Kick drum, very cathartic

Mix 32: J-pop's prehistory, A-pop's future, farm animals, big dumb pop & rap, and big loud noises

That’s my energy

More noise this week sonically, but the discourse is relatively serene. Not much to report in the music chat salt mines, except the best album of 2000 tournament is live.

I’ve been reading through Michael Bourdaghs’s Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop, which has filled in a few gaps from my 1974 survey but has mostly given me some confidence that the year I mapped out hit some of the key themes and stories (in the author’s telling, anyway) from Japanese rock of this period. My sense that there is ferment c. 1968-1974 is more or less affirmed through his focus in the middle chapters on Group Sounds (of which I wrote, re: The Mops’ final live album, “[it] documents the dregs of their sieve, the little discarded bits of a zeitgeist that’s finally out of juice”) and the folk-rock boom. I also previously featured a huge figure from an early chapter on postwar popular culture, Shizuko Kasagi, star of the boogie boom.

The thing that’s been sticking with me is his brief reference to an idea from an essay in his field (area studies) from Harry Harootunian in 1995:

One of the more remarkable but unobserved occurrences invariably effaced by area studies is the fact that the peoples of the world outside of Euro-America have been forced to live lives comparatively by virtue of experiencing some form of colonization or subjection enforced by the specter of imperialism. …The Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro, recognizing in the consequences of this assault in the 1930s the formation of a ‘‘double life,’’ developed a theory of ‘‘layering’’ (jusosei) that supposedly characterized Japan’s history since the time of origins to explain why Japanese were compelled to live comparatively— life in double time—as a condition of their modern transformation.

This seems like a fairly simple point (albeit one stuck in the center of a Jell-O mold of academese, some of which I have excised), one internalized across a huge swath of leftish online pop-cultural chat. But in the book, Bourdaghs pins this observation to the lived experience of his Japanese roommate, who knows much more about American popular culture than Bourdaghs knows about Japanese popular culture, and something clicked for me.

One thing I’ve been grasping at with my A-pop writing is a shift in global cultural transmission, whose broad strokes were obvious by 1990, where the book’s timeline stops. Bourdaghs claims: “J-pop exists in a different historical moment from the popular music [from 1945-1990] I discuss in the book: it names a new kind of map.”

The book sketches out one side of that shift in transmission: the emergence of a “regional” music that is in some ways formed through, or operating parallel to, a global hegemonic mass culture, but ultimately (eventually) stands on its own two feet. With the A-pop idea, I’m getting at a logical flipside that I think has been roughly true for a long time theoretically, but maybe hasn’t been felt as acutely until the last decade or so: that is, what happens when the pop forms comprising the “Euro-America” (Anglo/American) locus of popular culture are put in the position of grappling with a globally comparative existence themselves?¹

The other book I’m reading, Glenn McDonald’s You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song, points to another key part of what’s going on, which is the continuing necessity of exploration—and specifically global exploration—as a default setting for encountering not just new music, but any music. More on that next week.

---

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: KICK DRUM, VERY CATHARTIC

1. The Blessed Madonna, Kylie Minogue: Edge of Saturday Night

Things will get noisy soon enough, so let’s start with a suite of big dumb pop songs. The biggest and maybe dumbest is from Kylie Minogue, getting some H&M house music from The Blessed Madonna so that she can show off some of the vocal grain that they sanded down to an eerie smoothness on “Padam Padam.” Kat Stevens asks if Kylie is singing “that’s my energy — Old MacDonald” in the bridge, and although my ears heard “that’s my energy, oh my god” and the lyrics sites say it’s “oh my darling,” I think Old MacDonald is closer to her energy.

2. JUSTHIS f. MUSHVENOM, Dynamicduo: GOAT

And speaking of Kat Stevens and farm animals, here’s another of her recs, goofy K-rap singled out for incorporating actual goat sounds. This sent me on a journey of finding more K-pop with animal sounds, of which there is…a lot.

3. YOUNG POSSE: Ate That

4. babyMINT: Booooooring

Less common than animal noises in K-pop: G-funk, provided with characteristically charming tastelessness by YOUNG POSSE, who are quickly becoming one of my favorite K-pop groups. This one was a Bluesky recommendation from Jel; then moments later I saw Iain Mew share the new single from Taiwanese powerhouse babyMINT, putting me in mind of The Pierces’ hopefully-not-forgotten single “Boring.”

5. piri & tommy: 99%

Some effective, if basic, post-Pantheress pop from Manchester. The broken-up-as-of-2023 couple (who still plan to make music together, phew!) list as inspiration…huh, Arctic Monkeys?

6. Baby B3ns: T-Shirt

The hyperpop lava geyser continues to cool into little volcanic archipelagos of global novelties (this one’s German).

