Carve me to pieces

2025 Mix 20: An Other Dave dictionary, the A-pop to K-pop influence exchange, Disney flops, Copenhagen bops, embarrassing raps, and easy-to-listen-to but hard-to-describe cosmo-pop from all over.

Not one of your French girls

This is technically a quick one while he’s away—I am not here right now! So I thought I would create a dictionary-like stub for the various neologisms and/or idiosyncratic borrowed phrases that I have used over the years. In true Other Dave fashion, this “tossed off” intro wound up being extremely long!

A-pop

A way to think about formerly hegemonic American (the “A” in A-pop) pop music as a large regional competitor in a global pop landscape, with other pop scenes seriously vying not only for influence, but actual market competition. For most regions in the world, gaining a hyphen is a sign of emergence on the global stage, but for American pop music, the hyphen may denote a (relative) decline. You can read more about it here.

Ama-pop

Pop music influenced by South African amapiano, but not using the groove-oriented principles of amapiano (which I describe here). Tyla is the biggest ama-pop breakout success story to date, but amapiano elements, particularly the signature log drum sound, have started to travel globally, from Nigerian Afrobeats to other forms of cosmopolitan international pop.

Bort-pop

A coinage by Edward Oculiz in the Singles Jukebox, in reference to Kygo x Whitney Houston’s “Higher Love.” Bort, literally, is a low-quality diamond that is often ground down to create industrial abrasives. Edward O imagined Kygo grinding Whitney Houston’s original performance into an offensive diamond dust, reducing it to babbling syllables in lieu of a chorus. I took this concept and ran with it: bort-pop, to my mind, was something like a last gasp of EDM’s relevance in American pop (I’ll write about this more in a future A-pop post). You can read my original thoughts about bort-pop at my newly imported TinyLetter archival post.

Ferment

This is the word I use for the productive tension in a burgeoning scene that often but not always leads to a competent glut of music that may or may not then travel around the world and get absorbed into other music. A scene in ferment is taking wild swings and often breaking rules or inhabiting profound contradictions, but it is also operating at a baseline of quality that is very hard to do in a sub-par way—there is often excitement even in shameless copying and derivative attempts. Sometimes a competent glut will mellow into landfill, as in “landfill indie,” where the advances become a mere template, with further copies missing the spark that animated innovation. (Sometimes I still like the landfill stuff just fine!)

Hard clave

A way to describe the clave (“five beats in four”) rhythm in Brazilian funk music, which eliminates the sense of swing from traditional clave. The basic clave rhythm divides a bar into three and two, like in Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley” or Strangeloves/Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy”: clap, clap, clap…clap-clap. Brazilian funk music has reduced the beat to a more precise three-beat pattern to establish clave. If you’re clapping the “I Want Candy” rhythm you remove the first and fourth claps: X clap, clap…X-clap. I describe this as a much harder sound than the swing feel you get in other clave-based music, an awkward negotiation with the swingless throb of standard four-on-the-floor dance beat. Brazilian funk points vaguely to the swing and sway of clave and then strangles it.

Middlestream

This is the key argument in my third A-pop installment. I argue that through the aughts and into the ‘10s, mainstream American pop music lowered its commercial ambitions en masse in the pre-streaming era as record industry profits collapsed. At the same time, indie music, which had always operated as an uneasy “sidestream” to mass culture, started to converge with what was left of the mainstream. This convergence process arguably peaked between 2009 (the year of GAPDY, an acronym of the five indie albums predicted to win in various music critic polls that year) and 2011 (the year Spotify launched in the US). After the convergence, what you get is less distinction between what is indie and what is mainstream. I call the compromise a middlestream, which is where lots of semipopular music, including windowpane (see below), thrives.

Modal rap

Modal rap is a style of rapping in which rappers sing a limited set of notes in an improvisatory fashion. They are usually singing four notes (out of five) in the pentatonic minor scale, the scale used for traditional rock guitar solos. I refer to it as minor-key “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (if you have a keyboard handy, play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in C with your right hand but play an A note with your left hand). I lay out the concept in more detail in the fifth installment of my Taylor Swift series, in which I suggest that the same melodic simplicity evident in modal rap also characterizes a lot of pop music, including Swift’s, but for different reasons: Taylor Swift learned to write songs based on what at the time was her very limited melodic range.¹ What I don’t go into in that piece is that lots of pop music has adopted a more modal approach—in the sense of limiting melodic choices and simplifying harmonies—to fit more words into songs, which is also the gist of this interesting study on melodic complexity that provides very useful data leading to generally poor cultural analysis.

