“How Long?” is played as a light and jovial tune, right on down to including some goofy sound effects as punctuation on Ezra Koenig’s pleasantly winding melodies. It’s an amiable front for what could be Koenig’s crankiest, most bitter song thus far. It starts off with Koenig’s character grumbling about getting dumped by someone who cleverly tried to make it seem like a mutual breakup – “the only choice you gave to me is one I took reluctantly.” From there he’s questioning the value of pretty much anything, and though he’s doing it with a bit of levity, he’s not fully concealing his wounded pride. This is pretty bold for a guy who up until this point wrote every song in a way that suggested that he’d never had an unreasonable thought or feeling in his life. “How Long?” is pretty much nothing but unreasonable thoughts and feelings. It’s a song in which he conjures images of environmental catastrophe and it’s all just a hyperbolic backdrop for these two people to get stuck together alone all over again. Every mess seems entirely inevitable to him, and he’s just sitting there impatiently waiting for it just happen already.
“Up Late” is a very classic sort of slow jam, something you could probably have slipped into a Quiet Storm radio set if not for all the lyrics that wouldn’t make it past the FCC regulations. Ari Lennox’s voice has a low-key boldness here – she sounds so fully command of the situation that the relaxed sensuality of the track isn’t undermined by traces of insecurity. She’s singing about a regular hookup, and as sexy as the song gets, the most interesting bits of the song allow for unsexy details – duplicate key fobs, tv news, the very presence of the phrase “corn on the cob.” Even the more glamorous details, like setting the song in North Hollywood, get grounded in her mentioning her “Target lingerie,” complete with the ironic “Tar-jay” pronunciation.
“Sound of Space Between” is like a meditation on the simple act of talking to someone you love on the telephone that starts off in “galaxy brain” mode and then kinda spirals out from there. Eve Maret’s arrangement is like Kraftwerk gone cosmic, and she sings with a flat affect that does nothing to hide the vulnerability and warmth in her voice. The most interesting thing about this song for me is the way the song seems to move in an orbit, so it feels a bit like you’re observing musical and lyrical motifs from slightly different angles as the song progresses. Maret reaches no conclusions – it’s just a thought and a feeling in a moment that is extended to the point of abstraction.
“Forget Your Place” is an exploration of vagueness and neutrality in which the most distinctive qualities of Stephen Malkmus’ musical identity – the way he plays guitar, the sound of his voice – are either removed or significantly altered to the point it’s nearly unrecognizable. The song is built around droning sound loops that feel both tranquil and slightly unnerving, evoking the drab hum of computers, appliances, and fluorescent lights. Malkmus’ voice is mostly pitched much lower than his natural range, and he sings phrases that seem lightly disassociated but also quite friendly. When his regular singing voice appears it seems like he’s breaking out a spell, repeating “24/7 creative adults!” like he’s realizing what’s going on in a light panic. This is basically the nightmare of having a kinda-OK day job from a guy who has been a successful artist for nearly his entire adult life. Or maybe it’s also a little bit of a fantasy? It’s not actually that bleak.
Whenever I hear “Where’s Your Head At” now I think of something Douglas Wolk wrote about the song in Pitchfork’s best songs of the 2000s list. He presents the song as a bad trip set to gnarly house music, and describes the vocals as “a three-dimensional array of disembodied heads screaming that something’s wrong and you’re letting everyone down.” And like… yes, I totally hear that! But at the same time, I’ve never related to the song as being particularly negative. I hear the song as a rational, empathetic message cutting through the clutter of depressed thoughts and harsh self-criticism. It’s advice on how to get out of the dark hole: “Don’t let the walls cave in on you / you get what you give, that much is true.” The screaming, accusing voices come in during the parts of the song designed to give you an adrenaline rush – it’s like you’re meant to run from those voices, like they’re chasing you down. The song is set up as an escape from the worst feelings, the music is evoking the bad vibes in order to provide catharsis. I never come out of listening to this song – usually on repeat – without feeling better than I was coming into it.
