What’s the most stressful part of hosting a house party? It’s not the booze because people bring their own anyway and by the time you’re on your third glass of shit mix, you have no idea (or care) what you’re drinking. Who to invite and whether they’ll turn up is a biggie, but you can also refer to the point about booze for this one.
The biggest pain in the house party’s metaphorical behind is, in fact, the music. It set’s the whole entire vibe of every social situation that involves having orchestrated fun with a group of people you’re not actually that close to. No matter how many parties you throw, it will always be an emotional, anxiety filled minefield, my friends. Let's walk through it together.
1. Deciding to do it the night before
You spend most of the day before the party agonising about what you need to do. Fail to prepare and prepare the fail, right? Because you know deep down that this is your last chance to hold the reigns. As soon as people walk through your front door you relinquish all actual control and if you have a playlist on hand that’ll be one less thing to worry about, right? RIGHT?
2. Realising that you can’t build a playlist without knowing who’s going to turn up
Because you’re adamant that to create the perfect party playlist you must adhere to everyone’s individual tastes (shout out to all the people pleasers) but you can’t do that without knowing who’s actually coming to the party. Then you revisit the ‘maybe’ list on the Facebook event page and try to gauge the musical preferences of people you don’t know.
3. Forgetting about the playlist all together
Next thing you know it’s the night of the part you voluntarily planned, you’re dressed (without shoes, obvs) with an empty glass in hand after downing your value vodka mixer because the door rang. ‘This is great’, you think. ‘People actually came. How nice.’ But then an attractive friend of a friend who you have chosen to be your mate says those three letter words. ‘Where’s the music?’
4. Pressing shuffle on your saved songs to distract from the awkward silence
But it's okay. You decide to play it cool and saunter (stumble) over to your housemate’s speaker, wait an uncomfortable period of time in silence for the Bluetooth beep to relieve the tension and in a panic press shuffle on your saved Spotify songs because anything is better than this. Lol.
5. Forgetting the music is on shuffle and hearing one of your rogue guilty pleasures come on while you’re in the other room
How could you be so stupid? You knew that Hear’Say was on there somewhere, and this isn’t a Hear’Say kinda thang, dammit. Lucky for you, you’re the only one who recognises the intro, so you try to stay cool and awkwardly make you way back to the room where the music is before anyone notices.
6. Pretending that you’re not in control of the music anymore
Because by the time you make it back to the living room people have noticed that this isn’t the sound of a cool totally original base-heavy cover of a 90s R’nB classic, and they’re looking at you funny.
7. Finally finding the perfect song and adding it to the queue
That’s after you’ve settled for playing the Hot Hits playlist on Spotify just list your housemate told you to. But we won’t tell her that.
8. Braving the queue for your own bathroom and missing that one great song you chose
Que the tipsy mental maths calculation of how long it would take for six people to pee. The answer is forever. It will take forever. Enjoy the muffled echo of that one tune you had a good feeling about, pal.
9. When someone else takes over the music and you have to pretend you don’t care
Like, it’s fine. You were practically begging for someone to take over the soundtrack to the house party that you laboured over, despite having only just gotten to grips with the type of music everyone likes to listen to at this sort of thing. It’s totally fine. Go ahead. See if I care about your un-house party worthy cultivated playlist. Whatever. I’m not crying, it’s just the smoke from that dickhead I told wasn’t allowed to smoke weed in my house. Shut up.
10. Not being able to hide your destain when the ‘cool’ song comes on
You know the one. You don't know the words but everyone else does and you feel awkward because you definitely recognise the melody and everyone else seems really into it but you can't take the credit because the speakers are in the hands of someone else now.
11. Putting music on the next day and hearing all the queued songs from the night before
You wake up and finally find your phone beneath a pile of Dorito crumbs at 9.37am the next day and decide to brave the post-party cleanup. And you know what goes well with a post-party cleanup? A nice, gentle little tune to ease you into the reality of the day. But that's not what you get. You get a backlog of queued songs that are only suitable for jumping around to when everyone has reached their party peak.
House of Pain Jump Around comes on and you have two choices. You try to remove all of the songs in the queue and replace them with a more palatable soundtrack. Or, you pick up one of those leftover cans of Red Stripe and power through.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.