Emilio and I have a cult
2023 Mix 5 [Originally published Feb 15, 2023]
Each week I skim through about 2,000 songs from Spotify's company-curated New Music Friday playlists. Whenever I find 80 minutes worth of music I like, I make a CD-length mix and write a newsletter about it.
A helpful reader (LokpoLokpo) provides some context for the last mix's song by South African artist Maredi:
"That’s the unmistakable sound of Limpopo province! don’t know if you’re familiar with Makhadzi, who’s a huge star, but still somewhat in the SA periphery, much like rural Limpopo itself."
LokpoLokpo went on to make the connection between Maredi and Shangaan electro, and further to Sho Madjozi's roots in Shangaan electro on her first album (she opens last week's mix). I can now say more confidently that Maredi is a fast and cheap-sounding version of Shangaan electro, a genre I might have been dimly aware of ten years ago via Pitchfork or Frank Kogan, but never investigated. That puts Maredi in the long tail of a formerly trendy genre, where weird and interesting things sometimes happen -- like when country trio Band Perry made the bold decision to put out a vintage 2008-era sad Autotune rap in 2019.
How many long-tail post-trend oddities will you find in this week's crop? Read on to find out!
Here's the link to the full playlist on Spotify.
MIX 4: EMILIO AND I HAVE A CULT
1. Kes x Michaël Brun x Busy Signal: HoneyComb
Dancehall superstar Busy Signal stays, er, busy on what I believe is his ten millionth song in the past three years. I think I've had at least one on every year-end mix for a few years now. The last one was "Bring Rum" on my 2021 playlist. 2022's "Doh Dweet" would have made it on the playlist I eventually made if I'd heard it in time.
Tom Ewing just profiled seven of Busy Signal's songs in a music challenge on Twitter. There are many others.
Kes and Michaël Brun are new to me—soca group from Trinidad & Tobago and DJ from Haiti, respectively, and seem to bring an artier sound to the table.
2. Django Django f. Self Esteem: Complete Me
Hannah Jocelyn just started a playlist of songs that artists put out when they want to prove that they could make _____ if they wanted to (e.g. Blur sarcastically making a Pixies-type song with "Song 2"), a theme that I am very into.
This is absolutely one of those songs, but Django Django, normally a not-bad dreamy indie band, are comically unequipped to handle house anthem duties here. Everything is just...off? The whole song is weirdly tentative, right up to the prim little piano solo at the end that tiptoes around like it's afraid it'll accidentally let out a fart.
Self Esteem, last seen collecting carp pellets on Taskmaster for the New Year's special, overwrites and under-sings in a way that complements the production. My favorite line: "Trust that you know all that is right for you / Your gut does that for a reason." Not trusting her gut there, instead the simple cliché is needlessly splayed out so it doesn't scan, and on top of all that she pronounces "your gut" like "yogurt," evoking (maybe appropriately?) an Activia commercial. Which, I'm going to be honest with you, it totally should be!
Yogurt house!
3. Sinego: Mala
Colombian singer/producer sounds ready for a Fast and Furious soundtrack if the gang winds up anywhere in the vicinity of a Latin American country. (Marcelo D2 f. Claudia's "Desabafo," from Fast Five, is no longer on Spotify in the US; you can still find it on YouTube, along with the instrumental version, which I prefer to the one with rappers on it.) Reminds me a little of the fun EDM remix album of classic Fania Records salsa, Calentura: Global Bassment.
4. María Daniela Y Su Sonido Lasser: Mosca Muerta (2022)
Remember how last week I said I might put the new María Daniela song from last November on the mix? I did!
5. Bad Gyal: Chulo
A lot of finds from Spain so far this year. Curious about the relationship between Spain and Latin American countries in terms of how reggaeton is received...subject for future research.
6. Pabllo Vittar f. Anitta: Balinha de Coração
I've heard a few songs from Pabllo Vittar, a prominent Brazilian drag queen who brings a mainstream pop gloss to a grittier funk sound—fitting that Vittar features Anitta, who as far as I know is the Brazilian artist with the highest profile outside of Brazil who still has a connection to funk carioca. But I'm not sure how well the Brazilian funk of the '20s handles the integration of sounds and conventions that I associate more with the American pop environment after hyperpop than with other funk music.