“Right Side of My Neck” is a song about the early days of a romance, one in which the infatuation is strong, and very much requited. There’s no anxiety to this song, just a confident bliss and anticipation for more just moments after separating. There’s no sense of gravity in the arrangement – the sounds seem to float in mid-air as Faye Webster sings like someone whose head is in the proverbial clouds. Listening to this song without experiencing the same feelings makes one long for this feeling in real life, but also get a contact high from it. Webster and her band distill this specific feeling so accurately that it can be sort of abstract sort of calm, relaxed joy. It’s a bit like the art of perfume, really, which is appropriate given that scent is such a big part of the song’s beautifully evocative chorus: “The right side of my neck still smells like you.”
Eddie Vedder can’t help but sound heroic. There’s a strength and nobility in his baritone, and a courage in how he wields it. So it’s always a bit rattling to hear him sound entirely vulnerable, or for him to express insecurity and anxiety. He does that on “I Got Id,” a non-album single issued between Vitalogy and No Code in the mid ’90s. Vedder sings from the perspective of a lovelorn shut-in who feels so scarred by bad memories that he can’t bring himself to act on his love for someone. I’d say it was an unrequited love song, but this person seems entirely within his reach – he’s just too scared and self-pitying to actually go for it.
The line that always gets under my skin here is when he sings “I’ll just lie alone and wait for the dream where I’m not ugly and you’re looking at me.” I know this feeling a little too well, and that I relate to this as much now as when I was 15 is rather depressing for me. Vedder sounds so ragged and tired on this song, like he’s exhausting his last reserves of energy just to get this horrible, self-loathing feeling out of his head. He sounds so anguished when he yowls “if just once I could feel loved,” like if the sentiment of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” was utterly drained of all irony and cleverness and concentrated into just the most potent dose of loneliness and fear. The hero sounds totally defeated by his own worst impulses.
“Do You Think You Could Love Me,” perhaps deliberately, sounds a self-consciously dark and moody cover of an ’80s pop song that never was – an imaginary hit Olivia Newton-John, Irene Cara, or Taylor Dayne just never got around to making. The craft is strong, but the commitment to aesthetic is even stronger. Chrysta Bell is a frequent collaborator of David Lynch, and though he was not involved in this song his influence is very apparent. The effect is basically that whatever sexual intensity that would have been in the song regardless is run through a Lynchian filter of grim ambiguity – there’s a suggestion of fucked-up subtext that shifts the possible meaning of every line, so Bell’s motives are always difficult to read. What does she actually want? Is it exactly what she says, or is she toying with the person she’s addressing? It makes you feel like you need to know the answer.
“Numb” has a warm, comfortable feeling but a lightly melancholy vibe, like being stuck in an easy, pleasurable situation. The smooth chords and gentle groove frame a soft, low-key vocal melody sung by Emma Proulx that conveys a lot of nagging guilt – most of the lines she sings are apologetic, but it doesn’t even seem like she’s done much of anything wrong. She mostly just sounds like she’s scared of upsetting a precarious balance, and wrecking a very delicate situation. The mood of the song may suggest a dubious comfort zone, but she surely does not want to leave it.
“Side Effects” feels both loose and impatient, like someone who is anxiously waiting for the opportunity to let go and relax. Jade Bird sings from the perspective of someone who is eager for her relationship to kick into a new gear – the feelings part is sorted out, so what about actually going through with it? She sings with some traces of doubt in her voice, but with an absolute certainty about her need to move on to the next stage, and to get the hell out of wherever they are. Bird’s melodies are simple but lovely, and the song has a quick but graceful pace that makes it feel like you’re finally gliding down the highway once the chorus kicks in. She really makes you feel her freedom there.
One of the reasons BuzzFeed has been extremely successful over the past decade comes down to focusing on the utility of content, particularly in how sharing a list, quiz, news article, essay, or video can express someone’s identity or start a conversation with friends and family. This was the basis of editorial philosophy before I started working there in 2012, and more recently was codified into something that was referred to internally as “cultural cartography.” The cultural cartography system existed both to catalog the utilities of pieces of content as well as encourage creators to fully consider what the potential use of their work could be before they even started making anything.
