Ella Langley keeps breaking Billboard records, and the essays are flying. I highly recommend Natalie Weiner at Don’t Rock the Inbox, who dissects the most annoying political takes really well while gently ribbing me for not finding memorable a song she has had memorized for months. Fair enough—I have now had it stuck in my head for a week since publishing my last essay and I have changed my mind on “Choosin’ Texas”!1 It’s pretty good now! (I’m giving partial credit to budots.)
A lot of the commentary around this milestone reminds me of my ambivalence to engaging with or accounting for popularity generally. I have long been a pretty strict adherent to the explanatory—but unsatisfying—power of cumulative advantage as a theory of social influence, where some initial popularity begets more popularity (“the rich get richer”). But the catch is that the initial popularity spark is fundamentally unpredictable and hugely subject to chance. So there are always annoying non-answers to both “why is this so popular” (“because it was already a little popular”) and “why did it get a little popular in the first place” (“there’s no way to know until after it happens”). I go into this a bit more in my “monsterverse” essay in the A-pop series.
It would be wrong to say that chart success is meaningless. But something having meaning while also being kind of arbitrary is not a mutually exclusive proposition. I wrote about something like this in the intro for my 50 Favorite Songs over at RockCritics.com back in 2021 (the site seems to be down at press time), but in relation to my own taste:
My friend Isabel Cole explained to me that in horoscope-speak your “moon” is the secret Spotify playlist that you’d make to soundtrack your inner life. She also reminded me that astrology is fake, which is why it’s good—it’s like an improvisational prompt with arbitrary parameters to ensure it’s not just an act of confirmation bias. Something seems like it doesn’t fit, but then you make it fit, and that tells you something new about yourself. Just because something is tautological or arbitrary doesn’t mean it’s meaningless or ineffective, which is something I’ve known for a long time because I have experience with other things like that, too—death, certainly, but also the music I like.
Songs can hit you like that time I was walking home in the snow and an avalanche of ice fell from a bridge about ten feet from where I was standing, and there was no one around, and I thought about how if I’d been seconds earlier I’d be dead but if I’d been seconds later I wouldn’t have even noticed. It was a miracle that only I saw, and it made me feel lucky to be alive in a queasy sort of way.
Sometimes a song changes you in exactly the way you were intending to change anyway, which is suspiciously convenient. But sometimes a song changes you in a way you were not expecting, that turns out to be convenient, too, like when I decided Katy Perry was OK just in time for my son to get obsessed with her. Sometimes a song will change you in a way that you resent and you have to either find a way to make it fit anyway or bury it deep down, but deep down is still part of you.
And sometimes a song is just the wallpaper, except one day you realize you’ve looked at it every single day for years and never noticed something in it and all of a sudden it’s a miracle, too.
And sometimes a song really just means nothing to you, and it seems to mean everything to someone else, and you wonder where they must have been standing when it fell to earth.
My chart ambivalence goes two ways. On the one hand, I don’t think there need to be good or obvious reasons why something becomes popular, and think that a clinically descriptive account of popularity—like who shared what when—gets you most of the relevant information that isn’t just a form of baseless speculation at worst or imaginative storytelling at best. I am sometimes a fan of these stories; I just think any one story of success is usually compatible with some other contradictory story of success.
On the other hand, people really do like what they like for reasons that make sense or feel right to them; they are not being tricked or deluded into their feelings even if they someday reject those feelings for different ones. To know why they like a song, you’d have to ask them, which most chart analysis doesn’t really do. And even when you do ask, reasons and ideas can accumulate just like popularity, through the same mechanisms of social sharing. Most attempts to glean reasons (especially from places like social media or online forums) are as subject to cumulative advantage as anything else, and often miss the ways that people use the music they like without always telling you why, maybe without really knowing why.2 So I mostly just stick to me—and maybe sometimes my friends, provided I can use their own words.3
I still like to look at the charts—there’s often interesting information there, even if I’m not always confident it’s telling me much more than a horoscope would. I’m always most comfortable with what I can hear for myself, which is by nature idiosyncratic. I’m not immune to social forces, though. When my friends like things and write good pieces about why they like them, I listen more charitably. When I hear something over many years, or I hear it in a new context, I might revise a previous opinion—and I’ve found over time that my likes mostly deepen over time while my dislikes tend to wither. It’s hard for me to stay bothered by a song that I catch myself humming in the kitchen.
