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2026 Mix 30: Getting permission from Taylor Swift and Bob Dylan, ferment in multiple regions yoked together, the future in France, and a song about a penguin
Another week, another shout out to new followers who may have no idea what this is! The short pitch: it’s a weekly music newsletter where I share a bunch of mostly new songs (20) and mostly new words (many more than 20). If you don’t want the words, you can skip to the songs, and vice versa.
My post from two years ago on Taylor Swift and the ‘10s trend I call “modal rap,” a specific iteration of melodic rapping, seems to be making the rounds again. I never really expanded on that piece, which compares melodic rapping to Taylor Swift’s melodies in a way that’s deliberately provocative. I ended up making a mash-up mixtape of Taylor Swift melodies on melodic rap beats, though, for which I provided light liner notes here:
I describe her melody style as “hugging the root tone”: building songs around the rhythm of the words and (I would guess) rarely starting the process from an inspired wordless melody. Her singing, especially post-2020, tends to generate more rhythmic and verbal than melodic interest, which should in theory make it interesting to pair with rap. […]
At the end of the mix, I tie my musings together with older work. First, a live performance of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” where you can hear her get her sea legs when the fiddle comes in. I pair “You Belong With Me” with “Ride Wit Me,” the [Nelly] song that I conspiratorially believe she learned to play when she was twelve. More accurately, I believe she learned how to sing “Ride Wit Me” over the chords to “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne.
I have a more sophisticated take on the genesis of Taylor Swift’s melodic style than just “singing ‘Ride Wit Me’ over the chords to ‘Complicated’.” The early inspo pie chart has big slices for hip-hop, confessional teenpop, country, and emo. And there seems to be some evidence for this from a very early interview with her from 2004 on Good Morning America that was uploaded to YouTube about a year ago. That video confirmed a few things I’ve long suspected about her early musical favorites—for instance, she was a big enough Eminem fan to own not only Eminem albums but D12 albums. (This is also true of Ed Sheeran.)1 That plus Kelly Clarkson, Tim McGraw, Yellowcard, and Simple Plan, with a special symbolic place for Leann Rimes’s Blue, gets you a decent speculative taste roadmap.
I think my melody musings point to something outside of a lot of those maybe-inspirations, though. At the center of my writing is an idea of Taylor Swift’s voice, in a literal and figurative sense, being simultaneously conversational and incantatory. She’s singing to you in some obvious sense, but really she’s talking to you in a way that has a kind of alchemy in it, and I think she has something that basically none of the artists who seem to be working in her style really share. They frequently resort to sprechgesang but they aren’t talking to you.
Part of what distinguishes Taylor Swift is simply her scale. But I also think that among her childhood heroes, she towers less like her formalist muse LeAnn Rimes, an otherworldly singing talent, and is more like an Eminem pied piper figure. Like Eminem, Taylor Swift appears to leave traces of a massive impact everywhere, even though no other artists really get away with being soundalikes—the more you try to copy directly, the further you fall from the promise of her.2 Bob Dylan is like this, too. As other comparably scaled megastars go, I’d argue that the Beatles are not like this; they’re too generous and generative. You can borrow directly from the Beatles all you like and still sound like yourself (and sound great).
Over on Bluesky, Mark Sinker (dubdobdee) noted that one thing that both Bob Dylan and Taylor Swift do is create a kind of permission for others to do something other than merely “sound like me.” (His ideas in full are worth reading in the thread.)
Dubdobdee: “It really [is] about reshaping the entire landscape—obviously this has SOME relationship to what Bob Dylan was doing but it’s more what listeners took from it, as in ‘oh wait apparently I have permission to do THIS now!’ Where ‘this’ isn’t something Dylan was doing but NO ONE ELSE WAS DOING IT EITHER.”
You can hear a “post-Swift landscape” without ever really having to hear another Taylor Swift, per se. In fact, the closest we’ve gotten sonically to “another Taylor Swift” is the fascinating ROSÉ album that I wrote about here, which to me sounded like it was threatening Swift head on, not drawing from her power. It was an attempted industrial coup of its own odd design.
More generally, confessional-minded music in the wake of Taylor Swift’s success gives us a deluge of diaristic words pointing to the inner life of the artist, the deluge itself often coming at the expense of melody and economy. This autobiographical quality was not in and of itself something that really motivated me to like millennial confessional teenpop that preceded Taylor Swift (and which, I argue in my series, she took over completely)—it’s just that this approach happened to create lots of good, affecting music that I took to heart.3 The recessive 2020s version in the shadow of Taylor Swift is verbally denser and melodically weaker, and most of it simply doesn’t sound very good to me.4 But impact’s impact, the rest is taste.
