I am not a resource

2025 Mix 19: Windowpane threevisited, plus a variety of fakers, weirdos, and sellouts from around the world.

The panes of being pure at heart

One question I’ve been thinking about lately is the relationship between the emergence of middlestream music and the decline of radio formats, particularly Adult Contemporary. I think the AC format deserves more serious thought (I have a few books and articles on my to-read list, feel free to recommend some), and I have occasionally entertained putting together a larger project about it.

This week I took a look at the past decade or so of #1s on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart. Some results surprised me: Taylor Swift doesn’t have nearly the traction at the top that I thought she might.¹ My argument has never literally been that Taylor Swift was the biggest act in adult contemporary, merely that she inherited the movement of alt-rock by women into the adult contemporary “space” (which is to say, not only the charts, but corresponding public and commercial spaces), a transition that had already started in the ‘90s and shifted to confessional teenpop stars in the 00’s.

But even given that, her #1 presence is weaker than I expected. In fact, most of her AC hits are dwarfed by other artists, especially as the decade goes on and it’s not unusual to see something stay at the top of the charts for months on end.

There’s an especially funny trend of Miley Cyrus swooping in and crushing Swift on the AC charts. “Love Story” and “You Belong with Me,” both AC hits in 2009, even combined don’t beat the run of “The Climb” that year (though “You Belong with Me” did well into 2010 and remains Swift’s biggest AC hit). “Anti-Hero” goes to #1 on the AC charts for three weeks in 2023, Swift’s first #1 since 2018’s “Delicate,” only to be pulverized by the all-time run of “Flowers,” which is #1 for 34 consecutive weeks, interrupted only by Christmas. Then in 2024, “Flowers” is back on the charts again for another 23 non-consecutive weeks at #1, keeping yet another Taylor Swift streak (“Cruel Summer,” #1 for 7 weeks) comparatively short.

But I think the bigger story of the 2010s is the increasing incoherence of Adult Contemporary as a format as the decade wears on. It appears to be one of many casualties of mass media gatekeeper erosion, with congealed hunks of song-like substance hardening into the #1 position for ages. The grimmest stretch I saw was this one from 2019:

That’s basically eight straight months of “Girls Like You” by Maroon 5. I suspect during this period streaming playlists have more or less supplanted the role of Adult Contemporary, though. And I wonder if the spirit of AC moved to windowpane. Windowpane is on one level a songwriting mode, one that has started to replace ballads, but it might also be something like a format, keeping adult pop hot and youth pop cool at the same time.

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Previous 2025 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube

1. noa: Pink Punch
Japan

I tried to open the mix with a solid stretch of windowpane, but it just didn’t sound right coming out of the gate. Such is the nature of the beast (or the beauty?). So here instead is a dependable hoot from noa, who has followed a series of viral successes straight to cheerleader-stomp, “head shoulders knees and toes” chant inclusive.

2. Marina Satti: Lola
Greece

I’m putting together thoughts for my next A-pop piece now, which after many false starts is, I think, going to be about Eurovision and national variations on global formats. I don’t follow Eurovision closely enough to know how frequently a pop breakthrough in ESC has a genuine impact on a regional scene in a way that feels like it’s at the bleeding edge of global pop music: my sense of Eurovision through most of my lifetime has been of pop on an amusing historical delay.

But last year there were two acts whose success in Eurovision seemed to either spark, or at least get wrapped up in, the kind of regional developments that I’ve been thinking about in my A-pop series. One was Angelina Mango in Italy, whose blending of Latin American pop and Italian eyebrow-waggling seems to be pointing to a productive middle ground: a simultaneously subtler form of Europop and bolder, less vibes-based form of global cosmopolitan pop. Italy is punching above its weight in national representation on my mixes so far this year, and much of it sounds similar to Angelina Mango, though she may be synthesizing rather than leading.

The other ESC success was Marina Satti from Greece, who so far seems to be the biggest contemporary pop breakthrough I’ve ever personally tracked after Eurovision. I get the sense that she’s doing something that doesn’t derive from any one obvious precursor, the emergence of a sui generis pop sensation not beholden to bigger stars’ styles or trends: she casts the shadow. This song is not doing anything to dissuade me.