1. Ashe: Stop the Wedding!
US
OK, final chart-based musings: one question I’ve had in the midst of pop regionalization theory is whether the UK is asserting or reasserting itself as regional pop. This year the UK has its own “Choosin’ Texas” soft-rock chart juggernaut — Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s “Rein Me In” — and the UK charts have now have scrambled my musings further by being the first to launch American artist Ashe’s very British-coded new song—RAYE by way of Elton John—into its top ten.
2. nomi.: Sweet Talk
US
How many blankets can you throw on top of a mid-aughts minimalist R&B banger before it goes from “cozy” to “smothered”? This is like the owl in the Tootsie Pop commercial daring to find out. But like the commercial it (wisely) stops at three.
3. pix!e: Summer Blue
Philippines
Upon listening I assumed this was Thailand going for South Korea, but it’s Philippines going for Thailand going for South Korea.
4. Yukipoyo f. Zae: Te-Te Gyaru (Tagalog Remix)
Japan/Philippines
Filipino street culture meets Japanese ‘90s gyaru culture revival with the assimilated sounds of Brazilian funk moving things along. There’s a lot of everything everywhere all at once (general concept, not film), both on this song and elsewhere on this mix.
5. SMJ f. PLUTO: My Block
US
The Atlanta Whamieeverse keeps expanding — SMJ hops on Jeezy’s “My Hood” for a joyride and politely returns the car without serious damage.
6. Elyanna: Bosa
Chile-Palestine
Cosmo-leaning MENA pop from a rising Chilean-Palestinian star.
7. Tenma, Yasin Sherif: Gadi Mela Dheko
India
A Latin-indebted song from a Tamil film, name-checks “Despacito” while scootering around a dembow beat.
8. Dhee f. Lara Raj: Vari Vari (Unna Kaadhaliche) (Remix)
India-Australia/India-US
I have not followed Katseye closely enough to understand the ways in which they may or may not be speed-running a K-pop dysfunctional breakdown/breakup, but if so, they’re already moving on to solo breakouts. Here’s Lara Raj featured on another iteration of contemporary Latin clave in Indian cinema, from a Tamil singer.
9. badmónzjay f. Ikkimel: Geile Sau trotzdem
Germany
I started to do a little research into what to me has sounded like a renaissance of German raunch-rap in the past few years, one that reminds me a little of what’s happened in the US — women take over, have more fun with more sex and less misogyny, but do not get half the credit as the guys reeling in decline. But that may be an inaccurate read of the situation. I did end up wondering if I’m missing interesting German men rapping, but it turns out most of them do show up in my weekly longlists and I just skip right over them.
10. STER: Isso aqui é BR
Brazil
Another week, another live wire to follow more closely — STER is a classically trained Brazilian funk upstart who, with producer TH4I, sounds like she’s making a crossover play. She makes sure you know that she plays her own violin hooks. “Who is the baile funk Esperanza Spalding” is probably not a question would have occurred to me, but I’m glad it has an answer.
11. AfroSalto, Diamond Platnumz, Chlé: SHU!
Netherlands/Tanzania/South Africa
This sounded vaguely familiar—I liked it but thought the production sounded a little corny. Then I discovered that “AfroSalto” is a portmaneau of producers Afrojack and Gregor Salto, and that this is a remix of a song I already knew and liked. The (better) original “Shu!” from 2023 is on my amapiano holdover list from the time—I clearly underrated it!
12. Bambi: Let it B
Poland
The great Polish hope for superstardom from last year is reckoning with her own burgeoning popularity: “my ceiling is beyond the borders of this country.” And like a few other regional stars on the verge of a crossover that I’ve noticed, she goes wider stylistically, including smaller and artier in a way that I think suits her. New album’s out in October.
