This decade saw many of us transitioning from kids to teenagers. It watched us struggle with friendships, family, school, relationships—and, to a great extent, with ourselves.
It saw us go through many changes. Some too big to explain. Others, too small for us to remember. But, it does not matter what our memory has retained from the past 10 years. Everything that has happened—from the first time we cried this decade, to the first time we smiled and felt held—is still present today, plastered in who we have become, what we believe in, who we love, our dreams and hopes.
This next decade (just like this one was) is full of surprises.
This next decade will see us becoming adults, leaving teenage-hood behind, attempting to join the world as another person struggling to understand the “why” of things.
It is believed that time is a fixed line that only moves forward—the past always behind, inaccessible yet ever-present in our minds.
But, that’s where we all got it wrong. There’s one thing that can take us anywhere we want in the past like a time machine.
There’s one thing that can help us re-live a memory as if we were once again in the same room, with the same people, feeling the same emotions.
That is, music.
As absurd as it sounds, it is true. Through music, we can travel to an afternoon dancing with our friends, a birthday party that we can’t forget, our first High School dance, a cringe Musical.ly that we made, the first time we fell in love and got our hearts broken, days that fell dull and summer days that we were filled with absolute bliss.
With a click, we can access the music of the decade, revisiting our past 10 years through the sounds of our childhood and teenage years.
As we await the new decade, we have these sounds to remind us of how far we’ve come. We have these sounds to remind us of what we’ve lived.
In playlists, this is the music that shaped our lives the past 10 years:
Mainstream:
This playlist has over 100 songs (in chronological order from 2010 to 2019) that were mainstream this decade. Even if you don’t like some of them, it was inevitable to oftentimes escape their melodies in radios, televisions, and parties.
From Ke$ha to Katy Perry to Drake to Charli XCX to 1D to Imagine Dragons to Calvin Harris to Beyoncé to Billie Eilish to Lil NasX to Ariana Grande—this is the music that was in our top charts and we couldn’t stop listening to in the past years.
En Español – In Spanish
Many of us are Hispanics, and we grew up celebrating a duality of English and Spanish. As a result, we also grew up listening, dancing, and singing to Spanish jams.
From Pitbull to Calle 13 to Shakira to Chino y Nacho to Ricardo Arjona to Romeo Santos to Annuel AA to Maluma to Bad Bunny to Rosalía, these are the sounds that shaped the past 10 years in HispanoAmérica.
