“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.
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.
“Moon” is rooted in dance pop from start to finish, but the density of the rhythm and tone of the arrangement are always in flux. The moods are never in obvious fixed positions – the feelings blend and blur together into complicated, confusing, or contradictory vibes of criss-crossing keyboards and saxophone solos. Lucinda Duarte-Holman’s voice has a mostly chipper tone, which lightens the mood a little in the most tense bits, and adds a touch of self-aware humor. The off-kilter moodiness of the piece is the point of the song – according to Duarte-Holman herself, she’s singing about PMS, and feeling as the mercy of the moon and tides.
Stephen Wilkinson’s music as Bibio is commonly slotted in with electronic acts despite how often his songs are built around guitar and other live instruments. His most striking and beautiful compositions are rather pastoral and folky, even when he’s working in a more overtly ambient mode. “Old Graffiti,” from his forthcoming record, retains some of this aesthetic even as the rhythmic center of it signals an urban atmosphere. The central groove sounds extremely similar to me – it’s drawing specifically from Afro-Brazilian music, so I figure it must be something I already sort of know one way or another. (Or maybe it’s a Fela thing? Or a particular Studio One groove?) Regardless, the familiarity is a boon to the song, and Wilkinson’s psychedelic folkiness nudges the groove into unexpected tonal and emotional spaces.
“Patience” is all pleasant, warm sensations – a tight pocket beat, syrupy harmonies, piano chords that signal optimism, keyboard parts that seem to sparkle and gleam. It’s like Kevin Parker is going out of his way to create a good, positive vibe for anyone who hears it. And just on those terms, it really works. It’s a little more interesting when you factor in Parker’s lyrics, which deal with a tension between wanting to have a chill, carefree life and a desire for direction and meaning. Some real stoner stuff right here, for sure. There’s no contradiction here – this is an emphatically pro-chill song – but I do appreciate that he’s trying to rationalize and reconcile this tension. Basically, he’s creating a very relaxed vibe in which he can ponder how he can give himself structure. Honestly, it’s not a bad idea.
Stella Donnelly is particularly good at writing lyrics that sketch out a mundane situation with an underlying tension that speaks to something much darker. In some cases, as with her song “Boys Will Be Boys,” it’s unmistakably bleak. But with “Tricks,” a song about dealing with random dull men who’ve belittled her as she attempts to perform for them, the darkness is very low key and insidious. Donnelly’s voice is bright and assertive, but her guitar is a loose, casual groove – she sounds annoyed but her tone is mostly just dismissive. It’s less “fuck you” and more of an exaggerated eye roll. It’s a day-in-the-life song that gently nudges the listener to wonder why this sort of low-grade bullshit must be a default condition.
“Little White Dove” sounds off-kilter and surreal from the start, so when Jenny Lewis’ voice enters the mix and asks “was it a dream?” it feels like the question really ought to be “is this still a dream?” Beck’s production on the track is extremely wet and occasionally deliberately warped, and there’s so much silence in the mix that the drums sound exceptionally crisp and close to the ear. It’s not too drastic and not too jarring, just interesting enough to make a smooth groove feel odd and dreamy. Lewis’ voice is remarkable here when she slips into the chorus – she’s as loud and bold as she’s ever been, but also very controlled. Beck’s voice shadows her in the final rounds, and he only sounds ragged in contrast with the power and focus of her lead. That contrast is key, though – in the context of a song about a daughter finding it in herself to forgive her sick mother, it’s a show of strength and clarity.
“Leave My Home” has a very “I’m doing good, I guess” feeling to it. Smooth and relaxing, but with this subtle undertow of doubt and instability. The lyrics are specifically about adjusting to a new environment, but the feeling could be about any sort of adjustment period – it’s all in the way everything feels lovely but unsettled. This feeling really comes through in the guitar solo, which has a jazzy smoothness but also a slickness that feels like a put-on, like it’s all in quotations in a “fake it til you make it” sort of way.
“I don’t give no fucks” is a thing people say when all they do is give a fuck. There’s an irony to Ariana Grande singing that phrase in “Needy,” a song that is entirely about giving a fuck and being insecure and desperate for affirmation and approval. It’s a double negative – she’s saying she doesn’t give a fuck if people know this about her, but trying to “own it” is just another layer of neuroses. It’s trying to control the narrative. It’s trying to find some solid ground to stand on when everything else feels unstable.
But still, the vulnerability on display in “Needy” is admirable. The desire to “own it” is brave, because you’re not supposed to be proud of being so invested in a fledgling relationship, and so open about what you actually need from it. You’re supposed to play it cool, and hide all this intensity – overanalyzing texts, obsessing over every little thing, volatile emotions. You don’t want to freak them out, so you start feeling like you’ve got to protect them from your feelings. But your feelings aren’t an attack, and you’re just protecting yourself. Grande’s vocal performance conveys the strength of her feelings, but also a weariness. Tamping down this passion is driving her crazy and transparency is her only way out of this situation.
The line that really gets me here is in the chorus: “I can be needy, tell me how good it feels to be needed.” This is the crux of the whole thing, right? This isn’t about demanding someone’s time and energy and feelings. It’s about affirming your reciprocal value, and hoping that the person you need appreciates that need, because it’s ultimately a high compliment. There’s a lot of emotional intelligence in this song, and it’s not just in its vulnerability. It’s in admitting that things are confusing and complex and weird, and that need is both necessary and embarrassing. But it’s worth it: “I know it feels so good to be needed.”
Sasami sings “Jealousy” like she’s calmly, quietly passing along a secret. But I’m not sure what the secret is – her words come out like riddles, but her confidence makes you want to lean closer and decode what you’re hearing. The music feels conspiratorial and hushed as well, with simple drum machine clicks setting a tinny ambiance while her guitar chords seem to creep along gently, as if on tip-toes. The loveliest part of the song is the most enigmatic – why, exactly, is she singing the word “jealousy” in high-pitched clusters? It’s hard to tell who is envious of what, but the word rings out like a reason. Maybe she’s just trying to make you go “ah, of course, that’s it.”
John Peel used to say that The Fall were “always different, always the same.” This basically comes down to the singular aesthetics of Mark E. Smith – no matter who else was in The Fall or what influences were exciting him at the moment, the result could only ever sound like Mark E. Smith. A lot of my favorite artists are like this, and that includes Clinic. Unlike The Fall, Clinic are remarkably stable – they’ve had the same lineup since the beginning of their recorded career, and the group barely changes up their instrumentation. But the approach is the same: Sounds, aesthetics, and whole chunks of other people’s music get fed through the Clinic template and it comes out sounding like nothing but Clinic. If you’re not paying attention, they never really change. If you are listening closely, it’s all in the details. But either way, Clinic sounds incredibly cool. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it, right?
“Rubber Bullets,” like most Clinic songs, gets a lot of its character from the sound of Ade Blackburn’s voice. Blackburn, like Smith, has a one-of-a-kind voice, but whereas Smith battered you with the full force of his highly defined sense of self at all times, Blackburn is more peculiar and enigmatic. He sounds like a trickster figure – impish, furtive, and somewhat perverse. “Rubber Bullets” has a creepy psychedelic carnival vibe, but whereas that would suggest a wide open space, it has the same claustrophobic feeling that pretty much any Clinic song would have. They somehow make the lead organ part sound sweaty, and the lead guitar sounds like how being leered at feels. It’s not quite sinister, but it’s not far off either.
