Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Ariana Grande “Sweetener”

Pop albums take time to make, while pop star relationships tend to burn bright and fast. As a result, it’s easy to approach Ariana Grande’s new album Sweetener as a collection of songs about her intense romance with the comedian Pete Davidson. (There is, of course, a song on the record called “Pete Davidson.”) But many of these songs have been in the works for some time, and “Sweetener” in particular apparently dates back to 2016 when Grande was still involved with Mac Miller. (A lyrical tip-off is the entire verse about enjoying getting head from this lover, and Miller is a guy who proudly rapped “I just eat pussy, other people need food” in his album-length tribute to Grande, The Divine Feminine.)

Fun fact, right? Cool trivia. But I think this context is valuable in understanding where Grande is coming from as a person and as an artist. This is a woman who had her heart set on singing songs that conveyed a joyful, lustful love, regardless of what relationship she was in. She’s chasing a feeling, and trying to capture it in sound, and she absolutely nails it when she works with Pharrell Williams. Williams, one of the great geniuses of modern pop R&B, has an instinctive understanding of what chords and melodies flatter Grande’s voice and persona that most of her other collaborators have lacked. His chord structures float and sparkle around her voice, which is at once bold and sweetly delicate, like Mariah Carey in her youth. The songs sound light and dreamy, like she’s just levitating in a haze of infatuation.

This is the state of mind she wants to be in, like, all the time. Blissful, horny, and removed from stress and the horrors of the world. And whomst among us does not want this? Look at this gif of Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson from earlier this week. Who doesn’t want to feel like Ariana in this moment? Who doesn’t want to have someone look at them the way she looks at Davidson? This is an ideal state!

The idea driving all of this – her life, her songs – is that this is a choice. You have to want it, to chase it, to bring it into your life and cherish it. This is a woman who recently endured a horrific trauma, and made a decision to throw herself into love. She made a record about love rather than the hate and murder and cruelty she witnessed firsthand. She’s singing about her experience, but offering the best advice she can give to anyone else struggling: Find love, embrace love, hold on to it. You need that sweetener.

Buy it from Amazon.

Jake Shears “Big Bushy Mustache”

First off, I am just so glad to have this guy back. I miss the Scissor Sisters very much, but some solo Jake Shears will do for now – especially since it all just sounds like Scissor Sisters anyway. There’s some magic missing without Baby Daddy and Ana Matronic, but Shears’ songwriting is still distinctive sharp.

“Big Bushy Mustache” is a funky fantasy about masculinity that’s based in a desire to emulate a certain kind of ’70s straight man. It’s a nostalgic song about a type of guy you don’t really see anymore – strong and bold and flashy, right on the edge of campy but not quite. If you see this dude today he’s probably queer, and emulating the vibe as Shears is in this song (and his current look.) This is probably all tied up in very contentious “masc” politics in the gay community, but from my own boring straight man perspective, this resonates as an ideal of manliness that’s rugged and confident but relatively light on toxic masculinity. And the world surely needs more good examples of being unambiguously masculine without rejecting style and sexiness and fun, or being an angry creep about everything.

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Bad Bad Hats “Makes Me Nervous”

“Makes Me Nervous” is an airy, atmospheric pop song that conveys a very subtle anxiety in the way the guitar chords sound so crisp, taut, and rigid. It’s the uptight feeling hidden beneath the smiling facade, and the grasp on to familiarity in the face of the unknown. Kerry Alexander’s voice is ideal for this sort of low-key tension – she always sounds reasonable and calm, but her phrasing always reveals an easily wounded and sensitive soul. Her lyrics for this song match the tone perfectly, with her character getting paranoid about her relationship and freaking out a bit when she can’t get in touch with her partner. There doesn’t seem to be anything actually going wrong, but she’s so invested and obsessed that every little thing seems like it could be a harbinger of doom. And it all comes down to the Sisyphean frustration of everyone who’s ever been insecure in love: “I still want to be whatever you need.” If only!

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Doja Cat “Mooo!”

I suppose “Mooo!” qualifies as a novelty song, but I ask you: Where exactly is the line separating a “comedy song” from a regular song that happens to be funny? I’m inclined to say “Mooo!” is in the latter category – its silliness is more surreal than jokey, and there is a jazzy delicacy to the arrangement that is lovely and highly listenable in and of itself. Doja Cat is a delight on the mic, gleefully extending her cow metaphor to nearly a breaking point, and delivering an interpolation of Kelis’ “Milkshake” near the end of the song that’s joyful and inspired. The song is definitely funny, but when it comes down to it, “bitch imma cow, bitch imma cow” isn’t much weirder or off-kilter than a lot of other things going on in hip-hop lately. It’s just whimsical and cute in a way that’s a bit unexpected.

