The Playlist I'm Not Embarrassed About

There is a version of myself who listens to Tatsuro Yamashita on a Sunday morning, who puts on Édith Piaf while reading, who considers the tracklist of a dinner party playlist a form of editorial statement. That version is real. She exists.

She is not the person who does the housework.

The person who does the chores needs Cyndi Lauper. She needs Gloria Gaynor and Bonnie Tyler and, it turns out, Cher. She needs songs that make no argument for themselves — that simply arrive, fully committed, and refuse to leave room for the kind of self-consciousness that makes a person stand in the kitchen holding a sponge, wondering why she hasn't started yet.

Don't Stop Me Now is not a curated playlist. It is a confession. It is twenty-seven songs that have, at one point or another, made me move when I didn't want to. The Beach Boys at number two. ABBA twice. Whitney Houston. Journey. TOTO's Africa, which is both inexplicable and completely necessary. What these songs share is not a genre or an era or even a particular quality of musicianship — it is the quality of total conviction. Nobody in I Will Survive is hedging. Nobody in Don't Stop Believin' is being subtle. Freddie Mercury and David Bowie close the list together on Under Pressure, which is either the most dramatic way to finish a chores playlist ever assembled, or the most honest.

I think it is honest. Housework is, in its own small way, a negotiation with entropy. You are briefly resisting the disorder with your hands. It deserves a soundtrack that takes itself seriously.

The discovery, after years of treating this playlist as a guilty secret, is that there is nothing guilty about it. Good Vibrations is a perfect song. Dancing Queen has never failed anyone. The Disturbed cover of The Sound of Silence is genuinely strange and genuinely good, and it earns its place between KISS and The Weather Girls in a way that could only make sense to one specific person — which is exactly the point.

A playlist that could only belong to you is not a lesser thing. It is, in fact, the only kind worth making.