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Twitter Wants To Help You Welcome 2018 With One Climactic Musical Moment

Crowds will gather again for New Year's Eve celebrations in New York's Times Square, but Twitter has other suggestions for midnight entertainment.
Craig Ruttle
/
AP
Crowds will gather again for New Year's Eve celebrations in New York's Times Square, but Twitter has other suggestions for midnight entertainment.

It all started with a tweet from Phil Collins.

In a now-viral post from earlier this month, the musician suggested people cue up his song "In the Air Tonight" so the iconic drum fill rings out at midnight on New Year's Eve.

In true 2017 fashion, the tweet lead to a meme, and the Twitterverse lit up with other ideas for climactic musical moments to ring in the new year.

If Guy Lombardo's rendition of "Auld Lang Syne" — the night's traditional chestnut — is too stodgy, some more upbeat suggestions popped up. Those include Death Cab for Cutie's "The New Year," Toto's "Africa" and Tina Turner's "The Best."

If livening up your goodbye to 2017 isn't exactly what you had in mind, fear not. Twitter has you covered, too. Several fans of the avant-garde suggest cueing up the Zen-inspired John Cage masterpiece "4'33."

As in, the most famous 4 1/2 minutes of silence ever composed — maybe something to help you snooze into 2018, if you like.

Have a musical moment you think should ring out at midnight tonight? You can send us suggestions on Twitter @NPRWeekend.

NPR's Isabel Dobrin in Digital News produced this story for the Web.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Ned Wharton is a senior producer and music director for Weekend Edition.
Lauren Frayer covers India for NPR News. In June 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood—Mumbai.