Hey, Pookie

2025 Mix 9: Mid-aughts confessional lives, democracy dies(?), indie from all over stays about the same, Scandinavians get goofy, and schmaltz works its one-in-a-hundred magic

Spring Break-in-ers

Today we take yet another trip down memory lane to c. 2005-7 in the form of several rockin’ confessional tracks that would have sounded more or less at home in that era. This has led me to think about my first (and last) printed comment in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll, back in 2005. I wrote:

I’ve been thinking about how this comment has fared twenty years later. My sense is that what I was hearing in the confessional turn of teenpop music eventually took over pop music and pop discourse proper (along with a maybe related pincer movement of women routing men in the indie scene, too).

It’s de rigueur to call rock dead, but any accounting for what’s happened to rock music in the last twenty to thirty years needs to account for what happened to women in rock. Women more or less supplanted men in making the rock music that mattered — even though a lot of people at the time didn’t consider stuff like my Lindsay/Ashlee/Skye trifecta rock music at all— after the end of the grunge boom. Olivia Rodrigo has been charting a kind of alternate history of this period, alt-rock minus men, swapping in the Breeders for Nirvana, canonizing Alanis Morissette, and basically yada-yada-ing over the aughts so as not to draw too many direct comparisons to her closest antecedents in teenpop.¹

I’ve entertained the idea that 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 (a subject for a future essay, I think—I’m reading a book about it as slowly as all my other books). 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.²

The other thing that women taking over rock music did was give rock a means of coming across as hard and soft simultaneously without losing any of its power (again, a subjective assessment that I was making in the mid-aughts but everyone else seems to be making now). It’s the way rock music stays vital during, or after, its seeming “death”—not calcified into the modern rock charts or withering away in an indie scene, but diversified on the pop charts and adult contemporary charts. The lineage seems fairly simple: the lodestars go Alanis — Avril — Taylor. But there are constellations around each of them, and those constellations tell a story of rock in and around the 21st century that I’m pretty sure no one has written a book about yet, but probably should.

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Previous 2025 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube

1. Rose Gray: Hackney Wick
UK

This looks like the Big British Dance-Pop Breakthrough of the year to date, which is a good reminder that I tend to respect more than like most BBD-PB’s. Accordingly, I’ve picked a deep cut, a sweet and funny stream-of-consciousness club culture monologue that gives me an opportunity to link to the very much not sweet (and also very NSFW) montage from Rules of Attraction.

2. Eva Calyza: Blanca Serpiente
Spain

Dark flamenco-laced alt-pop, a Katherine St. Asaph recommendation. Golden Beatology pick of the week.

3. Grimes: idgaf
US

Look, I don’t want to share a Grimes song any more than you want to listen to one, but I can’t help but dig this portentous demo. It seems to have been created about a year after she met the guy whose slash-and-burn antics have already destroyed the lives and livelihoods of several of my friends, and maybe left Grimes worse off than that. “You know, not everything is fair in love and war / I didn’t know that before / Everyone plays to win / But what for?” Dunno. Illegally procured government contracts?

4. Horsegirl: Switch Over
US

Enough of that unpleasantness — let’s start a very long stretch of (other) Women in Rock. First up is Horsegirl (US), who have probably pulled ahead of the other horsegiirL (DE) with a good album that is quite a bit longer than the 13-minute EP I called good a few weeks ago but haven’t thought about again since. My attention for albums has atrophied considerably, but I can still make it to the 30-minute mark!

5. Japanese Breakfast: Mega Circuit
US

Another group I usually think of as an album band — no idea what this alt-country means for their next one, but I like it. Apparently her memoir is a must-read.

6. Ezra Furman: Grand Mal
US

Not really familiar with Furman’s work, but have seen her name here and there. This one’s great, sumptuous orchestral indie, a Destroyer-like melody, and one strong line (“the shiver that severs the heart from the brain”) plus one strong image (“a wedding ring rolling across a black table on our wedding day”). Are words, like, back??