Monsterverse

The “monsterverse” describes the massive popularity contest winners in a frictionless global music landscape. In the post-streaming era, anything in the world can become enormously popular for any reason at all, following the principles of cumulative advantage (i.e., popularity of a thing increases at an exponential rate as more people share it, a reaction that can be sparked for unpredictable reasons). This is the same backdrop that makes America’s hyphenation/“demotion” possible, which I discuss in the second installment of the A-pop series. Transnational cumulative advantage leads to both random pop successes—often attributed to TikTok but possible through many other means—and also durable, enormous music celebrities from around the world whose success is (seemingly) mutually exclusive from other stars doing something similar within their genre or region. If Taylor Swift is Godzilla, only a non-Godzilla (likely one not based in the US, or at least not based in her form of singer-songwriter-derived pop) can meaningfully compete with her.

Teenpop / teen confessional

This is my opportunity to share something from my Taylor Swift Fearless proposal, mapping out a brief history of teenpop from c. 1996-2006

I use the term millennial teenpop music to refer to the explosion of youth music following the twin “invasions” of kid-oriented pop in the late 1990s: the “second British invasion” of the Spice Girls and the “Swedish invasion” of producer Max Martin and Cheiron Studios with Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. This music was created at the turn of the new millennium, but also closely tracks the Millennial generation (an “echo boom” encompassing people born between the mid-80s and mid-90s), similarly to how rock music evolved as baby boomers came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The evolution of teenpop’s sounds and artists was timed to the historically large Millennial generation reaching late childhood and puberty: its music “matured” along with its fanbase. Teenpop music took a turn toward earnest confessional songwriting with the rise of Avril Lavigne in 2002, and the production and songwriting norms changed: the sound was now rock-oriented in alternative and adult contemporary styles, with young singers expected to play their own instruments and participate in writing alongside professional songwriters. By the end of 2006, when Taylor Swift’s debut country album was released and the average Millennial (like Swift herself) was a teenager, most early teenpop stars had shifted into more risqué pop styles, while the confessional songwriting wave receded into a niche interest controlled almost exclusively by Disney and its record label Hollywood Records.

I call the roughly five-year phase of millennial teenpop’s evolution between Avril Lavigne and Taylor Swift the era of confessional teenpop. Although Taylor Swift started her career as an aspiring country music star, her aims were always to cultivate the kind of youth audience that had formed strong relationships to the stars of the confessional teenpop era: that is, children and teens who were fans of young women who wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, and detailed the exhilaration and heartbreak of life on the cusp of adult independence.

Windowpane

A popular style of the middlestream, referring specifically to music with pop ambitions that sonically falls in an uncanny valley between indie rock and adult contemporary.² Windowpane encompasses elements of guitar-band indie rock, retro synth-pop, and bedroom shoegaze, not necessarily in combination. It offers hooks less “sticky” than Top 40 pop, but also sounds that are softer and dreamier than what you’ll often find in indie rock or singer-songwriter adult contemporary. The ongoing 2025 windowpane playlist is here.

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Previous 2025 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube

1. FIFTY FIFTY: Pookie
South Korea

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 likely 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.

2. Dove Cameron: French Girls
US

And speaking of A-pop, there may be none more A-pop (A-flop?) than the Disney Star Who Couldn’t, Dove Cameron, who I’m guessing seethes about Olivia Rodrigo’s popularity more than I do. I love Dove Cameron—she comes from an old-school model of holding on to your child audience in baby-steps evolution, like giving your kid little sips of coffee in milk to prime them for a future caffeine dependency, but for Lady Gaga. And hold on to them she has: at my kid’s drum recital, someone played along to her cover of “Genie in a Bottle,” which not only eliminates the actual beat of the song (which greatly offended me but did admittedly make it easier for a kid to play at a drum recital—adorable), she edits the line to “gotta ask me the right way,” which is very Year 2000 Radio Disney Censor coded. Even in her post-Disney solo work there aren’t many flagrant F-bombs to be found, but on this song the central image is the nude scene in Titanic that launched millions of Millennial libidos, and there’s a double entendre about the Arc de Triomph that was so filthy I had to double-check the lyrics.³

3. Satine: Ohoui!
France

One way to avoid my windowpane playlist is to fool me by singing it in French (though this does not always work). Another is to jump up a whole octave in the chorus hook. This one does both!

4. Smerz: Feisty
Norway

Was interested to read a Guardian piece on the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, the school responsible for launching a new crop of sophist-o-pop semi-celebs, including folks from my mixes like Erika de Casier, Clarissa Connelly, and (one half of) Smerz. There may be a discernible Copenhagen sound, recently captured in a Spotify playlist as something between historical documentation and broader genre mapping (i.e. includes many artists not from RMC), Cph+ list.