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Tirzah “Do You Know”

Mica Levi’s arrangement for “Do You Know” makes Tirzah sound as if she’s pacing circles in a damp basement in her mind, trapped indefinitely in a loop of thoughts about a relationship that has crumbled. Levi’s production centers her voice in the mix so fully and clearly that it sounds almost too intimate, so it feels less like hearing a song, and more like accidental telepathy. Or, at least, it’s like overhearing half a phone conversation you really should not be eavesdropping on but you can’t bring yourself to tune out. Tirzah’s lyrics are specific enough to give you a clear sense of the troubles between her and this other person, but just vague enough that you’re still piecing together the bits that are left unsaid.

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Robyn “Missing U”

Robyn knows what we want. She knows that we want her to make the kind of songs you dance to when you’re upset. She knows we want her to take our loneliness and heartache and turn it into romantic, cinematic, and cathartic moments that are sometimes more satisfying than actually feeling good. She knows no one else can do this for us like she can. And so here’s “Missing U,” a song that gives us what we want and what we need. Robyn is not very prolific, but she is generous.

Robyn knows her way around a hook, but the reason her songs work comes down to the sound of her voice. She always sounds like a strong person cracking under the pressure of enormous feelings, like she’s trying to hold it together just a bit longer. She always sounds like her pride is slipping away, like someone ready to totally debase herself to get the feeling out. She never loses control in the song, but it always sounds like if you keep playing it over and over, she might.

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Astronauts, etc “Symbol Land”

“Living in a symbol land.” That phrase, central to this song, really gets under my skin. Symbols in and of themselves are fine – utilitarian, a crucial part of how we process language, images, and life. But the way we lean on symbols for shorthand can be disastrous. A lot of the problems in the world come from an over reliance on symbolism: A laziness in interpreting other people that justifies casual cruelty, the intellectual bankruptcy of only seeing action and ideas for their symbolic value, the accumulation of empty signifiers in capitalism.

“Symbol Land,” as a song, isn’t quite as political as my interpretation of that line would suggest. It’s more of a broken love song, with Anthony Ferraro singing about attempting to parse the meaning of a collapsing relationship. His melody is gorgeous, and the sound of the chords and harmony has a stately and angelic quality, like John Lennon’s “Imagine” by way of Brian Wilson. Ferraro’s words are left deliberately ambiguous, almost as though he’s attempting to disrupt the symbols that weighed down this relationship in expectations beyond simple, pure love.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Lithics “Still Forms”

I hate to share a song and say that it sounds just like something else – it feels lazy and disrespectful to me – but… I have to do that here. This band sounds so much like Erase Errata that it’s uncanny. I first encountered Lithics when they opened for Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks recently, and I was stunned by how specifically they sounded like Erase Errata. Not post-punk in general, or other similar bands like Delta 5 or The Raincoats. Erase Errata, right on down to the tone of Aubrey Hornor’s voice.

But this is not a complaint. I miss Erase Errata, and Lithics are very good at making this type of jagged, disaffected music. “Still Forms” has a weird sort of swing to it, and its main guitar riffs have a peculiar sharp trebly clang that is like the musical equivalent of a bitter taste on the tongue. Hornor’s lyrics are evocative too, particular with her cold, blunt delivery. A line like “TV remote lying in a field of golden wheat” comes off as a menacing implication.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Taylor Swift “Delicate”

It’s so interesting to hear Taylor Swift doubt herself so much. “Delicate” is a love song, but from the perspective of someone who is desperately afraid that this amazing connection she’s made is about to be poisoned by her past, or ruined by allowing herself to be vulnerable too soon. And all she wants is to honest, and to just tell this guy what she’s feeling. She’s censoring herself, editing out as much as she can to maintain an illusion, but she’s not sure if it’s working.

She really makes you feel her angst here – the urgency of her desire crashing into the anxious need for self-preservation. You can hear the classic Taylor crush vibes in the song, but it’s muffled and muted by the icy arrangement. The song is all tormented restraint, so when the bridge comes and allows a brief moment of pure honesty – “sometimes when I look into your eyes I pretend you’re mine, all the damn time” – it’s incredibly cathartic. But then the song snaps back into the chorus – “is it cool that I said all that, is it chill that you’re in my head?” – and she sounds so totally defeated by her need to protect herself.

Buy it from Amazon.

Janet Jackson “Love Would Never Do (Without You)”

Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ songs are typically highly dynamic, with mostly percussive elements shifting around to give the melody maximum emotional impact. In the case of their work on Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, it’s like drawing several underlines beneath the hooks. There’s a softness in Janet’s voice, but the music explodes with great force. As expressive as her voice is, she’s always understating the feeling relative to the intensity of the keyboards and drum hits.

