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As a longtime member of the Arts & Life department at ye olde newspaper, I know that people like to get mad about a list.
Movies, music, TV — it doesn’t matter. If you’re ranking something, people are going to have opinions about it.
We’ve done some truly herculean lists in the past — including our magnum opus: Canada’s 150 most important songs, in honour of Canada’s 150th.
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This thing was my idea despite knowing exactly what we were getting into; for a long time, I held onto my physical copy of the September 1999 issue of Spin, The 90 Greatest Albums of the ‘90s issue, and I still clearly remember the lede in the introduction: “You must be high.” (I also recall a line about a chair being thrown.)
No chairs were thrown in the boardroom at 1355 Mountain Ave., but there were, uh, spirited discussions and emails (so many emails!) and spreadsheets and copy-editing considerations such as how many dum dums and da das one needs to phonetically spell out in that singular American Woman riff. It was a stressful, hard and fun project — and, with any luck, I will be either retired or dead for Canada’s 200th.
Last week, the New York Times published an interactive about the 17 Pop Culture Moments That Define the COVID-era, and listen: I almost, for the first time in my life, left a comment on an article about what they left out — and what they included. (The Slap? Why?)
You can read it here. I agree with a few of the 17 choices, namely the inclusions of Ted Lasso (Apple TV’s feel-good sitcom in which anxiety and loneliness hum under the surface), TikTok challenges (lots of people filmed themselves dancing to pass the time in lockdown) and Bo Burnham’s masterpiece comedy special/album Inside.
Inside, especially, feels like a true COVID-era artifact; Burnham keenly captured what These Times are like in a way that’s both laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreakingly sad: the song That Funny Feeling still gives me goosebumps. But Inside isn’t just about being stuck inside during lockdown, though it was created that way. It’s also about being stuck inside the rabbit holes of internet discourse, and explores that tricky Venn diagram between art and content.
Here are a few others I would have added:
Wordle
This is a late-pandemic offering, but Wordle’s arrival in the mainstream consciousness during the Omicron-fuelled January 2022 was just what we needed. The daily puzzle could not be binged, it was something that truly unified its participants because everyone got the same word.
Do you still play Wordle? (Michael Dwyer / AP Photo)
Some Good News
Actor John Krasinski, a.k.a. Jim Halpert from The Office (and, OK, Jack Ryan from Jack Ryan) launched this feel-good YouTube show in March 2020 to give people a break from the relentless news cycle, and clearly it resonated: though only nine episodes, the series attracted 72 million views and 2.58 million subscribers.
The This Is Fine Dog
I mean, yes, the This Is Fine Dog — an image of a dog in a jaunty hat enjoying a coffee in a room engulfed in flames — has been employed as a meme for a decade now, but I feel like it really worked overtime during COVID. There’s simply no better image to sum up the cognitive dissonance of having to carry on while the world burns.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
This cozy Nintendo game, in which you tend to your own little island populated by animal denizens, emerged as THE game of lockdown-era COVID. I did a trend piece on it and dozens (plural) of people wanted to talk to me about it. A social simulation game when we couldn’t socialize? The timing!
TikTok cooking
The hold that baked feta pasta had on us. More so than the challenges, the viral TikTok recipe testing is what had a real impact during the height of the pandemic.
A time capsule about the pandemic experienced in these highly virtual times is an interesting idea, as time capsules — especially the kind that elementary school kids make — tend to be analog. I amassed so much digital detritus, so much content, so many screenshots that it’s hard to know what to keep as artifacts from a weird three years.
But I can think of one image. It’s a photo of my niece playing School. Fuzzy, the bear my husband and I gave her on the day she was born, is seated at a desk in front of a drawing of the teacher, who is only visible from the shoulders up. The teacher’s on a screen, you see. My niece was playing Zoom School.
What are some of your personal pandemic artifacts or COVID era-defining pop culture moments?
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