July 26th, 2018 2:57am
“Crazy for You” is Madonna’s best love song and finest ballad, in large part because she so fully commits to the forthright earnestness of Jon Lind and John Bettis’ music and lyrics. It’s not unusual for Madonna to be so heart-on-her-sleeve, but her most famous songs from the ’80s often have some arch or ironic quality. Here she’s tender, direct, and incredibly vulnerable as she confesses to huge, overwhelming feelings: “I never wanted anyone like this, it’s all brand new.” That last bit is what really gets me about this song – she feels out of her depth, she has no roadmap for this. What she’s experiencing is beautiful and exciting, but also quite scary. But regardless of the fear and possibility of rejection, she is absolutely certain of how she feels. It’s such a pure sentiment.
The clarity of the chorus is in sharp contrast with the verses, which look outside her feelings to observe the space around her. Lind and Bettis’ language is so vivid here, sketching out a scene in which other people in the club pair off and clear out, but Madonna’s character is waiting for something to happen. I love how this raises the stakes of the song – you feel the time slipping away, heightening her anticipation and longing. She’s trying to find a way to express herself, to make it happen. “Can’t you feel the weight of my stare?,” she wonders. “If you read my mind,” she fantasizes. As the song progresses she seems to get closer to the one she wants, but you never get any sort of resolution. There’s a very good chance that the intense love she feels goes unrequited and she heads home alone.
July 23rd, 2018 6:42pm
“Groove Is In The Heart” was released in the summer of 1990, in the middle of a three–year period in which music culture was transitioning between the aesthetics of the 1980s and what would become the 1990s. This phase of music history is fascinating to me because it has an aesthetic unto itself – creatively ambitious as artists and labels attempted to envision a fresh pop future, colorful and glossy, generally upbeat and optimistic in tone, and gleefully eclectic in its embrace of hip-hop, house music, and retro kitsch.
If you imagine all of that as a Venn diagram, “Groove Is In The Heart” is at the center. The track is one of the finest sample-based compositions of all time, with at least a dozen samples weaved into a seamless, ecstatic pop tune. Super DJ Dmitry’s craft is impeccable – he borrows a few grooves outright, but the bulk of the sampling is piecing together flourishes from small moments of disparate recordings. This is masterful audio collage on par with the best of the Bomb Squad, the Dust Brothers, and Prince Paul, and something that would be prohibitively expensive to create and release today. It’s an art form almost entirely snuffed out by commerce.
As glorious as Dmitry’s track gets, this song is still all about Lady Miss Kier. Her style, confidence, and enthusiasm is so strong that it’s nearly overpowering, and you don’t need to actually see her to understand that you’re listening to the coolest, foxiest woman in the universe. (But it certainly does not hurt to look! These videos are astonishing.)
“Groove Is In the Heart” is one of the world’s greatest crush songs. The music has a generous and playful tone, and conveys the euphoric rush of infatuation but without a trace of anxiety or melodrama. I love the way Kier expresses a deep appreciation for the person she’s addressing – she sounds so excited about them, and so inspired by their presence. (I love the phrase “your groove I do deeply dig!” so much. All I really want is someone who deeply digs my groove.) She gets silly, she gets sassy, she gets funky. The way she sings “I couldn’t ask for another!” is thrilling, and easily one of the most deliriously joyful bits of any song in pop history. The best part of this is that her bliss is contagious, and this song is one of the most effective ways humans have ever devised to induce crushed-out feelings.
July 22nd, 2018 11:59pm
The WPIX Archive is one of my favorite things on the internet, as it combines two things that will always fascinate me: Generally quite banal footage from the 20th century, and New York City history. The stuff I love most in the archive are from the ’70s through the mid ’90s, as they are glimpses into the world just before my existence or the adult world I only partially perceived as a child.
