defrog | Q: WHAT IS ROSÉWAVE? A: I STILL DON’T REALLY KNOW (Reply)

Seven years ago, Lars Gotrich (NPR contributor and curator of the famed Viking’s Choice playlist) started a thing called Roséwave. Technically It started as a one-Tweet joke, and then became an NPR playlist that is now in its seventh season.

What is Roséwave?

To hear Gotrich tell it, Roséwave is not a genre of music so much as a lifestyle – specifically, a lifestyle crafted around the summertime and everything we associate with that time of year.

To wit:

In summer, we party, we dance, we love. We try to pack in as much bliss as possible, as if the sun will one day stop shining, your favorite ice cream spot could discontinue your favorite flavor or Taylor Swift won't release another album ever again. Summer feels infinite, but also rushed in its impermanence — every moment lasts in memory, but disappears quicker as days become shorter. Roséwave bottles that infinity with a soundtrack that spans generations and genres of music, celebrating the feels, friendships and fizzy drinks of summer.

And furthermore:

You and your besties have waited patiently and saved diligently for that beach trip, that cross-country drive or that music festival overlooking the ocean. Or maybe you're staying home, but in need of a different state of mind — to drift, to dance, to spill a silly drink while in good company with family and friends.

You held onto that special shade of lipstick just long enough for the gloss to pop in the sun. You made a list of saccharine rom-coms to screen in the backyard. Your closet has switched from cotton button-ups to linen barely buttoned-at-all. You just fell in love and quit your job. You've been in love for a long time. You are ready to make Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie your entire personality. Your heart glitters every time you see your bestie IRL even though you just spent all yesterday in DMs.

Rosé is in the name, yes, to signal simpler and sunnier pleasures, but any song that pairs sweetly with a cool beverage (be it seltzer, iced latte, cucumber water, iced tea) and listless singalongs and dance parties is the pink-hued modus vivendi. Roséwave is light and breezy, but not necessarily unsophisticated — the sound of an experience kissed by sweet summer heat.

Like that.

And, you know, great? But as you might suspect, all of this sounds like no summer I have ever experienced in my entire life. Also, official Roséwave playlists are a mixed bag for me at best – much of it is the kind of stuff they play at parties that (thankfully) no one invites me to.

Still, I can’t resist a playlist challenge, and I’ve spent a long time thinking about what my own Roséwave playlist might look like, which meant thinking about what Roséwave is actually supposed to be. “Summertime feels”, basically, but what does that mean to me?

I started by thinking of the songs I associate with summer, although honestly I listened to so much music growing up and throughout my life that it’s all a blur, season-wise. But you gotta start somewhere, so I started with a list of songs I grew up with on the radio, and then I started thinking about the elements of Roséwave that Gotrich mentions, and my experience with them in my own life, and the thing just kept evolving and morphing as I kept thinking of other songs that might fit, and … well.

What is Roséwave? Probably not this.

DISCLAIMER: This is not intended as an anti-Roséwave playlist or a parody. If Roséwave is your thing, then by all means enjoy it. This is me trying to interpret Roséwave in a way that fulfils the basic criteria (“summer feels”) but also reflects the fact that we experience “summer” in different ways.

PRODUCTION NOTE: The official NPR Roséwave playlists run somewhere between 75 and 110 songs. I limited mine to 100, mainly because the embedded Spotify player only shows 100 songs. (For reference, the original unedited list is 230 songs.)

You’ll also notice the playlist run time clocks in at exactly six (6) hours (it says 5 hours 30 min in the browser version, but in the app it's six hours). That’s complete serendipity. I wasn’t planning on a time limit – but when I noticed the run time, I thought, “Well, that’s a nice round number – let’s just stop there.”

In any case, obviously it’s not meant to be listened to in one sitting. You can take your sweet time with it, if you are so inclined.

Enjoy what’s left of your summer.

Roséwave of mutilation,

This is dF