Your Playlist Is Hurting Your Social Life. Here's Why!
May 12, 2025
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It’s not just music anymore. It’s marketing. And sometimes, it’s not even you.
You’re in the car. Someone hands you the aux. Suddenly, your finger scrolls past the shaabi you actually listen to on your solo power walks. Past Hamada Helal. Past the early 2000s guilty pleasures. You pause, then play a moody French track you haven’t heard since 2022. It’s giving taste. It’s giving “I’m not like other girls.” But is it giving…you?
It’s the performative playlist era (a world where your Spotify says more about your social image than your wardrobe).
These days, liking music isn’t enough. You need a genre-spanning, TikTok-certified, lowkey-but-not-obvious, hyper-curated selection that says “rawshana” without trying too hard. Nothing says cool like knowing an unheard-of indie band from Portugal, but skipping over the Elissa deep cuts that raised you.
Music has become a battleground of identity, age, class, and social curation. Globalized music culture made us fluent in the art of hiding our real playlists—and why the songs we skip in public often say the most about us. In 2025, playlists are a social signal.
They hint at your age range, your cultural bookmarks, your place in the algorithm economy. A 22-year-old might jump from Raye to Mahmoud El Leithy to Adam Port. A 30-year-old might still be hiding their emo era in “private playlists.” And a 19-year-old?
Probably blending TikTok viral tracks with niche “core”-ified aesthetics: baddie-core, heartbreak-core, café-core—you name it.
And then there’s the shame of liking the wrong kind of music. Shaabi, mahraganat, early Disney songs, Samira Said’s auto-tuned era—music that’s either “too mainstream,” “too lowbrow,” or “too Arab” to feel cool in certain circles. But why?
When did relatability become cringe? And who decided which Arab artists belong in the same breath as Frank Ocean, and which don’t?
That’s where the generational split hits hardest. You hear it walking past a group of younger kids hanging out at The Drive 2—someone’s humming a chorus you barely recognize, until it hits you it’s a sped-up remix of a song you slow-danced to in 2008.
The references are different, the tempo’s off, and the nostalgia isn’t yours. That’s the TikTok-ification of music in action.
Younger Gen Z listeners consume music in fragments. They know the hook, not the verses.
They hear the song first through an outfit transition, a makeup GRWM, or a POV of someone crying in their car.
Their playlists are built on virality. Songs exist less for their artistry and more for their meme-ability.
Meanwhile, older Gen Zs or millennials might feel unmoored—stuck between nostalgic loyalty and the pressure to keep up.
They want lyrics, not loops. Full albums, not 15-second serotonin boosts. And when the two generations try to share a speaker, the aux becomes a quiet power struggle.
We love to pretend we don’t listen to what everyone else is listening to. Admit you like Sahby Ya Sahby by Bahaa Sultan or that viral, number one American hit, and someone might give you a side-eye like you just asked to DJ at their wedding using Bluetooth and a cracked SoundCloud link. Mainstream music in Arab contexts especially gets labeled bee2a fast—too obvious, too loud,
too lacking in mystery.
But here’s the catch: what’s considered “mainstream” is often the music that’s actually moving people. It’s the wedding banger.
The track that plays in taxis across Cairo. The thing that gets quoted in TikToks and remixes. But still, we self-police. We choose the lesser-known electro-Arabic hybrid over the latest Wegz hit—not because we love it more, but because it feels more “respectable.”
As if enjoying pop culture makes you culturally cheap. Your most-played tracks don’t always make it to your shared Spotify Wrapped story. In private? You’re looping the same 2012 Fairouz remix with guiltless joy. In public? You’re queuing up some obscure ambient edit that sounds like it belongs in a Berlin basement at 3AM.
We curate our playlists like we do our Instagrams. We hide our real taste behind “mood boards” of sound. It’s not that we’re lying—
it’s that we’re crafting a persona. Taste is now performative. And when everyone’s watching (or riding in your passenger seat), you want your playlist to signal something. Sophistication. Relevance. Sandbox-approved. Y2K Arab cool. But you know what’s cooler than cool? Playing Saad El Soghayar or Tate McRaae with pride. Or that early Shereen deep cut that still makes you want to cry in traffic.
At some point, we forgot that music is supposed to feel good. Not to prove something. Not signal intellectual range. Not be a personality deck in audio form. Just feel good.
But when taste becomes part of your “brand,” it’s hard to just like a song. You wonder if it’s niche enough, timeless enough, not-too-TikTok, not-too-Egyptian, not-too-basic. And in that loop of second-guessing, you stop dancing.
The truth is, your playlist isn’t a philosophy paper. You don’t need to footnote your Shereen phase or explain why Enta Eih still hits like a breakup. Your love of early Justin Bieber doesn’t cancel out your James Blake vinyl. You’re allowed to like both.
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So next time the aux lands in your hands? Maybe don’t perform. Play the thing you actually want to hear.