“Love Will Never Do (Without You)” is even more dynamic than usual because it was initially written as a duet with a man – they wanted Prince, then thought maybe they could get Ralph Tresvant, but nothing really worked out. So Jackson sings the first verse in a much lower register than usual, which greatly exaggerates her range within the track. This works to the advantage of the song, which starts out rather joyful but keeps escalating into dizzying ecstasy as it moves along.

The lyrics follow the sound of it, with the lowest vocal part at the start approaching the love between Janet and her partner in analytical terms but by the time she’s up in the giddy stratospheres, she’s nearly at a loss for words. (“No other love around has quite the same…ooh ooh!”) But as extraordinarily joyous as this song gets, the words are grounded and reasonable. The love in “Love Would Never Do” is not unrealistic – there’s work to be done, there’s conflicts and temptations, there’s a need to prove the doubters wrong. The loveliest and most romantic line in the song is so simple and direct: “I feel better when I have you near me.” If this song is doing anything, it’s just trying to capture that specific everyday happiness.

Buy it from Amazon.

Phoenix “Lisztomania”

Not long after this song came out nearly a decade ago, some brilliant person made a video for it cutting together scenes from John Hughes movies from the 1980s. Maybe you remember it! The “Brat pack mashup” video is a joy to watch, partly for obviously nostalgic reasons, but mostly because it connected the essence of the song – and Phoenix’s overall aesthetic – to this kindred spirit from the past. The editor of the video recognized what was happening in “Lisztomania” from the start: The boppy rhythm that invites you to swivel your hips and lighten your shoulders, the vocal that expresses a pure-hearted desire with a small dash of neurosis.

Thomas Mars’ lyrics are on the cryptic side, but it’s clear what this is all about. It’s about needing the thrill of romance, and cherishing the rush of raw, undiluted emotion. It’s about fetishizing the obstacles in the way of love, because they make everything more exciting. It’s about epiphanies and desire and dancing. It’s about wanting to feel fully alive.

Hughes movies are so resonant because the emotions and desires of the characters are amplified by youthful hormones, but have incredible clarity because they don’t have much more to think about aside from social status. This is true of a lot of fiction about teenagers, but what makes this all so seductive is that Hughes knows this is all great FUN. The creation of identity, the pursuit of connection, the ecstatic angst of a crush, the burning need to rise above your circumstances to something more glamorous and beautiful and exciting. You watch these films, and listen to the sort of pop songs that evoke the same feeling, because you yearn to feel like these kids. It’s all very instructive and aspirational. There’s a power in wanting things very badly.

Phoenix’s music comes from an adult perspective, but makes a case that this sort of feeling is not a thing you grow out of: It comes, it comes, it comes, it comes, it comes and goes! Mars sounds like he’s talking himself out of his feelings at first – “so sentimental, not sentimental, no / romantic, not disgusting yet” – but the music makes him succumb to it. It starts with the hip swivel and the lightness in the shoulders, and it quickly moves to your heart.

Buy it from Amazon.

Smino featuring Mick Jenkins “New Coupe, Who Dis?”

“New Coupe, Who Dis?” seems to float gently in a cloud of sparse organ chords, with just enough bounce and swing to register as funky. The placid groove suits Mick Jenkins, whose verse slinks around the beat with a loose and playfully melodic flow similar to that of his Chicago peers Chance and Noname. Smino is a whole other thing, though – his voice is high and cartoonish in some moments, raspy and soulful in others. Once he moves into verses, his words seem to spiral around the beat like vines. There’s a lot going on in this song that sounds like just hanging around doing nothing on a pleasant night.

Buy it from Amazon.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra “The Internet of Love (That Way)”

“The Internet of Love” moves at a languorous, hungover pace. It’s a slow drag of music, with piano notes and guitar chords that trickle out gradually as if the song itself barely has the energy to get up. The feeling of it is just as stuck as the sound. There’s a not a lot of lyrics, but what you get sketches out a portrait of someone who is alone and yearning for someone they’ve lost somehow. They’re lonely and heartbroken and retreating into themselves, imagining a future together that is just not going to happen. What really gets to me about this song is the self-awareness – he knows how bad obsessing over this is for him, and how it only makes the chances of getting what he wants more impossible. But he can’t stop sinking deeper into the feeling.

Buy it from Amazon.

