When the Playlist Loses Its Pulse
Why December listening asks for care, not convenience
By Rafi Mercer
There’s a particular point in December when the year thins out. Not quieter exactly — just less deliberate. Roads fill, diaries compress, and listening becomes something we do while doing something else. Music slips into utility. Background for movement. Sound as logistics.
It’s around then that playlists begin to wobble.
I was thinking about this after reading a Monocle column about a Christmas drive, a missing iPod, and the uneasy moment when festive music tipped into something artificial. On the surface, it’s a light story about disrupted routines. Underneath, it touches something more fragile: what happens when listening loses its human anchor.
A good Christmas playlist is never really about Christmas. It’s about memory density. About sounds that have accrued time. You don’t just hear the song — you hear where you first heard it, who you were with, what the room smelled like, how the light sat on the dashboard. The music carries residue.
That’s the thing algorithms struggle with. They can replicate surface cues — sleigh bells, swing tempos, warm vinyl crackle — but they don’t understand consequence. They don’t know why certain sounds stayed, and others didn’t. They don’t know what it means to return to a record after a year, or a decade, and find yourself changed.
Improvised playlists used to be human by default. You reached for what you knew. You made compromises. You let a track run long because it felt right in the moment. Now improvisation often means surrender — to systems designed to keep things moving, not deepening.
And yet, the more automated our listening becomes, the more we crave proof of humanity. A voice that strains slightly. A rhythm that leans forward. A recording that reveals the room it was made in. These imperfections are not flaws — they’re coordinates. They tell us where we are.
So perhaps the quiet act this Christmas isn’t about rejecting technology, but about reclaiming intention. Fewer choices. Slower listening. One album rather than a stream. One side played all the way through.
Because listening has never been about filling silence. It’s about recognising presence — in the sound, and in yourself.
And that, no matter how clever the system, is still a human art.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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