3. Mei Semones: Animaru
US

Jel tipped me off to what he called the windowpane-ish title track from the debut album of Mei Semones, an NYC artist with Berklee College background who to my ears skirts the pleasing mush of windowpane with crackling production and fussy classical flourishes to ornament bossanova-driven guitar pop. I have fallen completely in love with this album while understanding that it might be hitting a very particular Venn diagram intersection for me personally—listening to someone vocalize along with their own tricky acoustic guitar licks while ruminating on a sour relationship against light Brazilian rhythms is very Davecore.

4. Kat Dahlia: Eléctrika
US

Kat Dahlia has to be the poster child for abandoning the English language. Here she finds her way to an interpolation of “Insane in the Brain” and sounds like she could take over the world, a full decade after making me grimace in her previous attempt at catching a pop zeitgeist.

5. Veronica Maggio: Inte bra i grupp
Sweden

More middlestreams: in 2005, pop had been transformed by turning the Strokes into Swedish pop, and now twenty years later here is a Swedish pop star turning Swedish pop back into the Strokes.²

6. Leanys: Ven Pa’ca
US

Miami artist of Cuban descent with a perfectly serviceable light Spanish-language R&B number that lucked into a spot here as the perfect mix transition to…

7. Chrystel f. Timbaland
US

…Timbaland getting in on the ama-pop craze. My guess is that the Tyla South African crossover experiment has more or less been a failure: my comparison has been to Psy vis a vis K-pop and the US, where “Gangnam Style” was huge but didn’t translate into longevity in the way it did for South Korean artists who followed.³

I can never trust how much a new direction like this is Timbaland genuinely getting a second (or third or fourth) wind and how much is his business savvy in knowing where to put the right rubber stamp.

In the case of his Afropop collection Timbo Progression (billed as “Afrobeats” but much more of a pastiche of older Afropop styles), the producers are all Mosleys, plus business partner Zayd Portillo. There was something that sounded off about the whole thing—my first impulse was to cry A.I., and a quick search reveals that my instincts were probably right, but I haven’t yet found details on that specific album being A.I.-generated. (Would be cool if my ears have a built-in A.I. radar, though.)

The case of Chrystel is more clear cut, though, as detective Lokpo is on the case to credit the real producers: Telz, a Burna Boy producer who recently produced “Bundle by Bundle” and Jereezy, a Dutch producer. So, just a rubber stamp—at least it’s manual.

8. umru, underscores: Poplife
US

9. Disco Shrine: u+me
US

10. Sophie and the Giants: Bad Friends
UK

OK, time for a cheap knockoff palate cleanser. Isabel, who sparked my thoughts about adult contemporary and windowpane this week, also shared umru & underscores as exactly the sort of dumb shit I would probably love (accurate!). Disco Shrine defaces Donna Lewis in a way that made me laugh, even though I decided not to put Alessandra’s defacement of the Tetris theme that also made me laugh on the mix (maybe next week?). Sophie and the Giants’ post-Brat filler sounds like the opposite of its billing: No SOPHIE Whatsoever and the Liliputians.

11. Chloe Qisha: Modern Romance
UK

On to the windowpane! Malaysia-born UK-based artist Chloe Qisha has admirably conjured this [8] from a sea of sixes and sevens, though the massive effort it puts into creating enough steam to fog up a windshield seems like a lot of energy wasted compared to the efficiency of just about any previous era of steam-pop, like, oh, say, “Lose You” by Linda Sundblad, which itself has plenty of juice left over for pathos. (I’d guess that it’s easier to give sexiness pathos than it is to make pathos sexy.)

12. Mina Okabe: Strong
Denmark

More from the windowpane holdover playlist (177 songs and counting, though many likely stretch the definition a bit far), from a Danish-Japanese songwriter who doesn’t get close to an [8] but has no problem clearing the friendly [7] bar for mix inclusion. In the terms of 1989 thrash music—another period I’ve paid some attention to recently that was moving out of ferment but sustaining a competent glut—this would be, I dunno…something off of Leave Scars by Death Angel?

13. ME:I: Ready Go
Japan

The folks I trust on K-pop are eyeing the Korean charts like logistics experts nervously watching Chinese freight after the first tariff announcements, and while I can’t tell you much about either of those topics, I can tell you what my ears are hearing, which is that ME:I are layering a lot more J-pop back into their formerly K-poppish sound this time out.

