Every week, a different FADER editor compiles a playlist to highlight a new release and give you a guide to that artist’s web of influences and peers. These Staff Selects live in our Spotify app, alongside GEN Fs from our archives and playlists for each issue. This week, it's Naomi Zeichner on internet pop.
The release of Justin Timberlake's 20/20 Experience this month prompted a fresh look at his hairstyles and discography. I listened again to "Until The End of Time," "Gone" and ultimately, the entirety of No Strings Attached, N SYNC's sales record-breaking 2000 LP, scanning for hints suggesting the shallow and beautifully bow-tied future that lay ahead. "Digital Get Down," a glitchy ode to computer-assisted phone sex, is the eighth track on that N SYNC album, the point where things get tedious and weird. It comes from the same moment at the millennium's turn when pop awkwardly adressed the popularization of email, chat rooms and laptops, and which produced Britney Spears' "Email My Heart." Here's a collection of songs from a decade ago that grapple with internet years past, plus a couple celebrating bygone hardware: TLC's prophetic take on the emotional weight of online messaging, Kanye West's cheerful account of dating on Black Planet and Soulja Boy's love letter to his T-Mobile flip phone. As a bonus, too, the dated-too-fast video for C-Side's 2007 jam "Myspace Freak."
Staff Selects Playlist: My Internet Girl
