Get Up And Do It Again

Gelli Haha “Normalize”

I was thinking about why it is my brain instinctively characterizes “Normalize” as “heat wave music” and I think it’s mainly because it somewhat resembles Nu Shooz’s freestyle classic “I Can’t Wait.” That song has signified “sweltering urban summer” in a very satisfying way to me since early childhood, when I heard it constantly on New York City radio stations from my home an hour or so away in the suburbs. My brain connects the songs, and so Gelli Haha picks up some of the lazy groovy glamour I’ve long associated with Nu Shooz. It makes me want to walk around the Lower East Side blasting it from a boom box.

It’s easy to focus on the sound of “Normalize” because Haha’s vocals are almost entirely incomprehensible to my ear, though I know it’s all sung in English. She’s conveying a lot of emotion in her performance and that’s just as powerful as the way the song swings, but I try to focus on the words and mostly I’m like “cornucopia???” But still, I think I get exactly what she’s feeling here.

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