The Singles Jukebox

It’s been a long year, filled with good music and not many other good things, but we’re almost at the end. Our contributors have, as always, continued to produce great work (both for the Jukebox and outside of it), so as a way of wrapping up this year in Bonus Track posts, we asked our writers to submit their favorite non-Singles Jukebox work they did in 2020.

The list below includes reviews, blog posts, newsletters, original music, podcasts, personal essays, and more, about topics ranging from music to sports to video games to film. Some of these links have been shared in Bonus Track posts before, while some (including many submissions from recently joined writers) are new. We hope you find some entries of interest while browsing this post, and, above all, appreciate the diversity of our writers’ thoughts, interests, and creations.

• To begin, the Jukebox itself went through a few small changes in 2020. We switched hosts back in March (which allowed the site to load much faster), revamped our Twitter in September, and, just this month, welcomed 20 new writers to the site!
• Julian Axelrod worked on his creative project Finetunes, a curated collection of audio oddities for the internet age (or, in more casual terms, a series of mixes featuring music, original interviews and comedy, and audio clips from garbage TV). You can find every installment on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.
• Madi Ballista worked on English translations of J-rock and J-pop songs: a roundup of all her translations this year can be found here.
• Kayla Beardslee reviewed a linked short story collection by Jason Brown for Necessary Fiction, published a poem in Red Weather, and started a blog about The Lord of the Rings Online.

  • She also recorded a podcast about the album that her fifth grade class made a decade ago and created a narrative playlist for her radio show.
  • Beardslee also took over as Bonus Track editor at the beginning of the year, and only mislabeled a post as “2019” instead of “2020” once.
• Aaron Bergstrom shared his 100 Songs for 2020, a recap of his year in music listening (complete with writeups for each song).
• Nortey Dowuona released music as Samfl3, including the tracks “Ozil/Akam“, “Gave Them the Slip – V1“, and “Nice“.
• Jessica Doyle published an eleven-part essay series that explores the complexities of idol pop through the lens of the Kazakhstani boy group Ninety One. Back in June, she also wrote an essay about how COVID will affect urban planning.
• Juana Giaimo wrote about the new generation of Latin American emo for Remezcla, about Twenty One Pilots’ “Bandito” and how she feels safe when she listens to music by herself for Tone Glow, and about the 15th anniversary of Paramore’s debut album All We Know Is Falling for her Medium blog.
• Michael Hong shared his 20 Favorite Mandopop Tracks of 2020; he also reviewed after-hours.
• Thomas Inskeep wrote about Kenny Rogers in the ’80s after Rogers’ death in March; about Elvis’s 1975 LP Promised Land on its 45th anniversary; about the Billboard album chart in February 1975; and about the 40th anniversary of Linda Ronstadt’s Mad Love.

  • Just this week, he also wrote a piece celebrating the 30th anniversary of the AIDS relief benefit album Red Hot + Blue.
  • On his Twitter, since February, Inskeep has also been doing a year of #MWE, where he listens to a new album every day and writes a review of it in just one tweet.
• Joshua Minsoo Kim interviewed over 60 artists for his newsletter Tone Glow in the past year. Here are six interviews that he’s thought about regularly: Jim O’Rourke, Maggi Payne, DeForrest Brown, Jr., Micaela Tobin, Wendy Eisenberg, and Angel Bat Dawid.
• Josh Langhoff was the ballpark organist at Wrigley Field for half of the Chicago Cubs’ home games, and he compiled an image of Twitter comments about his playing. He also wrote an overview of Musart Records, and regional Mexican music in general, for UDiscover Music, and recorded a presentation for Pop Con 2020 about how Christian kids’ musicals shaped the early CCM industry.
• Iain Mew continued to write about historical video games on his blog Super Chart Island. Three of his favorite posts this year were on Wipeout 2097 and how music was central to the new possibilities the series offered; on Final Fantasy VIII, why it’s so successful at depicting teenage characters, and how it changed his life; and on Pokémon Red and discovering what he’d been missing out on for twenty years.
• Ryo Miyauchi started This Side of Japan, his Substack newsletter on Japanese music. Two of its most recent issues feature his 100 Favorite Japanese Songs of 2020 (Part 1 and Part 2) and his 100 Favorite Idol Songs of 2020.
• David Cooper Moore, on his Medium blog, wrote a post about making rainbows at the beginning of the pandemic and why rainbows were the right symbol with the wrong slogan. He also self-published a piece from 2018 that never ran about cumulative advantage and Spotify’s playlist curation.
• Austin Nguyen wrote about Melodrama for One Week One Band, interviewed Hunjiya for HS Insider, and wrote his first album review for Pop Matters on Aalok Bala’s EP Sacred Mirror.
• Jackie Powell covered WNBA team the New York Liberty for The Next, often focusing on how mental health and sports intersect. Among other articles, she wrote about Kiah Stokes’s role on the team, Sabrina Ionescu learning to embrace injury rehab, “superstar in the making” Amanda Zahui B., protest and social justice in the WNBA, and how Kia Nurse battled her shooting slump.

  • For Channel Kindness, Powell also did a podcast interview with New York Liberty Head Coach Walt Hopkins about mental wellness and its role in professional basketball.
• John S. Quinn-Puerta and his wife, Bethany, recorded twenty new episodes of their podcast Home Viewing, where they watch all of the movies they own (with a few they don’t thrown in).
• John Seroff did publicity for the still-ongoing Digital Discovery Festival (run by Brooklyn-based music venue National Sawdust), which features free streaming concerts and conversations with artists like Emily Wells, Antonio Sanchez and Thana Alexa, Samora Pinderhughes, Julian Lage, and many more.  Every artist who participated was paid $1,000 and given a platform to share new music, and dozens of these events are still available to view online.
• Ady Thapliyal started Asian Glow, a Substack newsletter about Asian pop music: the second issue, featuring essential Vietnamese pop releases from 2020, is out now.

  • Thapliyal also published a piece on fantasy and far-right aesthetics in Indian games for Vice (and later discovered that Ursula K. Le Guin had done it better already), and defended the Asian Underground for Tone Glow.

Of course, this post doesn’t include every single Jukebox contributor or every single work of note: if you’d like to read more from us, you can browse earlier 2020 Bonus Track posts at this link. Part 2 of 2020’s year-end Bonus Tracks will go up next week, and will be a collection of links to some of our writers’ personal end-of-year Best Of lists. In the meantime, Readers’ Week will begin tomorrow!