Welcome to part 2 of my top 10 of 2020. You can read/listen to part 1 here.
These are not ranked in order, but they have numbers because this is a list of 10 things and so I want everyone to know that I did, in fact, include 10 things.
Group chats: they exist in texts. iMessage. Instagram messages. Discord. Telegram. Slack. Signal. Group chats have a levity and asynchronous nature that allow us to stay connected, but on our own time. Zoom and Facetime are good for a lot of things, but it's also pretty draining to be on camera all the time! And you can have multiple chats going on at once. You've got the ones with your families, the one with your OG crew, your current town buddies, your brother and his friends, the group of Very Online strangers that you met on a social network made for sharing screenshots that you've all since abandoned but now you talk all day (literally all day, given the timezones. Real panic hours when unlock your phone and see 1,354 messages and it's been like just a few hours since you opened the group chat). You know, the usual kind of groups. But hey! People need people. People connect over the most ordinary and also completely random happenstance, and it makes me feel good. Also did I just spend too many words describing a very basic communication medium? Sure did!
Boys: so. uh. Rachel is pregnant. We took a circuitous route and lots of trying to get here. But in the end? We got pregnant. With twins! TWIN BOYS! We're technically due at the end of April, but will deliver sometime earlier in the month. What the hell did we get ourselves into? We're going to find out. And even though I started this list off by saying this is absolutely not a ranked list, this should have been #1, #3, and probably #10, just to reinforce the fact that WE'RE HAVING TWINS. TWINS THAT MIGHT ONE DAY DISCOVER THAT POPS IS ALREADY WRITING ABOUT THEM. (I don't know if I'm going by Pops. Maybe PawPaw. Daddio?)
Questlove: this dude was a savior at the start of quarantine, broadcasting live sets from his bunker every night. He is a human music encyclopedia and his special shows, like all-Stevie/Marvin/Prince sets, are full of gems and anecdotes. His more contemporary hip-hop broadcasts meant that rappers, producers, music industry vets, and the like would pop in and converse with each other in the comments. Or they'd share never-before-heard stories about a given track or artist. Or an artist would pop in and Questlove would quickly pivot to a song of theirs. Anyways, he's kept up his wildly prolific broadcasts and I love him for it.
David Ritz's biography of Marvin Gaye: this was a "holy shit" read (that I learned of because Questlove kept referencing the book and specific stories from it during his Marvin set). It's the best music biography I've ever read, in part because of the access that Ritz got to Marvin, and how insanely deep and self-reflective (and destructive) Marvin was. Ritz was actually hired to help Marvin write an autobiography while Marvin was still alive, so over the span of several years, he racked up tons and tons of interviews that were meant to be turned into Marvin's own written word. But then Marvin was murdered by his Dad and so, instead of a book written in Marvin's first-person voice, Ritz had this wildly expanded archive of direct source material that he augmented with interviews from people who were in Marvin's orbit throughout his life.
The NBA: look, I still find it wildly problematic that a lot of sports—especially college sports—are being played during this pandemic, for a number of reasons. But the NBA bubble will go down as one of the greatest things that a sports league has ever done. I know it was laborious and wildly taxing for the support folks that were in the bubble, like the caterers and hotel workers. People were separated from their families for a long time. But selfishly: fuck, did I (/we) need it. The amount of good hoops that we got, in a really weird setup, was so fun. It seems very unlikely that the 2020/2021 season will be deemed as successful, since the teams are playing and traveling to home arenas instead of playing on a centralized campus. The 72-game season will undoubtedly be reduced to 60 or even 50 for some teams, thanks to COVID. But that glorious bubble.
Well, that's it for Greg's Newsletter in 2020. I managed to get a few more of these out than last year, a trend that I hope to continue in 2021.
I love you all and I always love hearing from you in case you want to drop a line and just say what's up! Or tell me what's new with you.
<3
Greg
Top 10 of 2020, Part 2 [No. 082]