Best of 2025 Pt. 1 - Best Words

Words! ...Too many?

No such thing as too many posts

Well! Another year, another bunch of writing. I already linked to some essays that I liked, but won’t excerpt here, in this previous post.

I have two Taylor Swift-related things:

• A post-script in my Taylor Swift series that deals (obliquely) with the new album but mostly riffs on fame, aging, and the irony of “normality” and “relatability” making you the most well-known human being on the planet.

• A mix putting my writing about Taylor Swift’s melodies and rhythmic writing into action: 13EATS - A MixTaype.

My major series this year was The Rise (or Fall) of A-Pop, which I think turned out well. I hope people find the ideas useful and…you know, use them. Here’s the series synopsis:

• Part 1: A-Pop is the term for an American pop landscape that has taken on regional characteristics as more global scenes and audiences compete not only for “influence,” but for sales and global attention. What does it mean to no longer think of American pop as the center of global attentional gravity?

• Part 2: Global attentional gravity operates through the process of cumulative advantage at an omnidirectional worldwide scale. This leads to what I call a monsterverse: huge megastars competing as outsized regional representatives while their local competition doesn’t get anywhere near as big.

• Part 3: The story of how American pop and indie music converged into middlestream music, a halfway point between a shrinking pop mainstream and indie’s widening “sidestream.” The resulting music sounds like the uncanny valley between indie rock and adult contemporary. (I refer to a typical middlestream style as “windowpane.”)

• Part 4: Could Eurovision, or an international competition like it, take the place of America’s central role in the global pop marketplace—a platform for bringing subcultural sounds to a broader audience, or surfacing exciting new boundary-pushing artists?

• Part 5: A brief prehistory of A-pop and its transition period in the ‘10s, with diminished gatekeeping, a slowing of the contemporary churn of popular culture, and a consolidation of fewer huge names in sales and airplay.

• Part 6: Expands the series scope in an epilogue to address the “celestial jukebox” and the long-deferred promises (and fears) of digital access finally becoming a more equitable global reality.

And now, the rest!

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A.I.

I find it difficult to put too much stock in all of this yet. Generative A.I. isn’t out of the 5-year “let’s see how this goes” phase of newly-overhyped technology for me to have strong opinions. I find it reassuring that most of the music it’s currently generating is usually bland and/or borderline incompetent. But I don’t doubt that at some point a song generated mostly through A.I. will be good. I just don’t think we’re there yet; like many tech hype things there’s some big story on the horizon that it’s too soon to fully understand.

Long term, I think Star Trek already showed us the way—A.I. generated writing and media will replace bureaucratic reports no one wanted to write anyway, and will also be used to read and synthesize those reports, while all the academics and poets produce original work from the material security of military service or being on the dole. Seems plausible.

—July 10

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One thing that’s sort of funny about current A.I. music is that prompts are getting pretty good at making uncool forms of music most people associate with humans (simple guitar-driven pop-rock) while most actual pop music sounds more like a computer should be able to make it, but can’t.

—July 14, Bsky

Ama-pop

My guess is that the Tyla South African crossover experiment has more or less been a failure: my comparison has been to Psy vis a vis K-pop and the US, where “Gangnam Style” was huge but didn’t translate into longevity in the way it did for South Korean artists who followed. Psy was and remained big in South Korea, whereas it seems to me like Tyla is sort of stuck trying to play for non-South-African audiences. I could be wrong about that; I just hardly ever see her in my South Africa playlists.

—May 15

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It’s weird to say that I’m disappointed in Tyla’s career, which seems successful both commercially and aesthetically. But a few years ago I was really hoping that something might bridge South African amapiano to American pop more organically, and that it would hopefully beat global mercenaries like Major Lazer to the punch. I was rooting for Sho Madjozi or Moonchild Sanelly, who have indeed remained fairly big as crossover artists, but neither are near Tyla’s status.

Meanwhile Tyla herself continues to offer a South African-indebted melange of sounds as a backdrop for a more generic R&B personality. She sounds like she’s trying to use the Rihanna playbook, but I don’t think that playbook really works anymore. Case in point, maybe: I’m pretty sure that when “A-POP” literally appears in the “Chanel” video(!!), it’s not referring to America. And yet the outcome of the song is very A-poppy, hoping to find global success by appealing to an American attentional center of gravity that just isn’t as central as it used to be.

—November 6

Analog music recommendations

Sometimes to avoid the daunting blank slate of picking an album to listen to in the evening, I do a music selection exercise where someone names two moods and then I try to find an album that intersects. I used to keep track of these, so I can tell you that “yappy + fulfilled” led to Tierra Whack’s Whack World (played four times in a row); “agreeable + anticipatory edginess” yielded Cornelius’s Fantasma; and the right mood for introducing Magma’s Udu Wudu to the household was “focused + -ish” (“-ish” being its own emotion).

This usually only works as a spark for figuring out what someone else might want to listen to. When I’m alone I usually just want to listen to music in an undifferentiated stream, as much of it new to me as possible. Music doesn’t so much reflect or shape my mood as give me something to focus on instead.

