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Right around the pandemic’s true kickoff moment in the United States, the British pop star released her second album, “Future Nostalgia,” a polished trip through several eras of dance music: disco’s groovy pulse, new wave’s punchy synths, the brash colors of the 1980s New York club-kid house music that Madonna spent her early years so cannily borrowing from. The candy-coated “Trolls World Tour” showed us a pulsing mass of cotton-haired creatures, all under one ridiculous roof, raving to Daft Punk’s eternally joyful “One More Time.” For once, there was a vague sense of disappointment that we were not Trolls, too.įew human artists stoked this phantom-limb FOMO (how can we fear missing out if there’s nothing to miss out on?) like Dua Lipa.
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Even children’s movies seemed to be rubbing it in. There was the British singer Jessie Ware’s fourth album, “What’s Your Pleasure?”: It evoked peak-era disco’s mirror-ball largess, all for listeners whose idea of a “night out” had most likely been reduced to an extra trip to the grocery store. There was Steve McQueen’s intimate and lovely film “Lovers Rock,” in which you could watch a packed room of West London revelers sway and sing to Janet Kay’s reggae single “Silly Games” - lost in the moment, no social distancing necessary. So many striking musical moments from the past months have reminded us that we cannot, at the moment, be together.