7. PASSEPIED: 21世紀流超高性能歌曲

Wanted to peg this as post-NewJeans to count it as the final song in a derivative style block, but no—if anything I’m wondering how J-pop filtered/filters into the K-pop zeitgeist. Mixwise, I think it’s better understood as the lead-off to a very brief math-lounge mini-block.

8. Dolphin Hyperspace: Walk on Music

I am a sucker for groups that clearly have more talent than taste, so here is some more math-lounge (Wii-core?) for you, from a dorky LA duo.

9. Dj Caio Vieira, DJ WG DO SS, Dj Alan Melo: De Baixo Pra Cima

Having a hard time grappling with MJ’s legacy these days, as my youngest is enamored after a friend performed some impressive dance moves at a talent show. I don’t feel like getting into it, so I’m mostly just enjoying the songs in the background, constantly reminded of how miraculous some of them are. You almost can’t believe someone sat down and wrote these things. You can really do anything with “Billie Jean,” and I’ve heard plenty of people do a lot with it. To its credit, this baile funk remix, although a no-brainer, slaps much harder than it needed to.

10. DJ Flash, Beendo Z, Fresh: Vroum Vroum

Belgian DJ and French rappers do, in fact, go vroom.

11. Rylo Rodriguez: 85 Cutlass

An interesting callback to modal rap’s prehistory, namely Future on his early singles, before he pioneered the sound of the next five or so years. When I did a mash-up of Future with an Aaliyah song, I decided to pitch Future down a step so as not to mess with the instrumental. I usually avoid pitch-shifting vocals, but it sounded good, and that artificially woozy bass effect happens to be Rylo Rodriguez’s natural register.

12. Luh Tyler, BossMan Dlow: 2 Slippery

This is the first BossMan Dlow appearance on a mix — he’s one of a few up-and-comer Florida rappers, along with Luh Tyler—and I finally picked this one mostly as an excuse to post this hilarious BossMan Dlow parody. I like the ambiguity the Florida rappers bring to humor; you get the sense that their whole deal is a bit, but they leave the door open a crack to seriousness (or is it vice versa?). How serious could “I feel like Bugs, got all these carats on my teeth” really be?

13. Fimiguerrero: Gucci

A Nigerian-British rapper whose totally blown-out sound is a bit dated (I associate this with 2020-2021, and I’m usually at least a year late to these things) but I like the way he says “Gucci.”

14. Joshua Chuquimia Crampton: Acidito

Some face-melt guitar squall from Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, sibling of Elysia Crampton of Chuquimamani-Condori, whose DJ E got raves from the avant scenesters in my orbit late last year. This is something like My Bloody Valentine with extra blood, came out the same time as DJ E in November ‘23 but for some reason is only now adding its yearly contribution to my tinnitus, possibly for tax purposes.

15. Dame Area: Si No Es Hoy Cuándo Es

Spanish industrial duo calls their mix of jackhammer electronics and acoustic percussion “tribal wave.” Leans a bit more arty than noisy, but still makes a decent racket.

16. ØKSE f. billy woods: Amager

Will admit to admiring-not-loving most of billy woods’s material, but I do really like this collaboration with an avant-jazz group, a quartet with members across four countries.

17. Buzz’ Ayaz: Efdji

Cyprus psych-rock group could maybe use a bit more sludge in their mix — would probably sound great live.

18. nand: 22 Uhr

Synth-pop from Germany that actually sounds like the 80s to me, not this adult contempo synth stuff that passes for cheesy nostalgia. This is the real cheese.

19. Yaelokre: Harpy Hare

This folky folktale from the Philippines appears to have gone viral somehow — more whimsical than weird.

20. Myra: Amour Terrible

French singer-songwriter wins me over with a light bossanova and then unexpectedly layers in kitchen sink percussion, baile funk-indebted mouth clave inclusive.

21. Hope Tala: Thank Goodness

Summery alt-pop fare from the UK, just in time to shuttle the kids back to school.

22. Laytonya Ali: Ali Shuffle [1980]

A 1980 boogie boxing novelty, from one Ali (no, the other one), to another (yeah, that one). Not to be confused with the 1976 “Ali Shuffle.”

23. The Soundcarriers: Always

British group aiming for Broadcast but overshooting the time machine dial considerably and landing closer to Fairport Convention (complimentary).

24. Jamey Johnson: What a View

Haven’t checked in on Jamey Johnson in a long time — he seems to be relaxing in Margaritaville. Good for him!

***

That’s it! Until next time, [goat noises].

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from The Blessed Madonna and Kylie Minogue’s “Edge of Saturday Night”

1. I’m putting this forward pretty tentatively—for one thing, there’s the “who’s we, white man” of it all re: the extent to which plenty of people in Anglo/American spaces already “live lives comparatively.” But there’s also the fact that today’s ascendant regional music coexists outside of literal colonialism, and you can, in fact, technically choose to ignore it. My interest is in the way the shift finally seems to be affecting (American) pop music, as if the music itself is aware that it’s being forced into a comparative existence it’s poorly equipped for.