That said, these mixes do frequently seem to reveal how I’m feeling. Which is weird, because usually I’ve put together the only mix I could have made with the songs that made it through my intuitive whittling process—and this process isn’t as beholden to my moods as I once suspected it might be. I’ve had occasion to re-listen to huge batches of songs only to select the exact same ones. So the only mix I could have possibly made with the material I have just so happens to hit the emotional nail on the head. The universe works in mysterious ways.

—April 3

Bb trickz

Bb trickz out-sketchbooked Playboi Carti in an 11-minute album it probably took her two days to make.

—April 14, Bsky

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I was planning a long and, it turned out, quite tedious post on the new Playboi Carti album, which I started out thinking was a full dud and have settled on being somewhere in the B-minus range. The idea was to review each of the album’s 30 songs as if it were the “choice cut” from its own separate album. This was fun for approximately four blurbs and then I gave up, which mirrors almost exactly my experience listening to the album. (Like the album, I might have eventually warmed up as I went along before crashing out completely at the end — but unlike the album, this would have required actual work and not just occasionally rolling my eyes while doing some crosswords.)

So I’m happy to report that as far as 2025 kaleidoscopic sketchbook rap is concerned, Bb trickz’s incredible new album has the whole concept covered in 8 songs and 11 minutes—a big step forward from her last album, which was only 6 songs in 11 minutes. I’m tempted to keep it in my full albums list as the #1 to beat, even though I’d bet it would easily trounce all comers on an EP list.

—April 17

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[Re: “Missionsuicida] Young enough that her slide into edgelording might just be a regrettable phase, but the big splash was indeed big and splashy.

—October 31, Bsky

Budots

“What works or doesn’t work as a budots remix” is outlining something essential about pop music (not sure what) and it’s a great experiment because every song that’s ever been recorded will at some point get a budots remix. Why does “Casual” by Chappell Roan work? Scientists are baffled.

—November 17, Bsky

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What to do about budots, the late-aughts/early-tens Philippines phenomenon that has exploded in a global second act in the ‘20s as a TikTok superspreader (news at eleven)?

It’s hard to tell if a scene like this is in ferment, per se; as best as I can tell the template hasn’t changed much since godfather and reigning superstar of the genre DJ Love established the sproingy Eurocheese template over a decade ago. Three major stars have emerged, and are apparently teaming up as a Three Tenors-type supergroup: Love, DJ Ericnem, and DJ Danz.

The basic template for budots is to take a song, any song, and lay out the chorus melody or musical hook in literal bells and whistles. A sped-up sample of the original will often appear, but sometimes it’s just an instrumental. Budots has a Eurodance feel, but it has a steadier trot of a tempo (140 BPM or a bit less) and a more interchangeable feel. Many remixes are exclusive to TikTok dance challenges.

I am fascinated by which songs work and don’t work in a budots remix. It has something to do with isolating a core element of a song and pasting it with a pie to the kisser as a sort of stress test—the best songs either lean in and eat the pie or are totally humiliated. But anything in between falls flat.

—November 20

Can of worms

People always talk about opening a can of worms like you can’t just close it again and put a rubber band on there. They won’t get out, they’re just worms.

—September 11, Bsky

Clave

I’ve been convinced by Brad Luen that I should buckle down and read Ned Sublette’s Cuba and Its Music, which he (Luen) quotes with this provocative statement: “The clave is not a beat, as we understand beats in North American music, though the clave rhythm can be used as a beat… The clave is a key: a way of coordinating independent parts of a polyrhythmic texture.”

Thinking of clave as an organizing principle that remains constantly felt but sometimes unstated seems on one level like a no-brainer (this was one of the first things I learned from a jazz instructor before he introduced bossanova), but also opens up a lot of interrelated thoughts on how such implied rhythms benefit from being in the air or in the body, as it were, to really “get” them. I’d argue that for all of the considerable (foundational) influence of clave and Afro-Latin rhythm generally on American pop music, most A-pop doesn’t really have an easy air/body naturalness with it.

I abstractly understood clave quickly as a musician, but it took me a long time to feel it, and even when I did (do) it was (is) a bit like the uneasiness of speaking in a foreign language that you’ve only known little bits of before: a little stilted and too effortful. I hear it more naturally than I can play it, and it’s something whose everywhereness in lots of global pop music feels both very important and hard to describe—like trying to describe, well, air, or what it’s like in your body.

—July 17

Doorknob art

I once developed a tongue in cheek theory of “doorknob art” in film school when digital video cameras started getting competitive with film cameras and made everything (including a doorknob) look beautiful with very little underlying craft necessary. Rosalía’s new album isn’t that, but it’s making me think of it.

“Doorknob art” is a huge problem in Cinematic Content Blob land (lots of film and nearly all narrative television), but is less of a live issue in music where production democratization has also supercharged craft in many ways.

