse macabre between life and death. Either way, we need the human voice, through poetry and song, to take us through.