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Use Twitter to find the exact time to play your favorite song on New Year’s Eve

Use Twitter to find the exact time to play your favorite song on New Year’s Eve

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It’s incredible to know that some people are still helpful online

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The Numerals For New York City's Annual New Year's Eve Celebration Arrive In Times Square
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The best part of any party, we can all agree, is the moment when one of your friends desperately begs for access to the aux cord or the Bluetooth connection so that they can play a specific track. They don’t want to explain the choice and they don’t care if no one else knows the song, but they do need everyone to hear it, as soon as you all get done with the tense, 40-second transitional period of hearing absolutely nothing.

Because I love this moment so much, I love the new Twitter joke that The Fader pointed out to me this morning. The joke — or maybe it’s serious advice? Up to you, and how you live your life and act at parties — is that you time up a specific song at the exact right moment to ensure that a relevant, thrilling, funny, or gloomy part of the track plays at precisely the stroke of midnight on January 1st, 2018. This should, theoretically, set the tone for the New Year for everyone in the room, so it’s a lot of responsibility.

Here are some examples that I approve of, at least enough to embed them in this article:

My colleague Tasha Robinson looked at these tweets and said, “This seems like a really lame version of sync-up culture,” referring to how some people watch The Wizard of Oz while they listen to Pink Floyd. I respect Tasha and see where she’s coming from, but she’s wrong this time. First of all, Wizard of Oz is a super long and confusing metaphor about opioids, and if that’s what my friends were feeling on New Year’s Eve I would just make them watch all the illicit cellphone videos I took at a 2015 performance of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Plus, listening to Pink Floyd doesn’t give you any way to show off how good you are at math!

No, this is fun and I think everyone should do it. It’s the rare use of Twitter’s new 280-character limit that doesn’t make me want to claw my eyes out. It’s also a good example of how you can use Twitter to say one small, useful thing instead of a bunch of not-useful and possibly mean things. Try it?

I did:

  • If you play “Happy Birthday, Johnny” by St. Vincent on December 31st at 11:58:49 PM, and your name is Johnny, Annie Clark will say “Happy New Year” specifically to you, as the clock strikes midnight. Start your New Year off right.
  • If you play “Same Old Lang Syne” by Dan Fogelberg on December 31st at 11:57:33 PM and your mom is there, she’ll wait patiently for Dan to sing “I said the years had been a friend to her / And that her eyes were still as blue,” so she can mutter “ugh, so rude,” just as the clock strikes midnight. Start your New Year off right.
  • If you play “Broken Clocks” by SZA on December 31st at 11:58:59 PM, the clock will collapse and time will stop and there will be no going back or forward, and that will be the end for us all, but we won’t be sure if we can leave. Start your New Year off right.

See? That was fun. I did a little math and it was a break from what I was doing, which was reading and reading and reading the internet.


One last thing on this topic:

This tweet is funny and I get it, but “a small sense of satisfaction for a while” isn’t nothing. Coincidentally, my New Year’s resolution is that, for all of 2018, I will look at every nice thing that happens to me or anyone else and scream “it’s not nothing!” If you play “Feel It” by Young Thug on December 31st at 11:59:40 PM, Young Thug will say “eyeball” just as the clock strikes midnight. Start your New Year off right. It’s not nothing.