This is the essence of viral content – the work that succeeds on the grandest scale does so because it has clear objective utility. If you’re chasing this, you learn to make yourself useful. In social media, people are always looking for ways to talk about themselves or thorny personal issues in a way that softens it slightly through humor and allows a bit of distance in that the person sharing is understood not to be the author. Quizzes in particular thrive on giving readers results that allow them to share a boast with a shield of irony and plausible deniability – oh, it’s just a silly quiz!
Once you start seeing this pattern in people’s behavior it’s hard not to notice it in everything that becomes popular. It’s the key to really connecting with an audience, and when this is done organically, it’s fabulous. But it’s also something that can result in outrageously crass content, and somehow becomes more cringeworthy when it’s done with very good intentions. There’s not much room for ambiguity or abstraction in this – the work that will resonate most deeply is an emphatic statement of self and everything runs on a generalized sort of specificity intended to create relatable moments. Everything is crafted to invite you to go “it me!” and then share it with other people as either “I am ____” or “we are ____.”
Pop songs have worked in this mode forever, and the music with real staying power is typically the stuff with the most utility. The songs that end up being most heavily licensed to television, film, and advertisements are nearly always the ones that either offer a lyrical declaration that overtly states something in the narrative or has a mood that signals particular contextual connotations. Music is a tool in these things, it’s all a shorthand that uses the strengths of one art form to in many cases compensate for the flaws of another.
This bleeds into how people make playlists in the era of iPods and streaming. People will make playlists for specific moods, for specific settings, for specific sentiments, or seek out pre-existing playlists with these utilities on Spotify and Apple Music. Utility is a large part of how anyone engages with music, and the emergence of platforms with observable data and potential for virality – as well as a commercial dependence on the money that comes from licensing – has pushed many people in the music industry to approach creating songs with the same “cultural cartography” goals as anyone making content for BuzzFeed.
So, Lizzo. Lizzo is a perfect example of an artist who is thriving on creating content about identity that is highly relatable and has a clear objective utility in playlists and licensing. The odds are very good that your first exposure to Lizzo’s music was in a television show or movie, or failing that, a video or song that came your way when someone shared it to your feed. Maybe it was served to you algorithmically on YouTube or in an automated “discovery” playlist. Lizzo’s music is perfectly engineered for all of this, to the point that it can seem like it’s already gone through extensive A/B testing and optimization. It’s glossy and immediately accessible, but signals some degree of authenticity and soulfulness. It’s aggressively sincere and every song is clearly about a particular statement or relatable situation. It’s all geared towards feelings of empowerment, and given how many ads, shows, and movies want to sell that feeling, her songs are extremely effective and valuable, especially since up until recently she was not famous and thus not weighed down in the cultural baggage of celebrity. (If you used a Beyoncé or Rihanna song instead, your “girl boss” moment would in some way become about Beyoncé or Rihanna rather than your characters.)
I can’t hear Lizzo’s music without recognizing her cultural cartography savvy. A lot of music can achieve these goals without contrivance, often just as a natural side effect of an artist intuitively making resonant work, but Lizzo’s songs all sound very calculated to me. This is not such a bad thing – her skill in expressing herself in relatable ways is a major talent, and I’ve worked with many people who have this natural skill and hold them in very high regard. (I’m much better at telling people who they are rather than asking you to identify with who I am.) Lizzo has a good voice, and her songs range from “pretty good” to “undeniable banger” but I have mixed feelings about all of it because I know the game being played rather well, and because I’m uncomfortable with this self-consciously audience-pleasing approach to content creation becoming the primary mode of pop culture. I appreciate the value of empowering art – and as someone who has spent his entire adult life as a fat man, I am particularly sympathetic to Lizzo’s fat-positivity – but fear mainstream culture further devolving into nothing but shallow exclamations of self-affirmation. We’re more than halfway there already, especially when you factor in YouTube.