7. Evie: California King
US

…Nah, words aren’t back. This is a hoot, though, a song chastising someone for leaving Tennessee to go live in L.A. that sounds suspiciously like the person who wrote it left Tennessee to go live in L.A.

8. Chloe Slater: Sucker
UK

Mid-aughts confessional sequence, yes! This is what you might call a “back on my bullshit block,” apologies in advance to any of you not with me on this journey. First up, a British artist who I heard as having a northern accent (she’s from Manchester), which made me wonder if her line “you like my southern accent” is a comment on American ignorance. Didn’t manage to figure that one out in time, but I do like how she marries the British sprechgesang scourge with a chorus that easily could have been in the post-“Since U Been Gone” wave.

9. Freya Skye: Can’t Fake It
UK

Here’s a British Junior Eurovision competitor and actress on Hollywood Records whom I would have assumed was American until looking her up from the credits of the Disney Channel Original Movie Zombies 4: Dawn of the Vampires. This is what I wish Olivia Rodrigo actually sounded like. It would make O-Rod an order of magnitude worse, don’t get me wrong, but the heart wants what the heart wants.

10. Corook: THEY!
US

The viral star of the “If I Were a Fish” song makes coming out as nonbinary as easy as A-B-C or 1-2-3, which is to say Sesame Street-esque, but I don’t mean to make how cloying I find it seem like a mark against it.

Instead I’ll just repost an old Chappell Roan review of mine that I thought mapped out my understanding of the changing generational landscape. (Click through if you want to read the part about She-Ra—spoilers, though.)

My kids are thoughtful about this kind of stuff, but they aren’t overthinking it. Partly this comes from us, but a lot of it doesn’t: the capital-C culture really is better for their brains and bodies and souls than it used to be. They insist that anthropomorphic animal toys should really be referred to as they/them (because how would you know?); they are perplexed by the narrow-mindedness of the few kids who still insist, in sepia tones of unenlightened boorishness, that boys shouldn’t wear nail polish; I overhear fourth graders playing baseball and responding to someone taunting “you throw like a girl” with “what does gender have to do with anything?” I see the relative ease with which they navigate all of it and think, is it really possible that my ’90s childhood was more like my parents’ ’50s childhood than it was like the present? Which is all to say that I bet my kids, like me, would listen to this Chappell Roan song [“Red Wine Supernova”] three times without giving a second thought as to what it’s “about.” But for them it wouldn’t just be because they were a little bored and didn’t pay attention to any of the words. We’d all agree it was a [6], but from worlds apart.

The line that stands out is “…You know how I’m gay? Well, now I go by ‘they’!” — just a casual ice-breaker that feels unfathomably far from the possibilities of my own upbringing, but also feels equidistant from the possibilities of where I hope my kids will end up.

11. alekkksa: щіт пост
Ukraine

Last confessional block song (or is it?). Ukrainian.

12. SAILORR f. Summer Walker: Pookie’s Requiem
US

Rihanna has continuing zeitgeist tendrils through all sorts of music about a decade past effective retirement — I think a lot about the way she relocated emotional expression from the diaphragm to the nasal cavity. But surprisingly few R&B singers have really followed her darkness in the same way, something I identified as the “Rihanna Death Drive” even before she put out Rated R and “Fire Bomb” (a literal death drive!). I was just basing this on “Unfaithful,” which floored me with its melodrama played passive-aggressive, an undercurrent of violence from someone who credibly threatens to murder you because she cheated. So I really enjoyed the way the venom drips out on this one: “bet she meets your mom, bet y’all get a dog and name it after me—hey, Pookie!” Someone needs to keep an eye on that dog.

13. Khadija Al Hanafi: SOS
Tunisia

OK, beats. First a Tunisian artist with some avant-footwork that could almost scan as a Príncipe act if it threw its weight (and/or stumbled) around a little more.

