I'm not jealous, Rodrigo
Mix 34: Cashmere voices, Rodrigo envy, crooners, weirdos, noise-makers, many echoes of hyperpop around the world, and Al Green covering Lou Reed.
Each week I skim through about 2,000 songs mostly from Spotify's company-curated New Music Friday playlists. Whenever I find 80 minutes worth of music I like, I make a CD-length mix and write a newsletter about it.
Some truly excruciating Olivia Rodrigo discourse wending its way through my social media feeds. I find Olivia Rodrigo…fine. I have mapped out the nature of my tastes in confessional rock music thusly:
Olivia Rodrigo is on the right-hand side of this inscrutable chart, clumped together with “every Avril clone post-2008.” (For reference, Taylor Swift is above Pale Waves and below Ashlee Simpson on the REAL curve.)
As for Avril Lavigne’s own relationship to real and fake, I will say that while Ashlee Simpson is, as Robert Christgau once noted (in what I believe are the only four words he ever wrote about Ashlee Simpson’s music), “the real Avril Lavigne” and Skye Sweetnam is, as I once noted, “the fake Avril Lavigne,” Avril Lavigne herself is a paradox: Schroedinger’s confessional pop star, perpetually in a theoretical state of simultaneous real and fake.
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 // Mix 25 // Mix 26 // Mix 27 // Mix 28 // Mix 29 // Mix 30 // Mix 31 // Mix 32 // Mix 33
MIX 34: I’M NOT JEALOUS, RODRIGO
1. Laufey: Bewitched
Where Olivia Rodrigo seems to worship the sort of omnivorous but boomer-informed pop music education I had growing up, Laufey — a Berklee formalist with Icelandic roots and an Avril Curve gestalt — taps a different part of my own musical pedigree, a pile of fake books and fussy attempts at standards for piano teachers who wished I’d apply myself more. And that’s more or less where I fall with her music; as deft as she is with the mechanics of the songbook standard, she doesn’t have that otherworldly melodic gift that I’m pretty sure Billie Eilish has and that so far Olivia Rodrigo lacks. (I’d rather talk about records with Olivia Rodrigo and make them with Billie Eilish.)
2. Jaime Wyatt: Love Is a Place
The rare track from Spotify’s country list that is nominally Pitchfork-approved. She augments the standard “somewhere, USA” to L.A. to Nashville pipeline with a harrowing story of getting arrested for robbing her heroin dealer.
3. Esther Rose: Dream Girl
More alt-leaning and country-leaning stuff, not sure where I came across this one but it’s in my album slush pile that I haven’t got around to updating in a month or two.
4. Goofy Geese: Bam Bam
This one is more of a mystery, Scandinavian in origin as far as I can tell, and seems to make good on Billie Eilish’s promise to bring the bossanova back to Zoomer pop. Automatic inclusion for expanding the stable of GOOSE bands. (That makes three geese across my mixes this year so far.)
5. Tori Kelly: missin u
An R&B Frankenstein — in some ways a classic millennial R&B jam but with a contemporary skittering drum n bass backbone and a hint of the hyperpop food processor. Kelly seems to get the connection in the video, wearing a puffy silver jacket and mugging for the fisheye lens.
6. Mackenzie Carpenter: Country Girls (Just Wanna Have Fun)
Very dumb semi-cover of the Cyndi Lauper song, with the idea going from breaking free from oppressive authority (the struggle for fun, in Simon Frith’s words) to just going out and getting drunk and singing Shania Twain. Where Lauper wanted to have fun but couldn’t, Carpenter just does it, and hence there’s not much fun in it anymore. There’s maybe an essay in there for someone who wants it, but not me, as it sounds like no fun.
7. Kah-Lo: fund$
I’d been missing Kah-Lo’s collaborations with producer Riton, but her album is back on steady footing overall, and this one was a must after I decided to hold my nose and put the previous track on the mix — more Cyndi Lauper!