Video Age “Pop Therapy”

This song basically sounds like someone trying very hard to make their own version of Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly in their bedroom with no budget, no session musicians, and only a fraction of Fagen’s chops. But you know what? It works for me, and Video Age’s earnest desire to write a classy, swinging early ’80s sort of pop tune is very charming to me. “Pop Therapy” is certainly much more tender and sweet than anything Fagen would write, and the vocals and lyrics convey a neurotic desire for affection and understanding that’s a bit dweeby but still very relatable.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad & Adrian Younge featuring Cee-Lo Green “Questions”

If you’re familiar with Kendrick Lamar’s “Untitled 06 | 06.30.2014,” then you know this song. That’s easily one of my favorite songs by Lamar, so it took a bit to get used to hearing a version of this without him on it and to grow accustomed to different shifts in the song that give more space to Cee-Lo Green’s voice. And though I quite like both songs, I feel a little bad that “Questions” – despite being the source material – has to be secondary, simply because it came out after Lamar’s track. This is an exceptionally composed R&B tune that nods to ’70s soul aesthetics while having a very distinct feeling to it. There’s a tranquility to the chords, and Green expresses a remarkable humility while singing lines like “I am wonderful, let me count the ways” and repeatedly uttering the phrase “let me explain.” This not a song coming from an arrogant place – it’s more about self-love and clarity opening your heart to other people and things greater than yourself.

Buy it from Amazon.

Louis Cole featuring Genevieve Artadi “When You’re Ugly”

“We all live on planet Earth and this is how it works,” Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi sweetly sing before laying out the rules in a boppy, funky chorus: “When you’re sexy, people want to talk to you, and when you’re ugly no one wants to talk to you.” And you know, at this point I just think “well, fuck you guys!” But then there’s the turn: “When you’re ugly, here is something you can do: FUCK THE WORLD AND BE REAL COOL.” That sentiment might be a little trite, but it’s also something I personally need to hear a lot lately. The world may be cruel in aggregate, but there are many good and open-hearted people, and there is always value beyond the superficial. Cole’s song is incredibly sunny, elegant, and joyful. When he implores you to just be cool, the song offers you some of its grace and strut to take as your own. You get to decide how you feel. Fuck the world and “how it works.”

Buy it from Bandcamp.

James Blake “Don’t Miss It”

“Don’t Miss It” is a song written from a position of clarity about living in a distorting cloud of depression and anxiety. And with that clarity – guilt, shame, fear of backsliding. The music is melancholy and mournful, but the elements of the arrangement are just off-kilter enough that the feeling isn’t pure or easy to place. There’s a slight warble on the piano, the emotional and wordless backing vocal is mixed so it feels a bit distant from James Blake’s voice, and Blake delivers some lines with bleak sarcasm. The music frames a feeling from not long ago, and Blake comments on it. He’s close enough to feel it, but also to be outside of it. The clarity he has in the moment is not yet fully clear.

Buy it from Amazon.

Negative Gemini “You Weren’t There Anymore”

“You Weren’t There Anymore” is a song that’s very much in the phase of a breakup where you’re just looping a one-sided argument with your ex in your head, like you’re rehearsing a script for the most cathartic conversation you’re probably never going to actually have. The song seems to move in emotional circles, with Lindsey French singing lines like “I’d feel better if you felt bad” with a mix of raw anguish and resignation. The song structure reinforces the feeling of being trapped in a loop, but there are a few dynamic shifts that shake up the rhythm and the feeling. When the beat picks up in the final third, it relieves some tension and suggests she’s almost through ruminating about this.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Christina Aguilera featuring GoldLink “Like I Do”

Christina Aguilera’s new album is called Liberation, and it truly sounds like the work of a singer who has been liberated from the pressure of having to compete as a pop star. This time around, she’s just an R&B singer making an R&B record with an assortment of talented collaborators – Kanye West, Hudson Mohawke, MNEK, Demi Lovato, Julia Michaels, and on this track, Anderson Paak and GoldLink. Paak’s track has a warm, mellow vibe that gives Aguilera permission to dial back her typical bombast, but without neutralizing her mighty voice. Aguilera is playing it cool here, and singing from a place of understated confidence – she’s basically telling a guy, “hey, I’m a lot more successful and experienced than you, but I’m going to give you a chance to get on my level.” It’s a welcome flip on usual gender roles in pop, and allows her to play flirty in a way that feels fresh.

Buy it from Amazon.

Jerry Paper “Your Cocoon”

“Your Cocoon” sounds chill but not relaxed. It’s like a room that’s been meticulously designed to be conducive to peaceful relaxation but is a bit too… sterile and stiff and clean and pricey to actually relax in. Jerry Paper’s grooves are strong, but a bit uncanny – the song has some swing, but it’s just a bit too tight. But the effect of the track suits the lyrics, which come off like half of a passive-aggressive argument that will never actually be verbalized outside the confines of a song. It’s the sound of someone who is presenting themselves as cool and above-it-all, and actually is to an extent, but definitely not fully. The neuroses tighten up the slickest grooves.

Buy it from Amazon.