—November 7, Bsky

Fairy trap

Hyperpop’s Autotune-maxing aims for adrenaline centers, but like many things adrenaline it can be a fight/flight/freeze proposition—sometimes it can really draw blood, but sometimes it can run away from the emotional core it’s ostensibly trying to get at, or act as a sort of numbing cocoon. I think Alice Glass’s “Catch and Release” falls into cocoon territory (likely more interesting than “flight” but less interesting than “fight”), the pain happening behind glass instead of among the shards.

—August 28

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I’ve found the fairy trap framing an interesting way into related music that’s been turning my head—a more promising path than some formal history of most of the stuff calling itself “hyperpop,”anyway. (I like hyper- as a production style that’s gone global in a lot of different directions.) This is the first Zheani on one of my mixes, I think—she puts herself at the same sort of distance that I said Alice Glass did a few weeks ago, but creates an energy out there that Glass doesn’t—I guess I’d say Glass puts the energy off at a distance, while Zheani puts herself off at a distance but the energy comes through anyway, something like that.

—September 25

Fire

When you start to type “fire,” you’ll get suggested a fir 🌲 and then fire 🔥 so it looks like you’re setting a tree on fire.

—July 11, Bsky

Funk and/or phonk

Phonk is an “I know it when I hear it” genre. I associate it with (often Eastern European) SoundCloud hard electro with percussion like dropping a sack of potatoes on the microphones, coffee bean and can inclusive. Hyperpop chipmunking is often a feature, but also screwed slow-down vocals, and usually extremely blown-out sound. I imagine the production workflow is very similar to Brazilian funk but with no clave rhythm and a much grayer and grodier palette.

—January 23

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Last week my kid looked at my Spotify playlists and said, in a tone of total shock, “You have a Brazil Funk Holdover playlist??” I said “yes,” and that was the end of the conversation. I don’t have any idea why they were so shocked by it. However, the other day they played a little three-note riff on the keyboard that they said sounds like “dad music” and it was basically a Brazilian funk synth line.

—March 13

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Hard to listen to Brazilian funk music in the car because it would be way too on the nose for that to be a soundtrack to a car accident.

—July 28, Bsky

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My minorly informed sense is that there’s been an infusion of sunshine into baile funk this year—more millennial funk throwback beats and cheerful vocals. Maybe the vibes are better in places where you can credibly put coup attempts on trial.

—August 28

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It is possible that my eight-year-old has written more about “Passo Bem Solto,” a song that went to #32 on the global charts and has stayed there for most of the year, than any music publication I follow. The writing in question: “DO YOU KNOW THIS SONG???? it’s good right?”

—September 11

Hypopop

Here’s the best shot I’ve taken so far at describing hypo-pop queen and Titan of A-Pop Addison Rae’s new album:

The Addison Rae album is vaporware (not -wave), but it is doing something that no one else is actually doing well. It’s insular and weirdly impenetrable with lots of flashes of something interesting, like trying to make out little objects hidden in a Jell-O mold. There are a lot of non-pop-aspiring artists who do vapor, but they aren’t simultaneously doing it in a main stage sort of way.

Addison Rae and Tate McRae both have a certain accidentally meta approach to pop—there’s a guilelessness to them; it comes across as flimsy without being insincere. For Tate it’s this extremely affected way of signifying pop celebrity, like an alien impersonating a human. Addison Rae is doing something more interesting to me, which is completely giving herself over to the music—what she reminds me of is Vanessa Paradis working with Lenny Kravitz on “Be My Baby.”

Addison Rae slithers under her songs instead of getting on top, but without this being an indie move where you’re self-consciously hiding yourself. As I described it last year comparing her to Ava Max, she’s “not so much minimalist as the other pole: recessive maximalism.”

—June 12

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When I use the hypo- and hyper- terms I’m thinking about a sense of a song trying to get out from under something that I happen to like—a kind of plain songcraft that it sometimes seems pop artists, particularly in American (and maybe British and some other western Anglophone) pop, find burdensome. Other regions have no problem with it, though, even when absorbing and adapting the techniques and strategies of the hyper/hypo stuff without getting all hung up.

By hypopop I mean the sublimation of the Songful Pop Impulse into waves of sound and feeling with the older structures visible just under the surface, in contrast to the sublimation in hyperpop of the Songful Pop Impulse into an overstimulating deluge of flickers and flashes happening around a song stuck in a glass box. The difference between the two is immersive sensory deprivation (hypo) versus alienating sensory overload (hyper), two routes of tripping the same pop pleasure centers from unexpected, indirect angles. Both follow roundabout routes to endorphin release but usually get there when it works (which it does sometimes).

At some level these fraught (or maybe meaningless) hyphenates have mellowed into production styles and instrumental palettes without any particular attachment to a zeitgeist. This probably improves the styles, as they can be used more casually now and still have benefits: e.g., hyperpop rocketed us out of a sluggish low-BPM ice age; hypopop keeps the kinetic energy of the pop banger but manages to salvage whatever worked about the somnambulant Vibes Era (the vibes, I guess? People tell me vibes are nice; I’ll take their word for it).

And because these hypo/hyper things are much broader production styles now, you can also use little microflourishes—the way an Autotune bend is employed on the outer edges of a vocal, bringing out the prettiness of a melody with subtle contrast, like applying a smoky eye rather than garish face paint.

