I throw all my clothes off the balcony

Mix 24: A summery grab-bag of bubblecountry, piss-take rap, remixes that are classy/clashy and crass-y, soccer shit, dembow, Indian indie, and the strange disappearance and reappearance of MILLI

Fallacious virtuosos

Vacation post! I’ll defer the intro bit to this Kieron Gillen review of Guitar Hero from 2006, which is so good that it coins a phrase for the inherent cognitive dissonance required to take pleasure in gaming, and that’s only the second-most impressive thing going on (the first is describing the mechanics of Guitar Hero as a form of embodied music criticism). I don’t know if I’d come across this piece in the late ‘00s — the concept of the “input fallacy” is familiar so I may have encountered it somewhere — but it still hits.

It also helps me to describe why I never really enjoyed Guitar Hero but loved the Beatles Rock Band game (which Daniel Radosh profiled at the time, another incredible piece): I preferred the studious “game as music criticism” element more than the button-mashing illusion of creating the sound. I was unwilling to suspend disbelief and enjoy the illusion that my actions were in any meaningful way connected to the guitar parts I was playing. It was mostly distracting me from listening to the music.

But Beatles Rock Band was different — it felt more like I was deconstructing Beatles songs element by element, an interactive Song Exploder for their whole songbook.

This is Gillen’s “input fallacy”:

Games trick you into thinking you’re doing something more difficult and interesting than you actually are. In Prince of Persia, you may just be pressing a single button, you’re rewarded with a powerful leap from the lead character. The fallacy is your brain connects your action to the animation – that it was you that did that, thus you should feel the rush of reward. Your actions created that reaction. In a real way, many of the best games are based around this, and games which fail to make you feel as if your on-controller actions connect to your onscreen actions are dismissed out of hand. This is why—say—Dragon’s Lair connected with gamers less than the similar period’s Defender, despite the spectacular difference in the visuals. In Dragon’s Lair, there was no real sense that you were controlling Dirk the Daring. In Defender, your slightest twitch was magnified spectacularly on screen. In one, you watch the hero. In the other, you are the hero.

And the passage about Guitar Hero as embodied criticism:

In its simplified—distilled—echo of real guitar playing, it teaches you a little of why guitarists play certain songs. Before playing Guitar Hero, I had something of an old punk’s puritanical disgust for over-technical guitar players destroying records with their unwanted virtuosity. Now, I can see why the pleasure overwhelms them and they want to do so. The breathless rush after you fall off the end of a guitar solo into a hard, extended note makes you see this… it’s addictive. So, they’re addicted to it and can’t help themselves. I don’t really blame them. It’s a feeling worth chasing.

It also teaches you that the best, the very best guitar-led songs manage to hit these sensations while still serving the song, because there’s more than the act of guitar playing being taught. It’s also engages with your understanding of the song itself. Guitar Hero, in some ways, is an active form of music criticism, opening the songs’ guts to a layperson so you can see how it’s working, like Natural Scientists trying to understand the universe’s design in a daisy.

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Mix 1 // Mix 2 // Mix 3 // Mix 4 // Mix 5 // Mix 6 // Mix 7 // Mix 8 // Mix 9 // Mix 10 // Mix 11 // Mix 12 // Mix 13 // Mix 14 // Mix 15 // Mix 16 // Mix 17 // Mix 18 // Mix 19 // Mix 20 // Mix 21 // Mix 22 // Mix 23

MIX 24: I THROW ALL MY CLOTHES OFF THE BALCONY

1. Mickey Guyton: Make It Me

About as effervescent as I can imagine Mickey Guyton getting, but totally lacking what I called (in reference to Taylor Swift) phrasal earworms, i.e. rhythmic phrases that get stuck in your head but don’t depend on their melody to stick (Guyton should have gone with “that’s that yeehaw-spresso”). But there are earworms aplenty of the old-fashioned melodic variety, including a guitar riff lifted—gently—from “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”

2. Polo Perks <3 <3 <3, FearDorian, AyooLii: Rainbow

The cover image of these guys howling in disbelief at whatever they’re looking at is what I imagine they do every time they put together a beat like this and play it back for the first time. Their weirdly respectful defacement of Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s “Over the Rainbow” is even bolder than what they did to “Funky Town,” though the end result maybe doesn’t ingratiate as totally. Or maybe it will — time will tell.

3. Kabin Crew f. Lisdoonvarna Crew: The Spark

Irish kids in a Cork-based youth media hip-hop workshop series hit a tone of [Elaine Benes voice] unbridled enthusiasm that I don’t hear so undiluted with irony like this very often these days.

4. Tayla Parx, Tkay Maidza: Era

No one on this song seems to be on the same page — Tayla Parx is doing therapy-pop, complete with boundary-setting, homegrown food, and imported sand, while Tkay Maidza boasts emptily and the production sounds like someone trying to make a Timbaland beat through MIDI. A fascinating mess that just holds together.