This music makes me want to rebel against it. I never ask that any music be “for me” – I prefer art to offer a window into other lives and ways of thinking – but Lizzo’s songs are often so transparent in their intended use as a way for square, insecure people to feel empowered and cool that I can’t help but hear it and think “but I don’t actually want or need this!” She reminds me a lot of Macklemore, whose big hits “Same Love” and “Thrift Shop” had a similar quasi-cool accessibility and cultural cartography value at the time. In both cases, making fun of them feels cheap and churlish, or like a sideways attack on fat women, LGBT rights, or uh, value shopping. But for me, it’s really just developing an allergy. I hear too much of music like this, or see too many shows and movies that are obviously designed with cultural cartography in mind, and I just run screaming back towards artsy ambiguity.
The majority of “It Was You” is smooth and sensual, with Norah Jones singing about a feeling of romantic certainty over jazzy chords. The verses have a different energy – an ascending melody that implies searching and emotional effort, lyrics that suggest an analytical mindset at odds with the gut intuition of the chorus. It’s a contest of head vs heart that the heart wins rather quickly. The back half of the song is elegant and gentle as Jones’ phrasing conveys a feeling of love so strong that it’s weighted by melancholy. Is she afraid this won’t work? Is this actually an unrequited feeling? Or is she so in love it’s bringing tears to her eyes?
“I’m Clean” has a cool, crisp tone and a mechanical groove. This sets up a chilly, antiseptic vibe that contrasts sharply with Katie Alice Greer’s voice, which is all messy passion and complicated emotion. She’s singing about negating herself and suppressing her emotions and needs to accommodate a partner’s kinks, and while she generally sounds like she resented this experience, there’s enough ambiguity in her voice and lyrics to suggest she didn’t totally hate it either. It’s a deliberately thorny and tricky song, and it’s handed off to the listener like a challenge. Or maybe it’s more like a mirror – what you get out of the lyrics and music here will depend a lot on your point of view.
The Beck discography is a spectrum of styles, and “Saw Lightning” is near the center of it, where acoustic folk and funky rhythm meet. This is not an unusual space for Beck to be – this is more or less the spot where “Loser” falls in that continuum, and the same goes for a lot of songs from Guero and The Information. It’s default Beck. The sweet spot, though his greatest work will usually be at the far aesthetic extremes.
“Saw Lightning” is a song Beck completed with the help of Pharrell Williams, and while you can hear Williams’ presence in the rhythms, the flavor of it is still overwhelmingly Beck. Williams is mostly adding a kick to it – a Neptunes-y syncopation, a bass synth nudge that makes the chorus more propulsive, vocals that add dimension and a sense of wild commotion around Beck’s voice. The song has a slightly frantic feeling to it, like Beck is there trying to keep a cool head while disaster strikes. The lyrics allude to natural disasters and climate change, and the feeling of facing down scary, uncertain situations. But Beck sounds brave here – he’s scrambling, but gracefully. He’s in awe of crazy stuff going down, but wise enough to back away. It’s not a song about being terrified of the apocalypse; it’s a song about adjusting to a weird new normal.
“Mantra Moderne” – both the song and its gorgeous but somewhat deadpan video – is essentially a smooth puree of various forms of distinctly mid-20th century sensuality. It’s a haze of psychedelia and jazz, spiced with elements of pop from around the globe. It’s a very elegant sort of stoner music, the kind of music where you’re probably not getting the full effect unless your skin is brushing up against silk or velvet. There’s a winky kitsch to this, particularly in the video, but Kit Sebastian’s craft is entirely earnest and quite impressive. There’s also a subtle creepiness to this music, with the cute aspects of the vocal melody barely obscuring the cryptic menace of the lyrics.
Unperfect is the new vehicle for Xenomania’s Brian Higgins, probably the single greatest pop songwriter of the 2000s that is all but unknown in the United States. Higgins is the prime mover behind the entire Girls Aloud catalog, plus key songs by Annie, Sugababes, and Kylie Minogue. He’s also the primary author of Cher’s “Believe.” You almost certainly know that one. Higgins’ aesthetic is brash, bold, and up-tempo. Every bit of a Xenomania song is catchy, it’s always a full-on barrage of hooks. Lyrics are always slightly strange, and despite being extremely glossy and POP, the songs are nearly all rooted in rock in structure, dynamics, and arrangement.