14. Debbie Sings: Like a Comet
Denmark

Over to Denmark for something that seems avant but hews closely to the Europop roots it’s presumably smartening up a shade — sophisticosplay? Sophistoriography?

15. Lia Larsson: Pling Plong
Sweden

Then to Sweden, to dumb it allllllll the way back down with Lia Larsson, whom I often want to include when I come across her songs (I’ve featured her once before). But I usually find her work either too annoying or not annoying enough. This is a Goldilocks irritant.

16. bambi f. Deemz: 101 Dalmatyńczyków
Poland

Can’t forget Poland in this suite, with a standout track from bambi’s TRAP OR DIE, the first full Polish hyper-rap album I’ve come across after a few years of groping around in the dark making sense of Poland’s pop-rap scene. Most of the critics I follow on Poland are too tasteful for this stuff, not to say high-falutin’ per se (a lot of the recs I get from the more jazz/experimental scene in Poland are very good and very weird), but this is what I am in the market for.

17. 7co: 0.0000%
Japan

One from Japan, heard the word “hentai” (pervert) repeated, assumed it was lobbed at an ex, and was curious to know what the lyrics mean, but the English captions don’t really give me a sense of the nuance. I feel bad phoning a friend every time I get monolingually stumped, so I’ll just enjoy it on sonics.

18. Cloonee, Young M.A, InntRaw: Stephanie (HNTR Remix)
Australia/US/Brazil

Cloonee, of “Sippin Yak” fame last year, reworked Young M.A’s “OOOUUU” eight years later to turn its most indelible moment (“you call her Stephanie?”) into a dance track. This amped-up and dumbed-down extended remix gets to the heart of the matter, no build up or modulation of any kind necessary.

19. Doowap, Enny Man Da Guitar f. OK.Mulaa, Don Tella: Shay’sthombe
South Africa

South Africa continues to test my slowly expanding knowledge of its various scenes, as this is listed as gqom and amapiano and sounds to me not quite like either. Would guess it’s more comfortably classified as bacardi (or “barcadi,” as I still see it sometimes, including how the genre gets listed in the genre machine). Anyway, it’s a good time, and Enny Man Da Guitar is a subject for more research.

20. Myra: La fête
France

Time to hit the brakes with a sad, lovely, vaguely Latin bit of French pop from Parisian artist Myra.

21. Nyron Higor f. Alici, Bruno Berle: São Só Palavras
Brazil

More mood music for the wind-down, a song sketch from a generally pretty if somewhat floaty album from a Brazilian artist.

22. Mora Piazzolla, Pipi Piazzolla, Mariano Sivori f. Cirilo Fernandez: No Hay Nadie
Argentina

Less floaty pop from Argentina, which isn’t to say it doesn’t float at all, but to paraphrase a great, it at least has a back beat so you can’t lose it entirely.

23. Q Lazzarus: I See Your Eyes [c. 1990]
US

“Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus started playing in my house like a ghost in the kitchen and once again I was hit by the same uncanny sense that I’d heard the thing before but couldn’t place it, the exact reaction I have every time a few years pass between hearing it. There’s nothing else like it on the admirable, if predictably hit-and-miss, posthumous collection — put together as a soundtrack album of sorts to a recent documentary. But I think this is still pretty good, like an XTC song trapped under smoked glass.

24. Nabila Ellisa: Menaruh Hati Tanpa Hati-Hati
Indonesia

End of mix, roll credits — specifically the credits from Indonesian film Tabbayun, which supplies me the sort of cinematic schmaltz that reliably moves me maybe one in a hundred times according to no discernible pattern I can make out. Sometimes a song is just nice, you know?

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That’s it! Until next time, try to enjoy something that’s just…nice.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from SAILORR f. Summer Walker: “Pookie’s Requiem”

1. Contrary to popular critical opinion I’ve seen, Rodrigo should not have fronted the original Nirvana members at the SNL reunion. Post Malone was perfect for that role (derogatory).

2. 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.