13. Yakaya: Kandibober
Ukraine
Ukrainian melancholy meets “What Does the Fox Say,” but instead of a fox it’s a beaver in a Kalush bucket hat.
14. Nizar Saad: 23 (Sabe2 El Zaman)
Egypt
Egyptian rapper glides along on house organ while the percussion tries to decide what kind of song it’s supposed to be.
15. Marcos Morales Mercurio: Silver
US
Florida drummer with synth arpeggios and relentless breakbeats that I believe are all performed live.
16. Berlam: Mission
Canada
Montreal rapper approximates a little pocket of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place” and measures the distance from Warp to hypertrap, throws in some clave because why not.
17. Stella Monye: Oke Mi Ye [1983]
Nigeria
Great Afropop from 1983 on a new compilation designed as a sequel to 2001’s Nigeria 70. One of my 1985 discoveries, Segun Adewale, is included on the compilation with “Yo-Pop Music” also from ‘83.
18. Salebarbes: Ça veut toute aouère
Canada
Rollicking fiddle jam from Montreal, courtesy a Cajun music group that calls the project “cultural reappropriation” and “a deportation in reverse.”
19. Guandu: Cowboy
Brazil
My favorite cowboy of the week is Brazilian bedroom alt-country labeled “slowcore” over on Bandcamp, which makes me wonder if indie alt-country just needs to get a little grodier for it to hit me the right way.
20. World Brain f. Kummisolo: Life in Theory
Belgium/Japan
Second appearance of New Age-curious Belgian artist World Brain with reclaimed soft-pop schlock that has sounded pretty cool for going on 30 years now.
21. Mordecai, JayJayy, NTK101: Cabanga Nje
South Africa
22. Mr Maker, Nobuhle, Smash SA, DJ Stokie f. MusicHlonza: Bade Lam
South Africa
Ending with two good ones from South Africa. JayJayy is neck and neck with Zee Nxumalo for favorite breakout amapiano vocalist of the moment. Then a group of porudcers I don’t know close things with a bit more actual piano, though lacking Jay/Zee.
That’s it! Until next time, choose Texas if you’re so inclined!
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from SMJ f. PLUTO: My Block
I do wonder what my experience of the song would have been like if I’d heard it more in public. This is something that changed how I felt about “Golden” last year, too, which is still in my head constantly. Kelly Clarkson finally covered it! It was great!
I think you can get stuck going down dead-ends when you conflate individual taste and expressions of something like “mass taste” (that is, popularity) in the same way you might with individual financial choices and macroeconomics. The macro view is a separate and important analysis, but not one that maps easily onto individual choices, even if it represents an accumulation of those choices.
I eventually ended up caring a lot about how young people engage with popular culture through my professional work, though it never really gave me much insight in the music that I liked that was ostensibly designed for younger people than myself. I could only trust myself there. The first thing I learned about using popular culture as a teacher was that it was never only a connecting or dividing presence in a classroom; it was always both simultaneously. One song lets a large group of kids in at the expense of a smaller group who feel shut out, or shut themselves out intentionally. There was never something for “everyone,” even though you can get everyone to join together toward a shared goal—especially if they’re creating music in some way themselves.
Dave, rockcritics.com is closed down forever,* but fortunately your 50 Favourite Songs entry has been archived by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, so your essay and list (with your commentary) can be read at this link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230603180203/https://rockcritics.com/2021/12/17/top-50-favourite-songs-david-cooper-moore
*Scott didn't renew with WordPress; he says he's saved everything ever posted at rockcritics.com, so nothing's permanently lost - though I don't know how much got scooped up by the Internet Archive.
Cumulative advantage for nepo baby music is extra because the outrage over unfairness plays into it, generating lots of free advertising. Economic injustice turns out to be the interesting new transgression that everyone's been looking for! It works because the obsession with wealth and celebrity as "goods" makes it ambiguous, not merely a bad thing.