So with that in mind, “Gots to Give the Girl” is a bit of a curveball. The usual hyper-charged Xenomania energy is gone, replaced by a cool, relaxed vibe. If Girls Aloud is music designed for gyms, Unperfect seems built specifically for the “chill” playlist at a coffee shop. But despite the drastic shift in tone, it’s still very clearly a Higgins song – you can hear it in the contours of the melodies and the way he stacks them all neatly in a row, and the voices have the same tones and cadences as the women in Girls Aloud. They each take a lead, but you could be forgiven for assuming you’re just hearing one woman sing the whole time. It’s also essentially a groovy rock song, right on down to two smooth, unhurried guitar solos. It all works rather well, and though I do believe the pop scene of 2019 needs more of the old Xenomania energy, I welcome Higgins’ reinvention.
“King James” is a funky, joyful ode to Lebron James, but not so much for his performance on the basketball court, but rather for his philanthropic efforts. I don’t doubt Anderson Paak’s earnestness here – his voice is passionate and earnest, his heart is very much in the right place – but it does feel a little like he’s ingratiating himself and trying to score free courtside season tickets. Frankly, he should get them! This is one of Paak’s best compositions, and James should feel endlessly flattered to be the basis for something so effortlessly groovy that takes his good works the basis for a bigger statement about community and solidarity. Paak’s doing his best to work up to the level of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder here, and with this track, he’s as close to that target as you could hope to get.
“Win” is one of David Bowie’s finest love songs, though it seems he didn’t really think of it that way, describing it in 1975 as more of a message to people who lack his dedication and work ethic. “It was written about an impression left on me by people who don’t work very hard, or do anything much, or think very hard – like don’t blame me ‘cause I’m in the habit of working hard,” he told NME. “You know, it’s easy – all you got to do is win.”
But that’s just the chorus. The verses are far more interesting, with Bowie – something of an unknowable ice queen himself – prodding someone else to open up and be vulnerable with him. “Slow down, let someone love you,” he sings, sounding handsome and mildly bemused. “I’ve never touched you since I started to feel.” Their distance and reluctance is an obstacle to his desire, yes, but I think this is also him feeling like he’s opened up and is now inviting a similarly aloof person into his life. It’s a bit “come on in, the water’s fine.”
“Win” sounds light and airy even when it goes a bit bombastic and theatrical. Bowie plays it cool in vocal performance and delegates projecting warmth to his R&B back up singers and David Sanborn’s fluttering saxophone. But despite that, he’s not devoid of passion. There’s a real conviction in his voice on the chorus, a genuine belief in both himself and the person he’s addressing. The song is essentially a pep talk, but Bowie’s doing that thing where one’s advice boils down to “just do everything I did, and it’ll all go fine.” He’s urging you to love David Bowie, because he loves David Bowie. He’s telling you that all you have to do is win because he’s David Bowie in the mid 1970s, and he’s become well acquainted with that outcome. His voice, his words, the music – he’s seducing you. And of course, this is David Bowie in the mid 1970s, so it works. He wins.
The core of “Don’t Know What to Do” is essentially a Kelly Clarkson rock ballad from the mid-’00s, but this being a K-Pop tune in 2019, it’s also a pounding EDM banger. It’s a little incongruous, but it works – they thread in 2010s dance pop signifiers along with the acoustic guitars in the quiet sections, and the big bass drop and surging tempo comes in just as the singer slips into English to sing the title phrase. She sounds entirely exasperated, and the dance section slams in as though she’s hitting a button to release an emergency dose of dopamine to shake her out of her sadness.
“Roads” sounds immediately familiar – the palette is ’80s British goth-adjacent indie, the production is every band since 2000 who’ve wanted to make their own late ‘80s Cure or 4AD album. It sounds like the 121st minute. It sounds like a dream you’ve had before. If Rose of the West were aiming for a pleasant deja vu sensation, they succeeded. But it’s not all aesthetic. “Roads” works in large part because Gina Barrington’s vocal tone has a cold neutrality that feels like whatever you need to hear. She sounds vaguely sad, vaguely scared, vaguely in love, vaguely concerned. The coolness sounds like a cover, but for what exactly? Something is wrong, and maybe this deep grey ambiguity is the root of it.