—October 2

k.

The best new album from 2001 I’ve heard this year is New Problems by k., aka Karla Schickele, bassist and songwriter for NYC indie groups Beekeeper and Ida (she joined the band in 1996). She made two full-length solo albums on Tiger Style and then put out self-released material afterward.

I find her songwriting fascinating because of how prominent her bass lines are in driving the songs; she writes like a bassist even when she’s arranging for piano. (In that way, though only indirectly, she reminds me a little of Tori Amos, who composes like her piano is the rhythm section.) I can’t think of anything else that sounds quite like it musically within its alt-songwriter lane, each song somewhat austere but with a lovely perpetual counterpoint between bass and vocals.

“I Wouldn’t Mind” might give you a sense of k.’s sensibility: two bass lines wobbling around each other like skeptical dogs sniffing it out, the lower frequencies pulsing and guitars bending like tape warp—like if Pavement tried to cover “Portrait of Tracy” but with the guitar line functioning as the overtones. And this is before I’ve even parsed the words, which seem like they’re probably pretty good and I’m sure I’ll get around to some day.

—September 11

K-pop

[Re: NMIXX’s “High Horse”]

After some talking up from Singles Jukebox pals, it still took several listens for the fullness and what I guess I’ll call subtlety of this song to really work on me. What I eventually realized was that the drums sounded massive, and that this might be the first time in a long while that I’ve sensed a K-pop song really punching above its weight in terms of pure production, as opposed to general effect.

—April 3

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The folks I trust on K-pop are eyeing the Korean charts like logistics experts nervously watching Chinese freight after the first tariff announcements. Silver lining to our chart stagnation sitch would be regional regrouping from unexpected places—it would be good for Europe and Japan to step up for the time being, but this will take time; seems clear the longer-term future is in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa, but we aren’t building the world to sustain this reality. (I can’t tell you whether or not this applies equally to pop and trade.)

—May 15

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I’ve gotten more comfortable with my claim that the secret sauce in the turn of A-pop to lite disco was absorbing conventions from K-pop—specifically, constructing songs with jazzier variations on basic pop chord progressions, something that may come out of post-disco but is more directly connected to Japanese city pop. (City pop derives in no small part from American R&B and easy listening/adult contemporary music of the time, as Nate Patrin recently pointed out in sharing Dionne Warwick’s Barry Manilow-produced “Deja Vu.”) And now we’ve come full circle, with A-pop reabsorbed back into K-pop, in the perpetual influence dance the US and South Korea have been doing for years now.

—May 22

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I have now officially seen KPOP DEMON HUNTERS, the Netflix smash that has finally dislodged Alex Warren from the top of the Billboard Global 200 charts. Thought the movie was charming but slight, could have used another few songs. I was more interested in it as A-pop Theory than as a movie.

What I thought was interesting about KPDH is that it seemed like the first fully post-A-pop children’s film: created in English and with American audiences in mind, but with no meaningful referents to American culture aside from an interesting songwriting blend of K-pop and musical theater. That is, it was for American audiences, but not only them, and not pandering to them. I would say the resulting tunes are firmly in the 6/10 category music-wise, with the occasional gentle nudge up to a soft [7], but this is much higher than the average pop song written for a movie about pop music, and the songs seem to be doing their job just fine.

—July 24

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I think I figured out that “Gnarly” by KATSEYE is like what it would have sounded like if Gwen Stefani’s “Wind It Up” had gone to the Pussycat Dolls.

—July 29, Bsky

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It’s odd that in what by all accounts (from people who track this sort of stuff) is a weak year for K-pop, it seems to have broken through completely, not only in KPOP DEMON HUNTERS form but also with the straight-ahead pop banger of the year (“High Horse” by NMIXX) and the genre-mash country music novelty of the year (“Kill Ma Bo$$ by KIIRAS) and plenty of replacement-level songs that make me feel like South Korea is approaching a global center of gravity for pop music that America is downshifting away from (I guess planets have manual transmission). It’s the sort of thing you can only really tell when you stress test it: it’s still got the same force even when doesn’t appear to be exerting its full force.

—July 31

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I think K-pop right now is finally achieving what Japanese anime did through the late 80s and early 90s, establishing itself—especially by getting kids on board—as a dominant cultural form that has to be seen as foundational even by people who aren’t “into it.” My interest in this (being relatively ignorant about Korean pop culture) has been on the US side. When I followed K-pop in 2010-2012, it was a thrilling scene to me but at the time I couldn’t imagine American pop eroding for K-pop to surpass it in America. But the erosion is very clear with my own kids.

—August 11, Bsky

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I’m in the odd dilettante-ish position of only judging regional scenes by their highlights, which means even a weak year could seem huge if a higher number of songs make it through to me. So by that metric, I think 2025 has been a great year for K-pop.

