Fear is normal
2025 Mix 40: More Taylor Swift (sorry), more Lover's Skit (not sorry), audience size guessing games with Indian pop, and pretty songs from Poland, Lebanon, South Africa, and Spain
Say, did you hear that there’s another Taylor Swift album out? I wasn’t sure if I would do another postscript to my Swift series, but I started writing something and it turned into…well, something. So here it is, the second postscript, about The Life of a Showgirl and “normal” in the rearview.
How You Get the World: Reflections on Taylor Swift, Postscript 2
To fulfill your dreams, you tried to get rid of me
I also put online a sample chapter for a proposed 33 1/3 book series on Fearless. My interest at the time was to go deeper into the central insight of the Taylor Swift series, which is that her career needs to be understood as a consolidation of pop movement toward confessional rock music in millennial teenpop, including a better accounting of that particular era.
I think if I were to revisit the project, I would want to write more about the era and less about Swift specifically. At the time I put the proposal together, there were no major books about Swift (there are now at least three, I think) and it seemed like the central insight was important. But I’d rather write a more impressionistic book about the confessional teenpop era that concludes with Taylor Swift than just write about her specifically.
So look forward to that some day, I guess?
1. Sudan Archives: Come and Find Me
US
I’ve had some trouble getting into the new Sudan Archives material—I think the balance between art and commerce is a little too far on the art side and the project has gone wobbly. But this one eventually insinuated itself with its broken strings and clave that turns into a heartbeat (or vice versa), along with a few other rhythms stitched together in search of a song, which it does find.
2. C’mon Tigre: K//A\K//A
Italy
Cluttered cosmo-pop, synths and soukous and scatting oh my. Notable for a video they promise pinky-swear has not been aided by A.I. but is rather just a close-up of a “ferrofluid on a microscope slide,” which is indeed cool to watch.
3. Lover’s Skit: Misconception
Sweden
Lover’s Skit are moving up in the world, which is to say that in two years they have gone from track 10 on a mix to track 3. They still make highly sync-able iPod indie, but this time they’ve upped their breakbeat game like employing a cybernetic exoskeleton.
4. Bakar: Lonyo!
UK
Post-Drake sadsack vocal weaves its way through a crowd of ecstatic schoolchildren singing the hook and dancing to a house beat loop on the blacktop—that’s what it sounds like, but the video does it, too, in a very charming (if probably technically fudged) oner.
5. Black Petrol: Turn I
Japan
More breakbeats in unexpected places, rocketing some nimble J-rap into the stratosphere, perhaps in tempo more than felt exhilaration.
6. Luz Eluney, Locura Mix: Marginados
Argentina
Fifteen-year-old up-and-comer in the Argentine RKT scene. Good opportunity to link to a Latin American music column I don’t think I’ve shared before, from Remezcla: The Mess by Richard Villegas. Hadn’t seen this particular column before, which features a quote from Simona, the Spanish pop star who is in the running for my AOTY for Astuta (so far I haven’t found an obvious candidate for the top slot).
7. Neha Bhasin, Sameer Uddin: Nach Le
India
The first of a few Indian songs on this week’s playlist. I will admit to being more intrigued than moved by most Bollywood-originating or -adjacent Indian hits—I will leave it to the committed populists among us to say something about global phenom “Saaiyara” (half a billion YouTube streams and counting)—so I can’t really tell you why any one of them works for me when it does. Apparently non-Bollywood Indian pop, which Spotify has been trying to call “I-Pop” in globocorporate “fetch” fashion (how big of a loser would you have to be to try to make your own custom pop hyphenate happen amirite??), is increasingly being referred to as “indie pop,” a trend I noticed last year with Jasleen Royal’s “Assi Sajna.”
8. Willy William: Si Tu T’en Vas
France
French artist who mostly makes me want to listen to Stromae, but I like wanting to listen to Stromae, so this works out.
9. Shashwat Sachdev, Shilpa Rao, Ujwal Gupta: Ghafoor
India
10. Natasha Trikha, Shaye, King Kanja, Shayra Apoorva: Iraade
US/India
11. Neha Kakkar, Tony Kakkar: Tu Pyaasa Hai
India
Three more tracks from the Indian pop playlists—goofy techno throb, shiny neo-disco, and and chipmunked Eurotrance over ‘10s EDM-pop thump, respectively—and I wonder if you can guess which one has 100K views, which has 400K views, and which has 10 million. I couldn’t! EDIT: Aha! I have the wrong video for one of them. It’s 100K, 10 million, and 34 MILLION. Have replaced that video, and the answer might be more obvious now…
12. Noura Mint Seymali: Ch’tib (Naha)
Mauritania
The second opportunity for Noura Mint Seymali to get the Golden Beatology award that she just lost out on a few months ago. Well, this week she easily takes the gold against even stiffer competition.
13. Yasmine Hamdan: I Remember I Forget
Lebanon
That said, this haunting number from Soapkills lead Yasmine Hamdan is probably my personal golden beat of the week. It really makes its doomsday chant stick: “killing is normal, lying is normal, incompetence normal, stealing is normal, manipulation is normal, intimidation is normal, normal normal normal, worry is normal, fear is normal, normal.”
14. Chuwi: Falta Algo
Puerto Rico
A modern take on traditional Puerto Rican bomba from a group that’s gotten a Bad Bunny cosign and a Tiny Desk, and would sound good drifting through a public park or…an NPR studio, I guess?
15. Runia: Chciałabym
Poland
Another beguiling, rickety Polish hyper-something song that keeps its pop instincts while submerged in buzzes and warbles, with the temperature taken down to a simmer without hitting outright hypo.
16. Sister Nancy, Mad Professor: Armageddon
Jamaica
Lovely track from Sister Nancy, a Jamaican legend whom I’m hoping will do well in this month’s People’s Pop Black Pop History Month poll with all-timer “Bam Bam.” This song was first released in 2021, but is on her new album from this year of the same name.
17. Yoo Doo Right, Nolan Potter f. Population II: Golfe du Mexique
Canada
Oh good, a little Francophone Montreal indie to improve my stats in that region. Nicely sludgy in spirit with some more pristine orchestral business elevating it beyond its central riff.
18. Nandipha808, JayMea, Viva f. Morena Deh Keys & Nation Deep: Daily Prayer (Chosen)
South Africa
19. Q Twins, MaWhoo: Imali
South Africa
Two amapiano tracks tipping into what sounds at this point old-fashioned dream piano from South Africa, the first caught my ear with an extended spoken word clip that suggests Tyra Banks leading a sermon, then layered voices with MaWhoo in the spotlight, in and out in a breezy three minutes.
20. LUSILLON: Tu VIP
Spain
21. Samuraï: Dejándolo Pasar
Spain
And to conclude, two pretty midtempo Spanish songs. The first stretches LUSILLON’s vocals like putty in the Autotune filter, but gingerly so that nothing ever seems like it’s going to come apart. Then some straightforward melancholy pop-rock, sounds break-uppy in the liberating alt-confessional fashion—“I wanna forget all this and pretend it’s natural.” Don’t we all.
***
That’s it! Until next time, stop talking about Taylor Swift (again), unless you want to, I’m not your boss.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title translated from Yasmine Hamdan: I Remember I Forget (“الخوف عادي”)
The South Africans won the week! Can a dream piano remix of "The Life of Ophelia" be far behind?
I call shenanigans on the Indian pop quiz! I guessed "Ghafoor" had the most streams and was surprised that the video you linked only had 400k plays, only to find a different "Ghafoor" video with 34M plays! (Got the order of the other two, wrong though.)