2020 was the unprecedented and unchallenged year of awfulness and music did in fact help us through it all. Stuck at home in lockdown/ quarantine in 2020, we found solace in music. We also identified with songs that seemed to tell the story of our lives, our emotions and our reality. So when someone on Twitter asked people to #SumUp2020WithASong they obliged.
The ‘If 2020 was a song challenge’ asked people to sum up the year that just got over, in a song.
This 1978 song by Blondie seems rather apt for the year that everyone wanted to end.
This Police song is so perfectly apt, though it isn't about the pandemic at all, but about a teacher resisting the charms of his student.
This Beatles ballad is apt because 2020 seemed to be longer than its actual length of 366 days.
Neil Diamond was singing about touching you, touching me. In 2020 it was the opposite.
This iconic song by one of my fave artistes of all time Billy Joel certainly fits the bill. The 1989 song lists all the big events of the years past and speaks about not starting the fire --- similar to how we didn’t start the pandemic.
This Josh Ritter song from 2019 speaks compassionately of troubled times and ravaged families --- like the impact that COVID 19 has had on innumerable people around the world.
Rather than a song, this tweet sums up the reaction to 2020 as a primal scream of some sort.
One reply helpfully supplied the sound of Jake Peralta of Brooklyn 99 simply screaming to the accompaniment of a guitar.
…Sanitiser. This 1963 Beatles classic has to be on the list – but with a twist.
…Argentina Quarantina. Andrew Lloyd Weber’s famous musical has a new twist. And why not --- the pandemic gave us a whole new vocabulary after all: moronavirus, quarantini, covidiot and many more.
I get knocked down lockdown, but I get up again are the suitably modified lyrics of that madly catchy Chumbawumba song from the 90s.
Some were thinking in terms of political turmoil that we have seen in so many parts of the world in the year past --- the name of Elton John’s tribute to Lady Diana suitably amended.
Hello darkness my old friend goes the classic Simon and Garfunkel – we have had some dark days indeed in 2020.
Prince sang about an end-of-the-world scenario in his song Purple Rain – or Purell Rain since sanitisers have become so ubiquitous in our lives.
Some of us became rather like this Pink Floyd song – numb to the horrors of this past year.
Dancing and partying became a distant memory in 2020. 2021 starts on a note of hope – may we get to fulfil our desire to dance with somebody, as Whitney Huston sang back in the 80s. With any luck if there is a challenge like #SumUp2020WithASong at the end of this year, we will see fewer gloomy thoughts expressed.
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