How the Coronavirus Might Shift Music Culture

Throughout the first months of the year, when coronavirus was just a keyword in headlines of articles I mostly didn’t read, the music in my headphones celebrated the pleasure of human contact. At the top of my personal pop playlist for 2020 is a mind-blowing dance song, “Sweat (Sophie Remix),” by the producer Sonikku and the vocalist Liz, which tells of a party so hot that sweat drips off the walls. It was only a little more than a week ago that I’d weave through crowded sidewalks to Dua Lipa’s battle cry of “Let’s get physical!” Or I’d spend packed subway rides vibing to Grimes’s “4ÆM,” a thunderous Bollywood rave about partying all night in which the singer bleats, over and over, “You’re gonna get sick / You don’t know when.”

These songs are new, but they voice some of music’s—and humankind’s?—oldest urges: to close-talk,; Olivia Newton-John ” in 1981; you can go back to Little Willie John, in 1956, for . Whatever the era, songs of bodily contact tend to rely on exciting rhythms, obsessive mantras, sharp dynamic peaks, and a sense of gathering frenzy. They care less for romance than for flirtation, lust, body brushes, and one-time make-outs. But their real purpose can be as an everyday utility. They convert the listener’s on-the-couch inertia into out-the-door vim. They conjure the motivating thought of weekend messes and mingles, and then they soundtrack them.