I also think, as I’ve written before, that one sign of a robust pop ecosystem is how well it fares in a “weak” year. K-pop in 2025 is like an inverse A-pop in 2024, where to my ears an uncharacteristically strong year for American pop revealed the depth of its sclerosis. Not only has nothing dislodged K-pop as a global center of gravity for pop music this year, there are crossover successes like KPOP DEMON HUNTERS that have started to actively diminish A-pop in comparison.

—August 21

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The spirit of bubblegum is alive and well in South Korea, which I suppose should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but still sort of surprises me sometimes in comparison to the US, where the spirit of bubblegum is not nearly so alive. There is some bubbly pop here doing reasonably well against a particularly stolid chart’s persistent fungi, but bubbly isn’t always bubblegum.

When I asked the music chat massive which American artist could pull off anything like YOUNG POSSE’s “Freestyle” (my first thought went way back to Kris Kross), the only remotely plausible answer I got was the Beastie Boys in 1998. I also got some flak from strangers about how horrible they thought the song was, which means K-pop is currently the only music that will really get a rise out of the “manufactured crap” grumps. So there’s something to it!

—September 4

Kristina Dawn

I have no idea where this song—which has immediately threatened to siphon my attention away and become my song of the year in the way a tapeworm might become the lead story of your “year in food”—could have possibly come from or how it could have possibly worked, even at a basic physical level. Kristina Dawn, a Filipina singer who put out a good but not particularly avant hypopop album earlier this year, is able to rap on what sounds like the inhalation of her voice, and then let out a jarring tumult of breathy squeaks and grumbles that make Playboi Carti sound like Pat Boone.

—August 21

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Who says rap is dead?? We’ve only been rapping in one lung direction the whole time.

—November 6, Bsky

One-Wave Wonders

I categorize Chubby Checker as a one-wave-wonder, someone who sparked an enormous zeitgeist without really going beyond it, like the proverbial butterfly that causes a tidal wave. A one-wave-wonder has more reach (and often more songs) than a one-hit-wonder, but also a sort of “where are they now” vibe settling in despite a massive early influence on the landscape. “The Twist” isn’t Chubby Checker’s only hit, but the influence of “The Twist” on pop leading up to the Beatles was very apparent when I spent some time digging through 1962 on Discogs. (After a few hours of tossing aside twist after twist, I wished I could mute the term: it was its own genre and a global phenomenon.)

The other one-wave-wonders that came to mind are Alanis Morissette, Avril Lavigne, and Lorde, all of them in a continuum of alt-confessional. The two most recent examples I can think of are Lil Nas X and PinkPantheress. The jury’s still out on the latter two’s careers, but I’d bet a considerable amount of money on both being this sort of figure in pop music (no small achievement).

Anyway, my feeling is that one-wave-wonders should absolutely get into any relevant Hall of Fame. It is, in fact, a rarer feat than just having a successful career. Maybe it should have its own category: the Butterfly Impact Award?

—May 1

Phonetics

Britney Spears’s “Radar” as “Amaraydah” and a grand theory of secular spirituality phonetics.

Words are trap doors but syllables are portals.

Anyway, “Radar” is not about having someone on your radar, it’s about Amaraydah.

Britney’s skill is to switch modes—syllables hit you like sandbags and then a phrase works its magic as meaning on the page. “People are lookin’ at us…”

—July 15, Bsky

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I like the idea of turning the word “onomatopoeia” into onomatopoeia for itself—like how Britney Spears’s “Radar” is not just about being “on my radar” but is also about “Amahraydah,” the experience of syllables representing sounds of their own bespoke impact and import first and containing semantic meaning a distant second. I’m sure there’s lots of annoying theory that goes into this further, in fact I’m pretty sure I’ve tried to read some of it before, but it’s not that deep—sounds are cool.

—October 4

Poptimism

The main idea in a lot of anti-poptimism screeds is a variation on the plot of Ghostbusters. The story goes: at some mythical point in the late 2000s, three interrelated monsters—(1) social media-empowered vulgar fandom swarming, (2) the industry decimation of arts coverage and criticism, and (3) the ballooning of a select few remaining American music celebrities to gargantuan proportions—were being held at bay by an invisible protective layer of skeptical or harsh treatment of pop music in music criticism.

Then a handful of well-intentioned but misguided iconoclast critics served up the Key that opened the Gate—via an “ideology” called “poptimism” that says that you can and should and indeed must write positive things about music that is popular—and thus the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man carnage of the current era came to pass, full of stan armies, zombie cheerleaders squatting in the charred husk of arts journalism, and Taylor Swift stomping around as…the Marshmallow Woman?

What has animated my writing on A-pop is mostly the impact of our celestial realities. The changes have been profound, and not all of them good. But none of them have to do with some imagined crisis that critics unleashed in 2007 when Zuul crossed the Atlantic. Critics were responding to all of the same conditions that the anti-poptimists are now complaining about. But they were taking an optimistic view, not of the monsters, but of the availability of more music from more places—reasoning that this ultimately meant more music by more and different people, and written about by more and different people, too. Both of these, I should add, did in fact really happen, even as many institutions around both groups, the music makers and music writers, crumbled. (Poptimist critics, along with all of the other critics, were a casualty of these changes, not their cause.)

