When you think of your needs, what’s high on your list? Food, water, and oxygen, I’m sure. Your friends and family, fine. Pets? Well, now that you’ve grown an attachment, I suppose so. Dark chocolate? Okay, make the argument for the intersection of indulgence and antioxidants creating necessity. You’re allowed.
But how about U2 albums, sassy pop bops, superhero movies, or cartoons that don’t even exist yet (and may never)? If you are the editor of a website, the answer might be yes, you need those things (or at least think other people are desperate enough to believe they need those things and want to read about why)!
The headline naming convention of “TITLE OF MEDIA/NAME OF PERSON Is the TYPE OF THING IT IS We Need Right Now” is cliched and has been scorned, but it seems that it cannot be thinkpieced away. Dozens of headlines from 2018 assumed they knew what our needs were. How rude. How dare people. How ridiculous. Below are some examples of what we “needed” this year.
We definitely needed movies.
We really, really needed Love, Simon.
And Crazy Rich Asians.
Or did we?
And A Wrinkle in Time, apparently???
Unfortunately, Simon is not a lesbian so we needed to look elsewhere for a lesbian coming-of-age love story.
We could really use a queer hero—a queero, if you will.
Thank you, Ezra. Thank you, Playboy.
What about queer albums?
Duh.
We needed love stories (that were decidedly not queer).
Et tu, LARB?
Do we need what we want?
Yes, I suppose that we do.
We needed TV shows.
And girl power icons.
Did we need pop stars?
Yes, we needed pop stars.
Did we need rappers?
Of course we did.
Did we need singers that weren’t just singers but sultry singers?
Bingo.
We needed theater.
Never in my life would I have imagined that we needed a U2 album, but guess what? We did.
With all due respect to her personal trials and demons, I also did not realize that we needed a Demi Lovato song, either.
And for that, I am a fool.
Another war memoir, really?
Needed it, and needed it now.
We needed records.
We needed albums and we need them to be fierce.
And of course, we needed songs.
Bangers, why certainly.
Bops, even. We needed dance bops.
We needed breakup bops.
We needed international bops.
But mostly, we needed sassy pop bops.
(Stage whispering:) We didn’t need any of this, but I will concede that some of it was nice to have.