The Library of Congress Adds Beyoncé, Weezer, and a Frankie Knuckles Remix to the National Recording Registry

The Library of Congress announced its latest round of recordings to be preserved in the National Recording Registry on Wednesday. The list acts as a kind of shadow history of the country’s ears. It’s an archive built not by sales figures alone but by a stranger, more subjective measure: what a group of experts decides actually shaped the sound of things.

This year’s class reaches from a 1944 Spike Jones cut to the 1987 remix of Jamie Principle and Frankie Knuckles’ “Your Love.” That entry, a foundational piece of Chicago house, lands on the registry the same year as Taylor Swift’s 1989, Weezer’s The Blue Album, and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” The logic isn’t genre chronology. It’s an attempt to trace real currents.

Robert R. Newlen, the acting librarian of Congress, called the selections “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.” Recordings are chosen for their “cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage.” The phrasing is careful. The choices are pointed. Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia” sits next to the Go-Go’s’ Beauty and the Beat. Chaka Khan’s version of Prince’s “I Feel For You” made the cut, a record she described as a moment where “everything converged: Prince’s genius, Stevie’s harmonica, Grandmaster Melle Mel’s rap, and whatever God put in me that day.”

For Khan, the recognition is specific. “For the Library of Congress to say this recording belongs in the permanent collection of American sound heritage, that means it wasn’t just a hit, it was history.” The Go-Go’s’ Jane Wiedlin spoke to the band’s legacy in starker terms. “There is literally no other all-female band that went No. 1 on the charts, play their own instruments and write their own songs. None.” These documents now sit inside an official story of American music, alongside Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music and the Winstons’ “Amen, Brother,” the six-second drum break that built entire new genres. The registry doesn’t just tell you what people heard. It tries to lock in what it meant.