My line is that good music could come from anywhere, from anyone, and for any reason—including bad ones that can be articulated as such. This is also what makes music the most vital and democratic mass art form. (We need more democracy, not less.) But you really have to look for the stuff everywhere, and the looking can be difficult because of its everywhereness. I think this “problem,” music’s accessible infinity, is also a miracle. I think I’m in a long line of critics who would more or less agree with this general perception, without any of us necessarily liking any of the same music as a result.

—September 4

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One thing I’ve said repeatedly in conversations about Ashlee Simpson is that I like her as an alt-rock singer and songwriter (with her usual team, including Kara DioGuardi and John Shanks). The differences between Ashlee and alt-rock are social, not technical.

I always disliked the lip-syncing framing in the Kelefa Sanneh “Rap Against Rockism” essay. Ashlee Simpson was a rock singer who toured and played with a live band. It sucks that she lip-synced on SNL rather than dropping out when she lost her voice. You can talk about industry, marketing, etc., but she made rock music.

It was important to me that DioGuardi/Shanks/Simpson was a real songwriting team. No one in that team ever accomplished what they did on that first album. I championed it because I thought it was better. That is always why I champion music. I don’t care who agrees with me on it.

—September 5, Bsky

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I do fundamentally think of what I do as poptimism in the spirit of early definitional conversations about “poptimism”—as an optimism about there always being good music somewhere. I think now is a much better time to enact “true poptimism” than was true back in 2000. Or rather, the poptimism that critics I like have always done is easier as a democratic proposition.

This is one reason why at some points I think: “well, this is much bigger than pop.” But it’s definitely not bigger than optimism, which is something I’m happy to carry a banner for, am in fact constitutionally incapable of doing otherwise.

—September 11, Bsky

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True poptimism has been tried and only sickos could handle it.

—September 13, Bsky

Populism

I worry about making popularity anything but an occasionally enlightening (mostly for “color”) variable in how I think about music. For me, accounts of popularity comprise one of many signals for my attention, usually not much better than more random ones.

What other people listen to can be extremely useful, but which “people” are really important, and charts don’t always reflect “people” I trust. That’s why it feels about as random as other methods—I don’t have good reasons to trust these people, but that just means they’re another shaky lead that goes into the big bucket. It’s hard to be cumulative-advantage-pilled for going on 20 years and still find popularity inherently interesting except as a phenomenon that is fundamentally unpredictable. I’m equally interested in why things don’t become popular when they’re trying very hard to, and those things are usually more fun to write about.

—September 28, Semipop Life comment

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In the light of day I think I’m probably being too dismissive about charts, especially international ones. Some are more useful than others and, taken collectively, all of them point you to stuff you probably wouldn’t hear otherwise.

The detective work of how a song happened is usually worth doing—my gripe about a lot of chart analysis is that it often ignores the actual shoe leather explanatory work for things merely being inferred from listening to the song. Reporting is often insider industry gossip or entertainment news fluff.

The reason I’m drawn to also-ran/never-was historiography is that it’s very hard to describe the ascent of a hit without the halo of its success affecting the storytelling about why it happened. The big breakthroughs lose their sense of chance and contingency.

—September 29, Bsky

Process

For whatever reason (I have my suspicions!) I am able to sort through a massive amount of random music very quickly to find things.

What I’ve learned is that if you can guarantee some base level of production competence, the rate of finding good music at random is always the same: I am drawn to un-expertly curated music at a rate of about 1%. (Expertly curated music is much higher, but it takes much longer to sort through.)

The worst piles of music to sort through are collective, semi-expertly curated music: the stuff that scenesters, chart-watchers, and hiveminds produce.

The reason isn’t that collective taste is bad (though it rarely matches my own) or that things that are popular are bad (though they often are), it’s that my discovery is almost purely a question of volume to find exceptions. The collectives pre-sort, getting rid of a lot of exceptions.

—August 8, Bsky

Sadness

One reason that women succeeded in the rock takeover is because eventually everyone had to learn how to cry in order to signify in the 21st century; sadness was no longer a color in the emotional palette one could ignore. Rock mostly veers angry rather than sad, but the women singing rock music could cry in anger, or be perceived to be doing so even when describing it this way is little more than thinly veiled sexism. The once disqualifying charge of emotionality over time transmuted into a kind of superpower.

There have always been easier routes to sadness in male-dominated genres like country and rap, not to mention emo. I think it makes sense as an eventual reaction to all of the emotions that grunge and alt self-consciously smothered, taking (for instance) anything resembling sadness and playing it as depression or disaffection, which seem like they should be stand-ins for sadness but really aren’t.

When I wrote the Arcade Fire review in 2004, the basic gist was that I needed a permission structure to indulge in a cathartic sadness, not just anxiety or dread—mostly, as is turned out, for personal reasons. At that point I was only getting my sad from mopers, miserablists, ironists, and assholes. I had not yet interrogated a preadolescence spent listening to Alanis Morissette obsessively without telling anyone about it.