Silver lining to our chart stagnation sitch would be regional regrouping from unexpected places—it would be good for Europe and Japan to step up for the time being, but this will take time; seems clear the longer-term future is in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa, but we aren’t building the world to sustain this reality. (I can’t tell you whether or not this applies equally to pop and trade.)

14. MiiNa, RIN9, DREAMeR: Song sinh
Vietnam

You know V-pop is in ferment because this song isn’t even that good and it’s still great.

15. Vana: Bite Back
New Zealand

Post-Poppy false metal from New Zealand, the sort of genre where my preferences are the faker the better, like imitation cheese flavoring.

16. Gena Desouza: เข้าใจปะห์
Thailand

Holy cow, is that a jerk revival I’m hearing in this scrappy Thai rap song? I know there’s ostensibly a jerk revival afoot elsewhere in the world, but that stuff would benefit from sounding more like this.

17. Little Homie, De La Rose, Huan62, Kris R: Natural (remix)
Dominican Republic/Puerto Rico

Dominican and Puerto Rican rappers goof around on a track for Roc Nation, which recently signed Dominican rapper Little Homie.

18. Moonshine, DJ Lag: Monkey Effects
Canada/South Africa

I’ve featured the Montreal artist collective Moonshine before—on this one they seem to mostly give things over to pioneering gqom artist DJ Lag.

19. MIRO f. Tarkan: Şımarık (MIRO edit)
Belgium/Turkey

Belgian producer does a South African house take on the 1997 Turkish viral hit, which I should know already from hearing it playing just about anywhere in the world c. 2000, but more likely only know from Claire Denis’s Beau travail.

20. Model/Actriz: Diva
US

Have hovered on Model/Actriz’s pretentious downer electroclash a few times in my playlist hunting and for whatever reason this is the one that finally stuck.

21. Tresca Y Tigra: Bengala
Italy/Colombia

Italian-Colombian artist Sicala and production duo Trampa with some art-reggaeton that is charming, if a bit of a mess.

22. The Marías: Back to Me
US

As far as I can tell, The Marías are thee breakout windowpane act, currently having a lot of success on global charts with “No One Noticed.” Frank Kogan said of that song, and its appearance on the Rock Streaming Songs chart:

I did notice and have name rec for The Marias on the Lollapalooza performer list but didn’t count them towards my name rec total ‘cos I couldn’t identify the genre. Having listened to the song, I still can’t. New age hyperchirp with post-Eilish touches and a beat? Halfway interesting and not what I was expecting from “rock,” though I can imagine old freeform progressive rock stations in 1969 playing stuff as off-line for “rock” as this, but I couldn’t imagine it being considered central to the genre.

I didn’t make the connection at the time that I was in the process of writing about this very topic (“what genre is this?”), because at the time I could not pick the Marías out of a line-up. But picking things out of a line-up is very un-windowpane.

23. Cyndi Thomson: Five More Minutes
US

This song almost made me cry during its final verse, at which point I actually yelled aloud in the car, “fuck no!” It got me thinking about the deceptively complex social commentary in Bo Burnham’s “White Woman’s Instagram,” a song that feels like a series of cheap shots with diminishing returns until its earnest bridge, which makes you (or at least made me) rethink everything happening around it. This song is basically that bridge without the surrounding jokes. No idea how to rate it as a song—I refuse to cry to it—but its making me feel that way at all is something, and I can’t stop listening to it.

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That’s it! Until next time, I wish you all the best as a contemporary adult.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Mei Semones: Animaru

1. In the 2010s she does better on the higher-turnover Adult Pop Airplay charts (created in 1996 as Adult Top 40). The two formats — Adult Pop and Adult Contemporary — have considerable overlap but are distinct charts. In the intro I’m referring specifically to the Adult Contemporary charts, not Adult Pop Airplay.

2. I think that this Strokes/Swedes dichotomy has never been as pronounced in Sweden itself, though—Robyn, e.g., looks very different as a Swedish pop star than she does as a global pop star breaking through as an “underdog.”

3. Psy was and remained big in South Korea, whereas it seems to me like Tyla is sort of stuck trying to play for non-South-African audiences. I could be wrong about that; I just hardly ever see her in my South Africa playlists.