8. La Morena 239 & El Bloke: Shorty Shorty
Found Florida-based dembow artist La Morena 239 two years ago with her song “La Connect,” which was pulled from Spotify and now I can’t seem to find it anywhere. (I may have a backup copy of it somewhere—sure hope so.) I love her effortless switching between rap and dembow, the way the rapid-fire of dembow immediately makes way for an easy, almost laconic flow; it’s like a gymnastics floor routine at a block party.
9. Kes: Banga
I featured soca artist Kes, via his collaboration with Busy Signal, back on Mix 5. Good time had by all.
10. Hiền Hồ - Phóng Xe Đêm
Another entry in a strong year for (Spotify representation of) V-pop, from another contestant for a Vietnamese reality singing competition. She tends toward ballads but here glides along a sleek electropop surface.
11. SARAPATA: Yorokobi
More intriguing weirdness Poland, the country that seems to be doing more with the promise of hyperpop in 2023 than any other.
12. Phelimuncasi: Meyo
New track from the gqom group that got me deeper into the Nyege Nyege Tapes label.
13. Overmono: Blow Out
Another winner from Overmono, splits the difference between their bread-and-butter pop-oriented techno and the ghettotech revival that HiTech is (hopefully?) ushering in.
14. Gwairoch: Dancing with Faeries
An extreme new ager from Sweden whose amazing website gets NO NOTES from me, absolutely perfect, it’s exactly what the internet after social media should feel like all the time; it’s what we’ve earned. I’m tempted to buy a talisman.
15. irlbabee: я хочу
More “hyperpop only died in the US” fodder from a Ukrainian Soundclouder.
16. YENA f. YUQI: Hate Rodrigo
K-popper formerly of Iz*One is totally not jealous of Olivia Rodrigo but did put enough actual pictures of Olivia Rodrigo and her albums in the original music video upload to get it almost immediately removed on suspicion of copyright infringement and then reuploaded, conspicuously Rodrigoless. You can still see the original vid in reaction videos, though.
17. VIIS: Barbie (Oops! Oops!)
Thai pop gets on the Barbie train (still haven’t seen the movie!) but I would argue the real power in this song comes not from the Barbie but from the “oops!”
18. Virgin Miri: h4msterb0y <3 Korea
Couldn’t place this song internationally— often when that happens I find it’s either from Sweden or Canada. Virgin Miri is Swedish, but according to Spotify her top two listener regions are Toronto and Montreal.
19. 薄荷水晶 [babyMINT]: hellokittybalahcurrihellokitty美味しい
Wavered on this one for two weeks — Chinese pop that I probably would have ignorantly guessed was from Japan on first listen — until I saw two different people recommend it across my various social media feeds (Singles Jukeboxers Crystal Leww and Michael Hong, who has more context at his newsletter) and decided it had to make an appearance.
20. Voice of Baceprot: [NOT] PUBLIC PROPERTY
The highlight from a new album of…what, the Indonesian Pussy Riot? First heard them in the People’s Pop 2022 poll back in January.
21. John Fahey: F for Fake
Drag City just put out a collection of insular, experimental material Fahey recorded in the mid-90s. From what I can tell, the album is unrelentingly bleak and almost impossible to sit through beyond a few minutes unless you’re seriously into that sorta thing, but there’s something about what sounds like Tuvan throat singing throughout this one that keeps me listening.
22. Al Green: Perfect Day
Fahey is also the perfect set up for this odd Lou Reed cover by Al Green, whose voice is as miraculously smooth pushing 80 as it was circa 60 (on Lay It Down in 2008). Green imbues the song with totally unironic warmth throughout, so when he fades out with “you’re gonna reap just what you sow” it almost sounds like a pep talk for a strong wheat harvest around the corner.
***
In that spirit, I hope you also reap what you sow—lots of tasty fall vegetables!
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from YENA f. YUQI’s “Hate Rodrigo”