Spotify Wrapped week is not the most wonderful time of the year, but it is a fun distraction from news and events that require critical thinking. Yes, Spotify is very bad, but the whole Wrapped thing is like getting a nice lil treat for participating in capitalism—I mean, don’t most death cults at least give out free merch? For the Extremely Online crowd, Spotify’s annual aggregation of its users listening habits is the next best thing to sharing a report card from your therapist. Vague-posting is a cornerstone of the millennial establishment, and what better way to not-so-subtle hint at a six-month existential crisis than with a highly sharable image featuring all the songs, artists, and podcasts you listened to this year? Memes. That’s how.
And boy oh boy, are the Spotify Wrapped memes dragging me better than Spotify ever could. Arcade Fire landing in fourth place on the list of artists I listened to most in 2022 is the kind of yikes moment that requires a fearless and searching moral inventory. Discovering I listened to almost 80,000 minutes of audio content—which Spotify tells me is 97% more than other users—demands a recount of every choice I’ve made over the past 10 months.
But somehow none of that feels as targeted as the memes, which are most definitely out for blood. You can tell a Spotify Wrapped meme is good when reposting it feels like showing everyone hidden camera footage of every time you said “You, too!” when a movie theater employee told you to enjoy the show. For reference, these are the best most horrifically accurate Spotify Wrapped memes:
The O.G.
Reductress is the gold standard for a reason.
Where is the lie?
My morning actually started with a hungry cat punching me in the face, so this is especially true.
Things are getting a little too personal
Okay, now let’s do some fun ones
