My Favorite Genre Is “Yes”
There are thousands of songs in my Liked Songs playlist, which should probably tell me something useful about who I am. Instead, it mostly tells me I have been saving songs with the long-term discipline of a raccoon.
Spotify has technically tried to move on from the little green heart. Now there are plus signs, green checks, and a slightly more useful system for saving songs to more than one place. I understand the logic. I respect the user experience meeting that probably produced it. Still, in my head, I am not pressing a plus sign. I am hitting the heart.
That matters, I think. A plus sign says, “Add this to the archive.” A heart says, “I don’t know what just happened, but yes.”
That is the whole problem. There are too many yeses.
If someone asked me what kind of music I like, I’d probably hesitate. I could give the normal answer. I could mention the bands I loved first, the phases I went through, the years when I thought I was only allowed to like music that proved I was serious in some vague, embarrassing way.
I could pretend there is a clean hierarchy in there, some stable inner committee calmly reviewing each song for genre, mood, tastefulness, and long-term personal branding.
The evidence does not support this version of me.
My Liked Songs playlist is less a coherent portrait of taste than a junk drawer with emotional lighting. Batteries. Loose screws. A tiny flashlight that still works for reasons unknown. A velvet glove. A boss fight. A saxophone solo from the future. Something earnest enough to be suspicious. Something stupid enough to be perfect.
Shuffle Takes the Stand
Shuffle always seems to know when I am trying to make a respectable argument about myself. It arrives with counterevidence immediately.
One minute, Lana Del Rey comes on, or at least a song I have mentally filed in that smoky Lana Del Rey corner of my brain: half-glamour, half-doom, a voice moving through the room like it already knows the ending. I don’t even really think of myself as a Lana Del Rey fan, which is an annoying thing to say when the song is sitting there in my Liked Songs playlist like a signed confession.
I doubt she actually pioneered that smoky, cinematic female vocal style I love. I’m sure the lineage is older, deeper, and more interesting than one artist. Still, my brain hears that voice, that narcotic sadness, that sense of someone singing from inside a faded movie poster, and immediately gives up. Yes. Fine. Heart.
Then, with absolutely no concern for tonal continuity, shuffle gives me “Boyz-n-The Hood” by Dynamite Hack.
I have no defense prepared. I do not even care if this is cringey. Maybe it is. Maybe it always was. Maybe part of its charm is that it sounds like a joke told with such commitment that it somehow escapes the joke category and becomes its own strange little artifact. It is acoustic, absurd, catchy, and completely committed to the bit. That counts for something. Sometimes dignity is overrated. Sometimes the song wins because it refuses to blink first.
Heart.
Then a boss track from Dark Souls III arrives and makes the whole situation impossible to explain. No lyrics. No irony. Just enormous orchestral dread, the sound of a cathedral deciding it has had enough of you. This one feels easier to defend because it is obviously great, but that only reveals another problem: my taste is not random enough to dismiss and not consistent enough to summarize.
I love music that feels oversized and severe. I love when a song makes the nervous system sit up straight. I love the sensation of being given a sword, a health bar, and no adequate explanation.
Heart, obviously.
Then TWRP shows up, bright and ridiculous and full of retro-future sincerity. Their songs sound like someone found an old VHS tape labeled TOMORROW and decided the future should have more funk in it. There is something almost tender about their optimism, even when the music is glossy and goofy and wearing chrome boots. It is not naive, exactly. It feels chosen. Joy as a bit that becomes a practice.
Heart again.
And, these are not even deep cuts from the archive. They are just a few recent witnesses. The full playlist keeps going: grandeur, silliness, gloom, swagger, ambient dread, video game apocalypse, neon sincerity, dark noise, bright hooks, songs I would defend in public, songs I would defend only under very specific lighting.
The Genre Aisle Cannot Hold Me
Streaming platforms love categories. They want clean labels, tidy moods, little aisles where every song knows where to stand. Sad Indie Morning. Cinematic Focus. Dad Rock That Has Seen Some Things. Main Character Walk. Rage Cleaning. Existential Synths for People Who Own Too Many Chargers.
I understand why this exists. Genre is useful. Mood is useful. Recommendation systems need handles. Even researchers who study music taste have found that our preferences can be grouped into broad patterns. People do not simply like “everything” in a shapeless way. There are structures under the mess.
That actually makes me feel better.
Maybe my taste is not incoherent. Maybe it is just more honest than my ability to describe it. There are patterns, but they are not all genre patterns. Some songs are saved because of texture. Some because of scale. Some because they hit a memory I did not know was standing nearby. Some because they are funny. Some because they are melodramatic in a way I deeply respect. Some because they sound like they believe in something, even if that something is extremely dumb.
The heart button, or the ghost of it, does not ask for a thesis. It does not ask whether this new song fits beside the last one. It does not say, “Excuse me, are you still the kind of person who likes this?” It registers a small private verdict.
Yes.
Not forever. Not always. Not as a manifesto. Just yes, right now.
A Better Kind of Mess
Part of me still gets self-conscious about this. Real music people seem to have lanes. They have scenes, subgenres, eras, formats, pressings, sacred albums, informed grudges. They can explain what they like without sounding as if they opened a cabinet and several unrelated objects fell onto the floor.
I admire that. I also know I am not built that way.
My Liked Songs playlist is not a brand. It is not a personality test. It is not even really a library, at least not in the orderly sense. It is a record of attention. Thousands of little moments when something reached me before I could organize myself against it.
That feels less self-indulgent than I first thought. Taste can become another performance, another way of trying to look coherent from the outside. The playlist is messier than that. It keeps the receipts from the actual encounters: the smoky vocal, the acoustic joke, the boss fight, the chrome-plated funk song trying to save the future through groove.
Maybe that is what I like best. Not a genre, but a threshold. The instant before explanation. The moment a song gets through.
For now, “annoyingly eclectic” is probably close enough. My Liked Songs playlist may not make me look consistent, but it does make me look alive to more than one frequency. I’ll take that.
My favorite genre is still yes.
those little hearts
I don’t know why I hit them
They’re good. All I can say
They just hit on something
Something I can’t say no to
