Fuck it, mask off!
In the last couple of weeks, in between buying a portable UV light sanitizer and texting my dad about whether viruses can travel through an HVAC unit, I have been at home rapping Future’s 2017 hit “Mask Off” to myself. The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face” and “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by the Police are also in constant rotation, all courtesy of a Spotify playlist called “COVID-19 Quarantine Party.” Another current favorite playlist is “Coronavirus Beats to Panic To” (which ironically includes Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic”). Another one jokes it “could go viral,” and yet another boasts that it has beats “sicker than the coronavirus.”
In the past few weeks, pandemic playlists have become ubiquitous, with celebrities, government bodies, and news organizations playing DJ. Rita Wilson—one of the first celebrities, along with her husband Tom Hanks, to test positive for COVID-19—shared a “Quarantunes” playlist with her fans. The Vietnam Ministry of Health produced a coronavirus handwashing song that launched a TikTok dance challenge. There are endless sets devoted to handwashing songs, including Playbill’s collection of Broadway hits (fittingly including “I’m Going to Wash That Man Out of My Hair” from South Pacific). The CBS affiliate in Pittsburgh suggested washing your hands to songs by local artists like Wiz Khalifa and Christina Aguilera. (Truth be told, “I’m a genie in a bottle, baby/You gotta rub me the right way” would make a genius soap commercial.)
For many people, these playlists satisfy an intense desire for distraction. In China, after concerts and other large gatherings were cancelled, the musicians of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra created playlists for people at home under quarantine, hoping to help them cope with boredom. As more of the United States was placed under lockdown, DJ D-Nice’s “Club Quarantine” Instagram Live stream fulfilled the same role; The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb praised D-Nice for taking “people’s minds off the invisible peril that surrounds us.”
However, looking over Spotify’s pandemic-themed offerings, I’m not convinced we’re looking to music to simply stave off dread. Based on their gallows humor, many of the COVID-19 playlists popping up on the app (some with followers in the hundreds of thousands) seem to want to envelop us in anxiety. While plenty of the song choices are relatively upbeat (Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” is an understandable favorite), some are decidedly macabre, from Filipino alt-rock band Bamboo’s “Last Day on a Cruise Ship” to Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away.” Yet another includes Italian rapper Gué Pequeno’s “2%”—a title meant to evoke an early estimate of COVID-19’s fatality rate. Seeing these titles, I began to wonder what these playlists were doing for people—and what were they doing for me? Why did listening to “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees calm me down when it should probably do the opposite? It reminded me of the time a friend told me that people afraid of heights often feel compelled to jump.
Throughout history, music has been an integral part of how people cope with epidemics. Sometimes, we put them in familiar musical contexts to make them less scary (less “novel,” you could say). While the rest of the world called the 1918 outbreak “the Spanish Flu,” at home in Spain it was often described as “the Naples Soldier” after a song from a popular opera; one of the librettists claimed it was because the tune was just “as catchy” as the disease.
At other times, music has been a salve. During the bubonic plague, doctors advised against certain sounds and recommended others. Jaume D’Agramunt, a Catalan doctor who wrote one of the first medical textbooks on treating the plague, called for the ringing of church bells to be suspended: “The sick are subject to evil imaginings when they hear the death bells.” At the same time, the French doctor Nicolas de Nancel recommended people listen or sing along to music, preferably the lute—though not too soon after eating or drinking, “for that much force incites the rheums.” For these reasons, writes Remi Chiu in his book Plague and Music in the Renaissance, civic authorities in plague-ridden Europe saw controlling the “pestilential soundscape” as an integral part of managing the epidemic.
But not everyone was using music to stave off sickness; some people even used to host large parties in defiance. Without an understanding of germ theory, these parties were not like the ill-advised coronavirus “herd immunity” parties of the present moment; rather, they were rooted in an acceptance of death. These people wanted to go out dancing. Dr. Nigel Paneth, Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology at Michigan State University, tells me, “There’s a lot of literature on how people behave during epidemics. The social order breaks down. During the plague, people used to have these wild dances parties. They figured ‘life is short.’” If the world was going to end, they wanted to enjoy what was left. Entire new genres of secular music suited for dancing and reciting poetry—including the virelai, the ballade, and the rondeau—flourished in response.
Likewise, I began to realize why these pandemic playlists continue to boost my mood. The themes underpinning many of their songs—passion, intensity, body heat—reminds me that art gets much of its meaning from confronting the ephemerality of existence. We want things deeply and quickly because life is, indeed, short. And musicians know that; they usually only get a few minutes per song. Who better to guide us in how to squeeze as much out of life as possible? (Or as Nelly sings in “Hot in Herre,” another one of my favorite fever-themed hits, “Why you at the bar if you ain’t poppin’ the bottles?”) Likewise, last month, when I was leaving the Trader Joe’s parking lot after panic-purchasing five bags of frozen berries, I turned on the radio and was happy to hear Ne-Yo singing, “I want eeeee-verything tonight/For all we know/We might not get tomorrow.”
I started to understand that these songs—these slow jams about night sweats and club bangers about feeling out of breath—were helping me to understand coronavirus as part of a larger story about human vulnerability. And there might be something to this theory, says Bishnupriya Ghosh, Professor of Global Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, who is currently working on a book about media and epidemics. Ghosh points to the 1990 AIDS charity album Red Hot + Blue, a compilation of Cole Porter covers, as a kind of pandemic playlist. The collection, which sold over a million copies, came out at the height of the AIDS epidemic and was full of “really romantic songs that make you swoon,” Ghosh says, like Neneh Cherry’s reworked “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and Annie Lennox’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” As the titles suggest, these songs did not shy away from the scary realities of AIDS; instead, they centered them, reframing the virus as a kind of co-inhabitant. In a way, she says, the songs aimed to “romance those who were infected” but also to “romance the virus”—as if telling the latter we have to learn how to live with you.
As the country faces the prospect of re-opening without a COVID-19 vaccine or reliable treatment, learning to live with the virus could become our next challenge, one perhaps more difficult than staying home. Quarantine tunes and lockdown jams may become outdated, and playlists that urge us to bump-and-grind in the face of death will be more fitting soundtracks for daily life. That is part of a rich musical tradition. What artists and musicians have understood for centuries is that we can’t separate our desire to live—our desires, period—from the eventuality of our demise. When I spoke with Ghosh, she recalled coming of age in Calcutta when “Fever,” Peggy Lee’s famous torch song, was made into a hit cover by the Indian pop star Usha Uthup. “People would laugh about it, because, you know,” Ghosh chuckled, “Calcutta was the city of malaria.” I laughed too, and quickly added it to my own playlist.
