Beautiful Music

It's surprisingly hard to find music about personal appearance that isn't, like, gross (though never fear, there's plenty of objectification odes on here, see also Roy Orbison), but I did my best to create such a playlist for the Face Value launch party, and you never know when such a playlist might come in handy for others. All these songs are about appearance in some way—odes to beautiful people, admonitions to stay beautiful, paeans to the ways we prettify ourselves, an embrace of ugliness, a mantra of pride, you get the picture. (Apologies for the many covers of a few key songs, like "I Feel Pretty"—when a song was really perfect I didn't see a problem with playing its variations. Like this amazing punk version.)

Two notes: 1) I do not necessarily endorse the messages in any of these songs—surprisingly, there were no songs titled "Hey Women's Relationship to Beauty Is Really Complex and Doesn't Really Rhyme Well." 2) I was pleased to discover that I really, really like RuPaul.

The Spotify link is here, and I'm listing the tracks below. Enjoy!

 

*When this song—a delight from an all-female Canadian metal band about looking pretty as one digs one's own grave—played at the party, my agent checked in with me to make sure that the bar was still playing my playlist. They were.