—March 6

Six Seven

“Doot Doot (Six Seven)” is the dark, dank source of a meme based on the police code for Report of Death that has uprooted from its huge Philly drill hit and become a playground chant, one that even my kids have caught on to (“six seven!”). Third grade folk wisdom currently sees it as a reference to the joke “why is six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine,” and I am not in any rush to change this interpretation.

—October 16

Soundworlds

Dijon’s work gets close to without touching a third rail of arty or capital-E experimental pretension that puts me off—it might be why I like Dijon’s productions with other artists more, like on the (pretty good, not great) Justin Bieber album. Left to his own devices, I think the impact for me is less what Ivy Nelson calls a “soundworld,” which implies a lived-in quality, and more what I’d call a “soundinstallation,” a room with a little invisible museum rope keeping you from really getting in there and mucking around despite its claims to participatory engagement.

—September 4

Taste chaos

Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter VI is the strongest album Wayne has put out in many years. This is a deceptively minor distinction—Wayne has never put out very good albums as a rule, while his features and stray verses and mixtapes have never really wavered in quality beyond the untouchability of his c. 2005-2007 imperial phase. He’s had a lot of low points and a lot of high points, and I doubt he’d distinguish much between the two. I think this is because he has exceptionally chaotic taste.

The phenomenon of taste chaos isn’t uncommon among popular and sometimes brilliant artists. Miley Cyrus and Kid Cudi both have glaring cases of taste chaos; Paul McCartney might have some version of it. Wayne’s mostly stems from his craft, though—he’s just monomaniacally, maybe spiritually good at rapping, good in a way that very few people have ever been good. I don’t mean to say this makes him better or the best, per se. The comparison I usually make is to Erroll Garner, who is an all-time great pianist who nonetheless doesn’t really command a top tier in the jazz canon. Garner would turn any old thing, or nothing, into an Erroll Garner original in the spur of the moment, sometimes leaving his own band in the dust as he improvised.

Because Wayne raps with this same sort of genius on tap, it usually means that when people are complaining about his technical choices, they’re really just complaining about his taste. Lil Wayne has never recorded a “mistake”; he’s only recorded utter shit that he intended to sound like that.

Better taste can’t “solve” taste chaos because taste chaos includes better taste, too, it just also includes inexplicably awful taste, and the two tastes are sitting next to each other and could not give less of a fuck. All of the songs on Tha Carter VI love each other, and you can tell that Wayne loves them, too.

—June 26

Tate McRae

Hearing “Greedy” more frequently over the past year was enough to convince me that I’ve been underrating Tate McRae—even if that was her only achievement, it would be an impressive one. But the new album surpassed my expectations. McRae mines the post-Aaliyah (peak-Rihanna?) landscape of R&B and pop in a way that sounds like what would happen if you gave top-shelf material from The-Dream & Tricky Stewart, Ryan Leslie, or second-wind Timbaland to a Disney second-stringer—like if “Umbrella” went to AnnaSophia Robb or something. McRae’s terminal vocal mush (i.e. those affectations referred to variously as marshmallow mouth [by me c. 2018], cursive singing, banany avocady, or Cajun baby) oozes over expensive-sounding beats like a textural slime that you just want to poke at compulsively, half attracted and half repulsed, unable to stop yourself.

—April 10

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Tate McCrae does cursive singing and then applies it to wingdings.

—July 30, Bsky

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I think at this point there is a whole school of mannerisms no longer tied to a specific singer—I am not convinced that cursive singing has a specific source. And I suspect Tate McRae has taken the mannerisms as far as they can go, like how Sleigh Bells could only make their first album once.

—August 1, Bsky

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I think she’s fascinating—the lowest ratio of vocal mannerisms to signified content of any major pop star.

—November 15, Bsky

TV

I don’t think the most pessimistic theorists on television were “right about TV all along” just because we’re seeing negative effects from a completely different medium that works in a completely different way, in an era in which television has the least social impact it’s had in 70 years.

Neil Postman had some bangers but the vast majority of TV protectionists got television fundamentally wrong, and they don’t get to be “right” just because bad things that are resonant with their fears wound up happening for totally different reasons.

—May 12, Bsky

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There’s a thing that happens in some art where diversions from conventions are exciting because you can still “see” the conventions, like a shore in the distance you’ve departed from. Then at some point you’re just at sea; the conventions are a distant memory. If you’re lucky you hit another shore.

Scripted television and jazz are both examples of forms that never really found another shore and are hopelessly at sea. Exciting stuff can happen but it never feels like anything is grounding it.

—June 23

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The thing that keeps music from going the way of television and (I’d argue) film is that there is close to zero cost to producing music—it is more like writing than it is like media production. So, similar to moving from publishing to “just write it,” you go from music industry to “just make it.”

—July 24, Bsky

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Television is a dying art form, and the culprits are hard to pin down and don’t easily reduce to “the internet.” I put most blame on the degradation of television writing and a devil’s bargain to become cinema at the same time movies became more TV-like.

