There are a great many music sites and blogs out there, not least Green Inc, discussing, debating, pondering and praising every genre, sub-genre, micro genre, album, even specific songs. But as far as we’re aware, there had never been a site dedicated to the complete history of modern music culture, certainly not an easily digestible one. As from 2015, A Year In Playlists became that site; a kind of pocket book guide to the past seven decades from post war R&B to the present day, all squeezed into 52 handy instalments.

 

If you’re a Green Inc regular you will recognise some of it, albeit seriously edited and reconstructed chronologically, each instalment representing a specific genre or period offering a loose narrative of how music itself progressed. Through necessity that means A Year In Playlists also features plenty of new playlists like Ska, Garage Punk, British Folk, Disco, US Hardcore, UK Hip Hop, Ragga and Grunge yet to appear on Green Inc. And what’s more, each and every song currently available features on our Spotify Play Button. That’s over a thousand songs!

 

Over the course of 2015, we created our own, alternative version to all those accepted histories of modern music culture, all propagated by the plethora of ‘learned’ rockbloke types telling us what we should and shouldn’t be listening to. A Year In Playlists is our attempt to steal music criticism back from such nerdy geeks who’ve been doing their best to ruin it for the rest of us for far too long. We want to sideline a trad rock culture that not only ignores huge swathes of black and electronic music, but is strangled at birth by an overbearing reverence for the sixties and sacred cows like The Beatles, Brian Wilson, Dylan and Neil fucking Young.

 

In the real world, the likes of U-Roy, The Slits, The Fall, Chaka Demus, Missy Elliott and a million others are equally as important, deep within a culture that belongs to the shared memory of pop lovers like you and I who have plenty of other stuff going on in regular lives that can still be brightened immeasurably by a song, a chorus, a voice, a lyric, a dance or any other soundtracked memory. That’s just how it should be and no critical theory, thesis or think piece will ever change it!

 

Chris Green