5. Tinashe, Jane Remover: Nasty (Match My Tweak Remix)

And speaking of fascinating messes — I wasn’t very impressed with the original “Nasty,” though I’m happy for Tinashe’s success with it, but Jane Remover has added some jet fuel (perhaps siphoned from, like, a G6) and taken all of the boring parts out—i.e. most of them—the original song a cloud of dust suspended in the air after the roadrunner just sped off.

6. Big Shaq: Like Wot!

A goofy, extremely inside baseball—er, inside football—track for the Euro 2024 championship that I figured was impenetrable to me because it was full of British slang, but no, the problem is that it consists almost entirely of references to soccer players.

7. The Jammin Kid, Majestic: Set My Heart on Fire (“I’m Alive” vs. And the Band Played On”)

A simple (basic, even) mash-up of the vintage pre-Girl Talk variety that I found touching in light of the recent footage of Celine Dion describing the struggle she’s had with her voice. Heartbreaking stuff.

8. Chimbala: Che Che

9. Fariana, Oro Solido: El Caballito

Two tracks that, to my surprise, are very popular. I can’t predict these things to save my life. First one’s Dominican pop—its subject: heat, and the removal of clothes in recognition thereof—with 13 million views at press time. The second is a warp-speed pop mambo from a Colombian singer with a Dominican merengue band.

10. 茉ひる [Mahiru]: Handle

Another post-NewJeans lay-up, this time from Japan. I’m starting to think everyone makes this look easy because it is, but no — that’s just the nature of a good zeitgeist, the rising tide lifting all boats.

11. MILLI, Flower.far, GALCHANIE: Sorry

MILLI was my favorite find of 2020 — she put out my favorite single of that year, and her other big single was good enough for my top ten. So I was dismayed to see those two tracks, “Sudpang” and “Pakkorn,” have disappeared from streaming platforms. But the rest of her work is still available and she’s releasing new music. This one’s a vaguely Afrobeats-influenced R&B track with singer GALCHANIE.¹

12. Tshegue: Sing My Song

A Paris/Kinshasa collaboration that coincidentally sounded great leading into…

13. KOKOKO!: Motema Mabe

…A new single from a major group from Kinshasa. I may have heard them before, but they recently came to my attention from Brad Luen in his review of the new Ngwaka Son Systeme album.

14. Akriila, Taichu: Popper!

Not sure what to call this subgenre of short, noisy art-reggaeton from Chile. Hyperton?

15. Jasleen Royal: Assi Sajna

Sweet, circular electropop song from Jasleen Royal, who started in indie pop as a teenager before graduating to major Bollywood soundtracks, and is now moving back in a bedroomly direction.

16. Ahsan Pervaiz Mehdi: Badobadi

Pakistani producer provides the atmospherics for a haunting vocal that I assume is a sample but couldn’t identify. He has a lot of examples of a similar remix style on his Instagram but I didn’t see a video of him putting this one together.

17. Bambole Di Pezza: ZenZero

Italian rock outfit tight enough to make you think they might be Latin American.

18. Pale Waves: Perfume

I never really expounded on why I loved Pale Waves’ Who Am I?, my album of the year in 2021 (by a nose, against Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red, which itself is retroactively the best album of 2020 — it came out in December 2020). I saw it as a Borgesian miracle: the successful application of Pierre Menard’s gambit to Avril Lavigne. There’s no such alchemy here, but the referents are Cranberries and Corrs, so likeable enough for auto-inclusion.

19. Violence Gratuite: Olive

French artist of Cameroonian descent on Nyege Nyege imprint Hakuna Kalala. Will need to listen to the whole album when I return.

20. Wizaard: DVD vidéo

There appears to be no subgenre of mid-aughts indie that is not still thriving in Montreal. This reminds me of The Bird and the Bee, back before Greg Kurstin lost his spark (would be melodramtic to say “soul,” though who can tell with these things) and got himself promoted to incompetence, the closest thing mainstream pop production has to a textbook example of the Peter Princple.

21. Pur:Pur: Not in the Mood

Ukrainian twee-pop, goes on exactly as long as it can before starting to grate.

22. Caroline Shaw, Sō Percussion: Sing On

Love Sō Percussion, especially on Buke & Gase’s 2021 album A Record Of. Here their partner is Caroline Shaw, a classical composer who has made a convincing step into art-pop, on this song putting her training to good use on those close harmonies that I rarely hear outside of more experimental or classical-leaning work.

23. Sun: Daydream

A project from a member of the Notwist. Instrumental post-rock in orientation, but a little less hazy and portentously crescendoed (you can still hear some Notwist in there), a nice closer.

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That’s it! Until next time, don’t let your recognition of the input fallacy kill your vibe.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from Chimbala’s “Che Che” (“to' mi ropa la tiro por el balcón”)

1. My strict rule against stylized all-caps is clearly wobbling; it felt weird to de-capitalize RAYE last week and even weirder to keep de-capitalizing MILLI. It may be time to revisit my style guide.