I heard a song from Portugal this week that sounded like an attempt to take funk and make it work in a new context. That song, "Solteira," is worth writing about: everything about it, from the stylization of the artists' names (credited to MC DY and <sighs> MC Bin Laden), to the mixing, to the production techniques, betrays a cluelessness that's easy to hear but hard to describe. (The only reason I knew it was from Portugal was because its wanness made me curious enough to look up what the hell happened. I rarely research the losers!)
I think "Balinha de Coração" gets much more juice from its chosen signifiers—it's not doing a pale imitation—but not nearly as much juice as I get listening to almost any other random funk artist I come across.
I would guess there's a kind of preservative value in this sort of work, translating from the promise and ferment of one domain to the accepted conventions of a different one even if you dilute the original a little bit—the definition of crossover appeal, maybe? Though it makes me wonder whether things need to do so much "crossing" in the streaming era, when music outside one's culture or language are still readily available with minor effort.
I don't know that there's anything wrong with dilution, per se, except in the cases where the dilution makes the result feel dead in the water (as in "Solteira"). Sometimes diluted is better in the long run; when you dilute something, it lasts longer.
7. Barto Katt & Koza: EY, AI
Case in point re: dilution: this Polish track shows how quickly hyperpop burned out as a zeitgeist while still managing to adapt and assimilate into global pop in a way that seems to have refreshed lots of music in lots of places. "EY, AI" is hardly world-beating stuff, but it sounds good and holds my interest, in a mode of music-making that would have been fairly fringe only a few years ago.
Judging from the many (many) mediocre rap songs I skip each week, there are huge swathes of the world that are still struggling to make hip-hop work at even a basic level, flogging styles and flows that have sounded dated in American rap for decades. Modal rap-style singing integrated faster, but it's not globally ubiquitous.
Hyperpop ripped through global pop with breakneck virulence, giving license to vocals and sounds and tempos that would have, in fairly recent history, been a tough sell almost anywhere but now sound good almost everywhere.
8. Cee ElAssad & Bongi Mvuyana: Njalo
Silky Afrobeat(ish) song from South Africa that uses a little under half of the "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" riff to a little under half the effect in a little under half the runtime. Not bad!
9. Marwan Moussa: حدوتة الماني [7ADOTA ALMANY] (2022)
Another Egyptian song from 2022 tossed onto a North African new music playlist. Moussa seems pretty consistently good and has more recent stuff, but I like this beat better, swirls a couple of Arabic flute figures together while the drums clomp along.
10. Anh Phan & Larria.: Xin Lȭi
Goofy Vietnamese rap, a lot of fun. Really need to do a deeper dive into V-pop. YouTube comment confirms the song is as carefree and good-natured as it sounds:
11. azulaqueen: Revenge
I see that azulaqueen is Ukrainian and I hear they dig the Prodigy, but beyond that I've got nothing.
12. Flow Jones, Jr., Blxckie, & Maglera Doe Boy: Pramis, Swuh
Flow Jones, Jr. punctuates every line with a nervous little laugh tic—hunh!—that makes him sound like Bernie Mac. If I hadn't noticed the verse not in English I would have assumed this group was American, but FJJ's from Johannesburg.
13. Goblyns: Big Red
Polite psych-rock instrumental palate cleanser. No idea where this one came from (no idea which playlist, I mean—bio sez it's from Berlin).
14. Sudno: Перечекаю молодiсть
I initially swapped the band name and song when looking for the YouTube link, which led me instead to Molchat Doma, a totally different band whose excellent song "Sudno" went viral on TikTok and was written up in the New York Times:
"In one [Tik Tok video], the music plays while a woman dyes her armpit hair blue; in another, someone tries on dozens of outfits. One short video, in which a dog wearing sunglasses runs around to the frenzied tune, has been liked more than 1.4 million times.
Most of the app’s users seem unconcerned — or unaware — that the song’s lyrics, in Russian, are about a poet contemplating suicide: 'Living is hard and uncomfortable, but it’s comfortable to die' goes one line."
