I’m trying to pick the best party tunes since 1966. Why are all the real bangers from 1989? | Zoe Williams

I never dreamed it would be so hard to put together a playlist for my friend’s 60th, writes Zoe Williams

For any birthday party with a zero at the end, the music is supposed to be very simple: you just pick a banger from the year the person was born and work towards to the present day on that basis. Some people are bound to be unlucky. I myself am the victim of a freak event as in 1973, no good songs were released anywhere in the world. But mostly it works on all kinds of levels, because it means that in the early part of the night it’ll be songs that your parents liked, as that’s how you came to be born in the first place, and for the music that was released last year and of which you are entirely unaware, it’ll be the end of the night, and you won’t care.

This is all great until you’re making a playlist for your dear friend who is 60. Even Claude AI was whining about the sheer size of this dataset. The parents would prefer a tea the day before and no longer want to go to a party, so the whole first two decades are playing to no one. (That’s actually unfair: everyone likes the Beatles. But the number of years in which the hit was something Ernie-the-Fastest-Milkman-in-the-West-adjacent is truly shocking.) Realistically, all your favourite songs were released in the same year, which is 1989. If you took a long, hard look in the mirror, you’d admit that you haven’t kept on top of the charts for roughly 20 years, and could no more distinguish early from late Beyoncé than you could correctly identify Mesolithic from Neolithic by looking at a stone tool. The songs you genuinely like definitely did not chart, and it would be antisocial to expect people to join you in knowing all the words; instead, looking for the crowd-pleasers, there’s a whole segment in the middle when you might as well be listening to Magic FM.

A wedding DJ once gave a friend a top tip: just play Chic on a loop.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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