Film’s struggles make sense to me but fumbling TV content is bewildering. It’s just not that expensive in the scheme of things, but its preservation requires (like music) more regional coherence and innovation in a lower resource (and maybe lower reach) crucible.

—October 12

Windowpane

I like the the term “windowpane”: it suggests the sort of music you’d listen to while looking out of a car window wistfully, backlit in a too-long shot in an art film. It provides a visual metaphor of the sort of music I’m taking about, too, separated by a thin but impermeable layer from the mainstream it wants to be a part of, and also sounds like it sort of is a part of. (I’ve also described it as an uncanny valley between indie rock and adult contemporary.)

To be clear (no pun intended?), I like lots of windowpane. It’s a bit like thrash in 1989: everything is at least a [6], much of it is a [7], and occasionally you get an [8] but not much higher.

“Yearncore” does provide a helpful rubric if I’m on the fence: Is there yearning? If yes, then definitely yearncore, hence most likely (but not always) windowpane. If no, not yearncore, and only possibly windowpane. At that point (“if no”) I need to go to the next item on the flow chart: Did it seem like I was going to remember what it sounded like while I was listening, but then when it was over I immediately couldn’t remember anything about it, but not in an unpleasant way, kinda like an aural sorbet? That’s windowpane, baby.

One question I have, though, is whether “genre” is the right categorization for it. I wonder if you might think of it more as a style or a song format, like the distinction between dance songs and ballads. In fact, there’s a sense I have that windowpane has basically replaced typical ballads over time, as slow singer-songwriter material has fused with what would normally be a heartbreak ballad.

—April 17

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As far as I can tell, The Marías are thee breakout windowpane act, currently having a lot of success on global charts with “No One Noticed.” Frank Kogan said of that song, and its appearance on the Rock Streaming Songs chart:

I did notice and have name rec for The Marias on the Lollapalooza performer list but didn’t count them towards my name rec total ‘cos I couldn’t identify the genre. Having listened to the song, I still can’t. New age hyperchirp with post-Eilish touches and a beat? Halfway interesting and not what I was expecting from “rock,” though I can imagine old freeform progressive rock stations in 1969 playing stuff as off-line for “rock” as this, but I couldn’t imagine it being considered central to the genre.

I didn’t make the connection at the time that I was in the process of writing about this very topic (“what genre is this?”), because at the time I could not pick the Marías out of a line-up. But picking things out of a line-up is very un-windowpane.

—May 15

ZZZTaylor Swift

The story of people attempting to leak the Taylor Swift album tonight will undoubtedly be more entertaining than the album. A guy in Michigan got a fluke preorder and put it up for sale on Facebook for $25. A nearby Swiftie bought it but didn’t own a CD player, so she got one from Walmart, then realized you can’t rip files to a computer this way so is just playing them in a Discord voice channel for thousands of people.

—October 1, Bsky

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You might be unsurprised to learn that Taylor Swift has put out another Taylor Swift album.

—October 2, Bsky

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Have come around to the opinion that the last Taylor swift album is the one where you need to care about the project but not the lore and the new one you have to care about the lore but not the project. (I don’t particularly care about either of these things.)

—October 10, Bsky

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I wondered if it is possible that, if transposed into the right key, you might be able to play every Taylor Swift melody on the piano without ever hitting a single black note.

By my count there are 7 songs with unambiguous blue notes in the melody, i.e. you’d want to mark it with an accidental in the sheet music.

7 songs use non-major/minor modes. These you could “play on the white notes,” but this would do a disservice to how complex/interesting they are. Almost all of these songs are from her Folkmore period or other songs with Aaron Dessner.

There are 5 modulations—in “Love Story,” “Paper Rings,” “Getaway Car,” “Betty,” and “Father Figure”—but no chromatic movement into the modulation, just a key change and then the melody restated in a new key.

2 songs are sung in harmonic minor (“Look What You Made Me Do” and “Vigilante Shit”) but she only sings the major seventh as far as I can tell, so it’s just a harmonic minor scale. That still counts as a chromatic note—there’s no way to play harmonic minor on all white notes—but it’s not really using chromatic movement.

That leaves the remaining 3 songs, which have clear chromatic movement:

• “The Way I Loved You” from Fearless is in major, but she sings a minor sixth and then a minor third against a minor 4 chord (iv) leading into the first chorus (but doesn’t repeat this going into subsequent choruses).

• “Gold Rush” is in major but uses a minor seventh against a minor 5 (v) chord (it has the feel of Mixolydian but she also sings the major seventh elsewhere).

• “Life of a Showgirl” has a minor sixth against a minor 4 (iv) chord in the bridge.

—October 16-19

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[listens to literally every Taylor Swift song] “I mean I get why some people like her”

—October 20, Bsky

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Imagining future scholars smugly explaining that there was no real “Taylor Swift”—this was just a conventional stand-in for an ancient form of storytelling sometimes accompanied by music, none of which survives.

“In this song we believe the literal translation is ‘I fed seven bars of chocolate to my dog, whom I wish to marry’—we’ve had to take some liberties to make this coherent to a modern audience.”

—October 21, Bsky