But one clip from the 21st century stands out – the last live footage WPIX shot of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. It’s not even a good shot of the buildings; it’s just a helicopter view of the skyline. The footage wouldn’t even be all that interesting if not for the context – the chatter of the Good Day New York hosts wrapping up their program for the morning, and that it’s soundtracked by Robbie Dupree’s “Steal Away.” Everything is cheery and relaxed. It’s just another boring late summer day.
“Steal Away” is a very appropriately titled song, given that it flagrantly rips off key elements of two major hits that came out in the two years before its release – The Doobie Brothers and Michael McDonald’s soft rock classic “What A Fool Believes,” and Eddie Money’s radio staple “Baby Hold On.” But please do not hold this against “Steal Away.” It’s a magnificent song in its own right, and frankly, more songs should have keyboard parts like “What A Fool Believes.” How many terrible punk songs are essentially the same damn thing, and no one complains about that? I could do without a hundred thousand of those, and but would be grateful for just one other good “What A Fool Believes” ripoff.
“Steal Away” is a song about an affair. It’s unclear what the entanglement is – is Dupree simply the Other Man, or is he cheating on someone too? It doesn’t really matter. The point is that despite knowing that he’s doing something wrong, he definitely can’t say no. The interesting thing here is how the chill vibe of the music defuses the conflict in the lyrics, and how despite the “into the night, I know it ain’t right” refrain, there’s almost no trace of guilt in the feeling of the song. Dupree tips back and forth between passivity and action, guided mainly by lust and excitement. This isn’t a song concerned with the aftermath of actions, it’s all about a moment. And that moment is quite romantic. I like to think that song is the start of one of those relationships that begin as some illicit affair, but end up being stable, loving partnerships.
July 17th, 2018 1:05am
We have our ways of making songs what we want them to be. I’ve read the lyrics of “Bodysnatchers” and understand that it’s a paranoid fantasy about helplessness and living a lie, but I decided what this song was about for me 11 years ago. It’s all in one line: “I’M TRAPPED IN THIS BODY AND CAN’T GET OUT.” That line, in a song that sounds like trying to frantically shake your own skin off, is what I’ve connected to, and that’s because I so badly have needed that song to exist.
I saw Radiohead play this song for the first time since 2006 on Friday night. It came near the end of the best show I’ve ever seen them play, and one of the most powerful live experiences I’ve ever had in terms of being at a high level of emotional and physical connection to the music for such a sustained period of time. “Bodysnatchers” was the emotional pinnacle of the show, and shouting “I’M TRAPPED IN THIS BODY AND CAN’T GET OUT” along with Thom Yorke was an incredibly cathartic moment for me. I felt like I was letting go of an idea I’d been holding on to very tightly for most of my life.
In that moment, during that song and during this show, I didn’t feel trapped in my body at all. My movements, typically either rigid or self-conscious, were loose and intuitive. Not graceful, but comfortable. I came out of that show feeling like I’d reversed a hex I put on myself many years ago, if just by fully realizing how horrifying Yorke’s line really is and that I don’t have to live like that if I don’t want to.
July 16th, 2018 12:29pm
A few weeks ago, after a series of epiphanies that have given me a lot of new focus in life, I heard this song accidentally as the result of an algorithm and unknowingly hitting a bunch of buttons on my phone. It felt like Björk herself appearing to tell me personally that I was making all the right decisions. “You can’t say no to hope, you can’t say no to happiness,” she sings. “It doesn’t scare me at all!”
“Alarm Call” has been a very inspirational song for me for about half my life now, but in that moment I felt like I was hearing it with new ears. What once sounded like advice now resonated as truth. The hope I feel and the happiness I want aren’t scary to me now, they are simply goals to work towards, and feelings I’ve opened myself up to. For most of my life desire was a frightening thing because it seemed like I wasn’t in the position to want things, and I could only envision how I might fail. But it’s better to not focus on outcomes as much as obeying intuition and satisfying curiosity. Follow the feeling and you’ll get closer to it.
