Alex put his headphones on. Song #100 was "Closer" by Ne-Yo. He remembered dancing to this at a frat party, trying to impress a girl named Maria. He’d spilled a entire beer on her shoe. He winced, deleted the sentence he’d just typed, and moved on.

He was twenty-two, a recent graduate with a degree in "Media Studies" and no job prospects. The only offer he had was from a dying blog called The Frequency . His assignment: write the definitive retrospective on the Billboard Top 100 songs of 2008. The pay was seventy-five dollars. The deadline was New Year’s Eve.

"The Top 100 Songs of 2008 is not a playlist. It's a life raft. It's the sound of millions of people pressing 'shuffle' on their anxiety. It's Auto-Tuned, it's ridiculous, it's painfully earnest, and it's the only reason we didn't all go insane. This was the year pop music looked at the end of the world and said, 'Okay, but first, let me finish this dance.'"

He scrolled higher. The middle of the chart was a warzone. #72: "Low" by Flo Rida (feat. T-Pain). He’d heard that song at every single stoplight, every house party, every sad trip to the grocery store. The "Apple Bottom jeans" had become the universal background noise of his senior year. He wrote: This song isn't music. It's a cultural event horizon.

It was December 2008, and Alex’s entire world had been reduced to a 160-gigabyte iPod Classic and a folding chair in the basement of his parents’ house.