So what does sound good? Well!
1. MOLIY, Yailin la Mas Viral, Theodora: Jetski (Friki)
Ghana-US, Dominican Republic, DRC-France
If you needed a quick guide to the globe’s current ferment you could do worse than getting these three on a track. MOLIY, along with collaborator and spiritual cousin Amaarae, has translated interesting elements of West African music—an ease with Afrobeats, a pinched but sweet soprano—to bigger global audiences. Yailin la Mas Viral is a good representative of various Latin American pop forms in their psych era: blending together, getting weird, pushing boundaries. And bringing up the rear in this particular version of the song (the official music video doesn’t feature her) is France’s current great hope for Afro-Caribbean crossover, Theodora, who is at the center of a whirlwind of amazing pop coming out of France right now.
2. (D)Juno: BB Bringue
Côte D’Ivoire-France
Newer to that whirlwind is (D)Juno, an aspiring French star of Ivorian heritage finding ways to take the emerging template of Caribbean-inflected generalist pop in France and adding in yet another regional element—the trickier rhythms of Ivorian coupé decalé.
I’ve been wondering why France has had so much success with the adaptation and translation of regional rhythmic forms within more mainstream-minded pop music recently, while artists attempting to do this in the US have generally faltered.
I was disappointed, for instance, with the new album from South African pop star Tyla, who named her album A*POP with the hopes of speaking to the genres and heritage of her own regional scene in South Africa, but I think accidentally tipped her hand to the limitations of her own adaptations in evoking the thing that I’ve been calling A-pop. Her songs on the new album sound to me like weak hybrids of US R&B with elements from South African pop and dance music, and mostly remind me that I’d rather be listening to South African music without US distribution.
But what’s happening in France reminds me that this isn’t some principled stance; I just don’t think Tyla specifically has been very successful at doing it. Artists in Japan, Kazakhstan, Poland, Colombia, and the UK have all had some success adapting their own style to amapiano, and I think it’s because you can hear their admiration and excitement in amapiano; they’re aspiring to make something as good as what they’re hearing. Tyla is giving flowers to the music scene she came from, but you can tell she wants to be something else—the next Rihanna, maybe. But there probably isn’t going to be a next Rihanna, or at least not one centered in the US market. Maybe (D)Juno has a shot from France.
3. Dj Quick, Fallon: Jamais
Guadeloupe-France/France
The other artists whose work I’ve featured a lot this year that I count as part of the French whirlwind are LinLin, whose album at least got a politely favorable review in Pitchfork, and Fallon. Fallon is probably the least assuming of the stars in terms of chatter in English-language publications, but she put out an album this year (Winter Princess) that I’ve returned to more than most other albums.
4. Savinnah, Genes1s: On Me
Kenya
I have already used up pretty much all of my email space for the post, as I’m wont to do! So brief descriptions from here on out. Here’s some Kenyan dancehall that seems influenced by Martinician shatta but with more low end in the drums.
5. Theomaa, 1T1: Wouloo
Guadeloupe
Bread ‘n’ butter bouyon! It’s good!
6. INNA: Morenito
Romania
Oh man, no words left for a paragraph or two on the cyclical return of INNA? She put out my second-favorite album of 2019 and one of my favorite songs of the last decade (“Tu Manera”) and here she is re-introducing herself yet again. (“Hi, how are you? What are you doing tonight?”)
7. Mahmut Orhan, Neşe Karaböcek: Yali
Turkey
Turkish electrothrob!
8. Sandy: Yalla Ya Layaly
Egypt
Lovely ballad from an Egyptian singer with a big enough profile for an English-language Wikipedia page that informs me she had a “fake retirement announcement” ten years ago.
9. Idra Kayne: San Star Tou Cinema
Greece
What would probably be a decent midtempo diva number is given a Frankenstein makeover and accompanying lightning bolt jolt with a somewhat incongruous freestyle beat.
