Herewith I present to you A Modest Proposal: Instead of fighting to lose weight or vowing to travel or pretending you'll drink less, why not resolve to listen to more music in 2016? When I say “more”, I don’t necessarily mean more hours; I mean more genres, more kinds of music than what you naturally gravitate to. Being a culturally well-rounded person is a near universal goal, so why don’t more of us strive to be well-rounded listeners? Music captures the ethos, ecstasy and animus of the subculture that creates it; what better way to understand a people than from the music they make? I would argue it behooves any aspiring culture vulture to listen to at least the contemporary critical consensus and popular sales picks of any given year's top artists in the fields of hip hop and grime, electronic dance and house, country, Latin and Afro-Latin, jazz, dancehall and reggae, pop, indie rock, global, Afrobeat, K-pop, Eastern Euro-pop, metal, folk, punk, R&B and avant-garde. That’s what I did in 2014, when I built this 2000+ tracklist of 2014 songs from a far-flung array of sources. Over the course of the past year, I returned to every track at least three times, savoring each blip, strum and melisma the way a sommelier might sample a Cheval Blanc ’47 or a Colt ’45. Divorced from the hype cycle and the breathless rush of IT'S NEW, these songs blossomed or faltered on their own merits and my capabilities as an active listener. Ten months later, I emerged broadened and battered with a hard-earned 1100 track playlist of my culled favorites. It was an exhausting and exhilarating journey, but I knew I had only barely scraped the surface. This year, I’m giving myself an even more difficult task. Meet my Everest: a still-to-be-finalized, 2015 vintage, 7,000+ song playlist that includes every song in the Billboard Hot 100, the top 20% of Pitchfork, all the competitors in Eurovision, two songs from each of the XXL Freshman class nominees, everything reviewed on The Singles Jukebox, selections from all of The Quietus' top albums, Spin’s 101 top singles and meticulously assembled collections of the best (and sometimes worst!) of each of the genres listed above. I’m aiming to wash/rinse/repeat twenty songs a day for the year and live to tell the tale. Want to keep up and keep me honest? I’ll be updating my current day’s listening list to this playlist; feel free to subscribe and take the plunge with me... MusicREDEF will be taking the next few days to walk off this #$!%ing New Year's hangover and you should too. Matty Karas, the man who put the 'A' in aggregator, will return to his desk and your inbox on January 4. It's been fun link-hunting for you in his absence! I hope to see more of you in 2016, just as soon as this migraine clears up...