So to clarify: the band that plays "Sudno" is a Belarusian post-punk group that sounds like the Cure. They should not be confused with the band named Sudno, a Russian post-punk group that sounds like the Cure.
15. balloon: 花に風 [Hananikaze]
Spotify's Japan-centric playlists offer up a few vocaloid tracks each week. I've heard of but never followed vocaloid—it's a technique where producers use voice generator software (a bit like text-to-speech) to create a "singer," usually chirpy-voiced, and program each syllable as a note in a score, allowing the vocal to speed through difficult melody passages or hit extremely high notes that are easy to program on a keyboard or computer but difficult (or impossible) to actually sing.
Vocaloid music rarely does it for me, not because I'm against chirpy computer-generated voices you orchestrate on a keyboard (far from it!). It's that a lot of vocaloid melodies are insipid: when a vocaloid singer sings a simple melody hook, it necessarily has none of the personality or grain-of-the-voice timbre or texture that might elevate it.
By contrast, if you use the tool to play something virtuosic, it can approximate something like jazz scatting, a distinct vocal form of its own. (There are other forms in Japan where human singers do this against computer-generated jazz-pop; my favorite is YMCK's chiptune album Family Music.)
So in some ways a good vocaloid song can feel like listening to, say, Lambert Hendricks and Ross singing along to "Airegin." Annie Ross could even hit some of those ear-piercing high tones that the vocaloid singers are programmed to reach—and she did it manually!
16. Ali Farka Touré: Safari
Despite claiming to have listened to a lot of Ali Farka Touré albums over the years, I've never bought one or, apparently, listened attentively enough to tell you anything about any of them? Sounds great, not sure what my problem is.
17. Dur-Dur Band f. Xabiib Sharaabi: Duurka
Figured this was an archival rerelease of a Somali funk band from the 80s, but this is a new recording—could have fooled me (and in fact did). Awesome Tapes from Africa put out a snazzy rerelease of some of their 80s work a few years ago. More info on the new recording at Forced Exposure.
18. Pedro Ricardo: Ode ao Gato
Straight down the middle 5/4 Portuguese jazz pop. Bass sounds like a cow.
19. Marcelina Szlachcic: Z Tobą
Polish former child reality competition contestant turned R&B singer who is self-professedly "no longer a 14-year-old child in her work, but is aware of her abilities and goals."
I really want to compare Marcelina Szlachcic to Rihanna, but on third or fourth listen I've decided she doesn't sound that much like Rihanna. But I did think of Rihanna when I first heard the song, which gives me the flimsy excuse to share my recent bright idea:
Rihanna should make an amapiano album.
20. Blaqnick & MasterBlaq x Major League Djz: La Maluka
Nice instrumental amapiano track you got there. Hey you know who would sound great singing on it????
21. Daan: 16 Men
Seems like this aging Belgian rocker is doing a Johnny Cash & Rick Rubin legacy move and I am surprised this trick still works on me as well as it does. Aging! It Rocks! ...Somberly!
22. 容祖兒: 春生 [Joey Yung: Spring]
Really can't make heads or tails of Chinese pop from Spotify (yet), much of which is lushly orchestrated and sweetly sung like this song from Cantopop star Joey Yung.
23. Whitney Houston: Testimony
I've written about getting blindsided by emotion while listening to Whitney Houston at least three times, which must be a record for a single artist, so here comes a fourth—her upcoming posthumous gospel collection includes this very early recording of her at seventeen. She's incandescent. It makes me very sad. Thomas Inskeep linked to another gospel track on Twitter, her duet with Bebe and Cece Winans on "Hold Up the Light" in 1989.
24. Post-dreifing f. Ísadóra: bergmál
Now what are the odds that I'd land on this song, which I just thought sounded nice, and it would turn out not to be a field recording of traditional Icelandic folk musicians as I assumed, but rather Björk's friggin' daughter singing with a Reykjavík art collective?
Nepö bjaby! I swear I did not know this until just now! I've been listening to it for two weeks!
OK thats it. Until next time: stay kind, or at least kinda.
The Other Dave Moore
Title translated from Maria Daniela y Su Sonido Lasser's "Mosca Muerta": "Emilio y yo tenemos una secta"