10. Sarah Sampp: Me Deixou Leve
Brazil
Will once again give props to my favorite music thread of the year—Jonathan Bogart’s thread of outside-his-comfort-zone songs: “brazilian r&b singer throwing back to 90s baile funk, when it was still airy miami bass pulses instead of blaring hard clave; adding her recent EP/mixtape to my listening queue now”
I’m glad that “hard clave” has taken off as a term with its intended demographic (Jonathan Bogart). May feature his thread in its own essay in the future and share a playlist of it rather than keep swiping from it (at least two more from it coming up next week, though). There’s a lot of good music out there!
11. Emma Rose: Schön sein (ist fun)
Germany
Lite German synthpop that did not graduate very far from the “singing into hairbrush” stage of development (complimentary).
12. Kapeke: London
Uganda
More charming Ugandan rap from a new playlist I’ve been following. I’ve started searching for playlists of specific underrepresented countries after my mapping adventures last week, more on that later. Uganda usually gets a leg up from being the Nyege Nyege Tapes home base, but I still don’t hear enough other stuff outside that label’s orbit.
13. LeoZera, Kaue Mc, CACAU CHUU: Na Rlk do MJ
Brazil
Two funk tracks for the week. The first is a “Smooth Criminal” joyride that sounds like it opted for the soundtrack to the SEGA Genesis game Moonwalker. From a decent album that (spoiler alert) just missed my best of the month rundown next week.
14. DJ Cigano SP, MC Pessoa: Noite Passada
Brazil
Second funk track, pretty melody, prettier fiddle. About as un-psychotic a violin as you can get, really.
15. Honda Remix: مسافة الامان [Safe distance]
Egypt
Is that brega funk from Egypt? From an artist named Honda Remix whose remix of a Honda is apparently an Audi?
16. renie cares, на її оцнові [Na Jiji Otsnovy] f. vrochinskiy: Неcповідимі шляхи [Nespovidymi shlyaxi]
Ukraine
Weirdo rock-slash-rap-slash-noise-slash-wait-what? from Ukraine!
17. mui zyu: パラレリズム (Parallelisme) [Pararerizumu]
Japan-UK
This one’s gorgeous, lightly orchestral dream-pop. Website says an album is forthcoming, at which point maybe I’ll have room to write more.
18. Damaris Bojor: All the Things She Said
Mexico
A cover of the t.A.T.u. classic in a regional Mexican pop style. Would love to hear a version in Spanish.
19. Hakushi Hasegawa, HaHa and the Hairpins: The Owner of Sweetness
Japan
Jelcore spotted! Cute ‘n’ scruffy, with suitably cute ‘n’ scruffy video protagonists. Jel weighs in: “I like it! Elephant 6 J-Pop!” (That’s a rave.)
20. Ichiko Aoba: Sayonara Penguin
Japan
Turns out you can be a critically lauded experimentalist and still do your best work writing a cute 2-minute song about a fuzzy stop-motion penguin.
That’s it! Until next time, choose your words more carefully than I do if you’re worried about email cutoffs.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from INNA: Morenito (“¡Hola! ¿Qué tal?”)
My Taylor Swift series is mostly about the landscape from which Taylor Swift emerged—that is, millennial teenpop, especially its confessional turn exemplified (but not started) by the rise of Avril Lavigne in 2002. I have been writing about that era of music since back when it was actually happening, and have observed in a bittersweet way how a lot of what I liked about the music of that era has evolved or atrophied, including much of its formal construction. The most sustained piece I have about the confessional teenpop era is in my proposal for a book-length essay on Fearless, available here.
The contemporary musician who reminds me the most of Taylor Swift at a formal level is John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, who has very similar melodic tics as Taylor Swift for what I would bet are similar reasons: a primary interest in words with a secondary (but still significant) interest in sounds.
My own tastes in confessional pop largely didn’t survive into the current pop era. I recently participated in a big 2000s pop retrospective where people chose their favorite singles, and my #1 single of the whole decade—“Don’t Save Me” by Marit Larsen—wasn’t picked by a single other participant, despite that song having a huge moment among friends and fellow travelers in 2006.
I appreciated the economy of mid-aughts confessional teenpop artists trying to fit as much information as possible into fewer words conveyed in bigger melodies. (Ashlee Simpson was excellent at this.) Which detail gets chosen matters much more when you simply don’t have that many syllables to choose from.
Economy has basically no place in the post-Swift songwriting environment, where songs are constructed to allow truckloads of words in without worrying about mucking up the hooks, because the hooks themselves are softer—weakened intentionally to give more space. I tend not to like the way it sounds, but I’m not against it in principle, only in practice.
"That's it"?? 😆 That is a ton! Thanks for the food for thought!