“Alarm Call” is one of Björk’s most joyful pieces of music, and also one of the most pop things she’s ever made. It’s her version of Michael Jackson – a densely packed groove that nevertheless feels light as air, with a lot of wordless emoting coloring in between the lines of well composed vocal hooks. Her message here is optimistic and utopian, but very aware of the flaws of the human mind. This positive feeling, this “enlightenment,” it only comes if you fight for it. You get there if you let go of fear, and work for hope and happiness. She’s telling you this is possible, because she’s made it up to the top of the mountaintop. She’s got a radio and good batteries, and this is the joyous tune that she believes will free the human race from suffering.
Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but it definitely has worked on me.
July 15th, 2018 4:34pm
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.
July 14th, 2018 10:26pm
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.
July 13th, 2018 1:24am
“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.
July 10th, 2018 3:02am
“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.
July 9th, 2018 1:04am
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.
July 9th, 2018 12:46am
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.
July 6th, 2018 2:10am
“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.”
July 4th, 2018 6:14pm
“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.
July 3rd, 2018 1:52am
“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.
July 1st, 2018 11:38pm
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.
June 29th, 2018 12:31pm
“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.
June 28th, 2018 12:12am
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have composed so much music for film that the aesthetics of film pacing have carried over their work in Nine Inch Nails. “Ahead of Ourselves” strikes me a distinctly cinematic song – it sounds like a chase sequence cut between multiple perspectives, with the loudest and most abrasive moments of the chorus presented less like chord changes and more like sudden smash cuts. The drums are the focus all the way through, starting at a maniac pace but speeding up with drum fills that seem to swerve across the song like the beat’s taking a shortcut. There’s something cartoonish about those fills, and I like the way this musical element that strikes me as rather un-NIN contrasts with the rest of the composition, which is full-on NIN aesthetic.
June 26th, 2018 12:29pm
The first two verses here are very good – it’s Kendrick on the first, Jay Rock on the second, so what would you expect? But the real draw here is the third section in which the two go back and forth on the mic while Hit-Boy’s beats subtly shift for emphasis. The track has a drowsy feeling to it, mainly due to a flute loop very similar to the one in Future and Kendrick’s “Mask Off,” but the energy level in the vocals is quite dynamic with both men approaching the groove differently every few bars. I particularly like when Jay Rock seems to lose his cool and gets aggro – “Fuck your plan, I’ma burn that castle!” – especially since it’s in strong contrast to some much more chill moments less than a minute earlier in the song.
June 25th, 2018 1:39am
Trippie Redd has, up until this point, mainly been associated with the more mumbly end of the SoundCloud rap cohort, so it’s something of a surprise for him to release this song, which is basically a straight-up alt-rock ballad. “How You Feel” is very minimal in terms of arrangement – there’s no percussion at all, the guitar part is pretty basic and sounds a bit like someone trying to play Eddie Money’s “Baby Hold On” from memory, and the only flourish is a droning lead guitar line. But despite this fairly static arrangement, Redd’s voice is dynamic and emotive enough to keep it compelling all the way through. He sings this with great feeling and urgency, and with the commitment of a guy who has no real incentive to do a song like this but clearly feels like he MUST. The melody is strong, the sentiment is heart-wrenching, and there hasn’t been a good power ballad in a while: This song should be a hit. People should be waving lighters to this thing.
June 25th, 2018 1:25am
Kanye West raps on this song and co-produced it, but the Kanye-ness of this song – particularly in comparison to most other songs he’s released in the past few weeks – is fairly subtle. Kanye has rarely made music as slinky and sensual as this, and even when he’s on the mic he’s wise enough to dial down the antics and just complement the groovy before tossing it back over to Teyana Taylor. Taylor is a revelation here. She’s charismatic and bold, particularly when she’s switching up the melody and cadence. This is a singer who has clearly learned a lot of the best musical lessons from Beyoncé, but stops short of directly emulating her. But it’s there in the creative approach to melody, the commitment to interesting phrasing, and the playful sexuality. “Hurry” is too sincere in its horniness to be a joke, but it’s definitely the kind of sexy song that isn’t afraid to give you a knowing wink.