I tend to find most of this stuff a little too sophisticated, which is to say the tune to pretension ratio is out of balance, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that for many of these artists (like de Casier and Smerz) their best work involves a compromise with their impeccable taste. For de Casier, that meant writing for hire and adapting her skill to K-pop with NewJeans; for Smerz it means trying to make a bad song and ending up with the best thing they’ve ever done. The disaffection level isn’t quite up to (down to?) the Farah (of Italians Do It Better) standard, but going for the anti-gold really works.

5. Blümchen, Eli Preiss: Boomerang
Germany

A hyperpop “update” of Blümchen’s 1996 Europop classic “Boomerang” that is approximately 30000% less hyper than the original. What are we even doing here? (This song is also good, it’s just that hyperpop’s got nothing on hyper pop.)

6. Туча: Комета
Ukraine

One thing that I think we’ve kept from bort-pop while throwing out the considerable amount of bathwater involved is the idea that you can just hum an old song to yourself and it can end up in a new song without having to put a giant wink on it or clear a sample. In this case, mixing “Blue Monday” with “Wearing My Rolex.” (Another benefit of the casual semi-rip-off era: lots of options to replace cancelled originals.)

7. INJI: U WON’T!
Turkey

8. BIG WETT: Top of the Class
Australia

9. Dizzy Fae: My Baby Loves Me
US

A goofball-pop suite. First some cuisinart-pop that has managed to sneak in an unfashionable bit of pop-dubstep EDM of the past decade. What are we supposed to do without all those blorps? Dance to the treble? I laughed exactly once at a specific point in “Top of the Class” I won’t spoil for you. (You’ll know what it is. This does not mean you will laugh.) And more hope for the jerk revival from Dizzy Fae.

10. Somo P: จุ่ม จุ่ม
Thailand

Somo P specializes in very short, very simple Thai novelty rap. She is great.

11. Mocky: Music Will Explain
Canada

Mm, a bit more sophistication with a lounge-dance jam, like when Jamie Lidell started sounding like he wore a suit.

12. the dresscodes: ヴィシャス}
Japan

13. iri: harunone
Japan

Two from Japan, J-rock from previously-featured dresscodes (I wrote: “like a bunch of goth kids covering ‘Walking on Sunshine’ for the school talent show”) and mellow time signature short-circuitry from iri.

14. Brøder, koshi: Natural
France

15. Renzo Zong: Pia Pia
Peru

Everywhere-and-nowhere cosmo-pop from France and Peru that goes down easy.

16. Cyfred, Sayfar, Scotts Maphuma f. BenyRic, Cowbii, & Tango Supreme: Thandi Mali
South Africa

Amapiano (not ama-pop) is back! I find so much of this stuff every week that I rarely find space for it on the mixes. Try c. 225 more here.

17. 54 Ultra: No Tengo Valor
US

18. Steve Parks: The Golden Key [1981]
US

19. Delu Kanam: Mafaro
Croatia

20. Manu Dibango f. King Sunny Ade: Jingo (Luke Una’s Dancing in Outer Space Edit)
Cameroon/Nigeria/UK

Very low on email space, so let’s just say: four retro picks that are figurative (Jersey one-man-maestro 54 Ultra, who has found the right recording space or some miraculous plug-ins to sound authentically old), literal (re-release of a 1981 track from soul artist Steve Parks), figurative again (Afrodisco from…Croatia, sez Bandcamp? Cool!), and…halfway between literal and figurative (a home run Mr. Bongo edit, this time of a Manu Dibango and King Sunny Adé track from 1994), respectively.

21. Busy Twist, Ghetto Kumbé: Candela
UK/Colombia

I will not be cut off by the email limit, dammit! Luckily this song is very hard to describe! Uh…polyrhythms? Spanish?

22. Thanya Iyer: Low Tides
Canada

What if Bird and the Bee, but eight or more years of music conservatory? (Complimentary.)

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That’s it! Until next time, use your extreme deadline pressure to push it to the (word count) limit.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Dove Cameron: French Girls

1. Since then, Taylor Swift has improved her voice to a full additional octave, and uses her new powers to sing the same melodies two octaves apart, which is a very Taylor Swift thing to do. My guess is that she has spent a few million dollars on voice coaching and approximately zero dollars on music lessons for guitar or piano.

2. The phrase itself was coined in conversation with Jacob Sujin Kuppermann and Al Valera, who both deserve credit, as does Hannah Jocelyn for the related genre name “yearncore.”

3. Cameron uses the misquoted phrase “paint me like one of your French girls”—it’s “draw me,” perhaps the most misquoted ‘90s line after Mrs. Doubtfire’s “drive-by fruiting,” which it turns out is actually “run-by fruiting.” (What?? I know, right??!!!)