TinyLetter Archives
Ed note: Have tried to salvage as many TinyLetters as I have access to on this page. I had a TinyLetter account from 2019 - 2022 before switching over to Substack. I didn’t write much on TinyLetter but on this page you will find:
Links to my 2019 and 2020 playlists:
20192020
My first explorations of “modal rap,” “marshmallow mouth,” and (citing Edward O at the Singles Jukebox) “bort-pop.”
Some assorted life stuff
April 6, 2019: The Proof Is in the Party
I don’t know how this format will go—I sense it will be as close as I seem to get these days to the heyday of 2006-2008, when I had a space to write and think that felt both observed and private, which is to say there were people reading it, but I didn't care. That started to change around 2009, when social media inflected but hadn't taken over the blogosphere (I used Tumblr, kind of a midway point between the two), and then changed entirely sometime around 2013, when Facebook became the predominant place most people I was in conversation with kept conversing. Problem was there was too much feedback, or if not feedback at least eyeballs, from too many places, too many worlds colliding. That said, feel free to tell your friends, or my friends, that this thing exists. Everyone’s invited.
This year I finally started processing a huge amount of music through Spotify. I’m not sure what motivated it, except that my kids are old enough now that I have a bit more of my personal headspace back and a little bit of time to indulge myself. Each week I compile a list of about 800-900 songs from the “New Music” playlists of about a dozen countries and regions. The vast majority of the songs are on the US-based "New Music Fridays" already, so each country or region might have between twenty and thirty additional tracks that are more local or just...odd (Ashlee Simpson showed up in Malaysia for some reason!).
My listening is pretty shallow; I’m looking for fast connections. If it grabs in the first few seconds, I listen for 30. If I get to 30 and I’m still interested but don't see it sticking yet, it goes in a “pending” list. If I get all the way through and it sticks, it goes on a monthly playlist.
Here’s the playlist for January/February.
1. Cards, Sita: Shouldn’t Be Sorry
2. Lizzo: Juice
3. Slim Jxmmi, Rae Sremmurd: Nothing for Christmas
4. Tyga f. G-Eazy, Rich the Kid: Girls Have Fun
5. Bhad Bhabie f. Kodak Black: Bestie
6. Chaka Khan: Hello Happiness
7. Daddy Yankee, Snow: Con Calma
8. Inna: Sin Ti
9. UPSAHL: Drugs
10. Lauren Aquilina: If Looks Could Kill
11. Isabella Lovestory: Humo
12. Austin Mahone: Why Don’t We
13. Mars Moniz, Lao Ra: Wapo
14. ITZY: Dalla Dalla
15. Michaël Brun, UNIIQUE3: How About This
16. JADED, Black Caviar, Antony & Cleopatra: Slippin’
17. Abhi the Nomad: Flush
18. Valee f. DRAM: About U
19. Big K.R.I.T.:Energy
20. Dr Vades, Blanco: Ringtone
21. Anna Jones: Slip
22. Jessie Ware: Adore You
23. Max Styler f. Elanese: Animal
24. Barrie: Clovers
25. Bibio: Curls
26. Los Puchos: Floating on the Water
27. Wizaard: Ur Headdy
28. Sweet William: Kikuzato (Pianiment remix)
And here’s the playlist for March.
1. Inna: Tu Manera
2. SAULT: Don’t Waste My Time
3. Jansons, Dope Earth Alien: Switch (Follow the Drum)
4. Wiley f. Stefflon Don, Sean Paul, Idris Elba: Boasty
5. Vendredi sur Mer: Chewing-Gum
6. Franc Moody: She’s Too Good for Me
7. Call Me Loop: Body Like Yours
8. SKY-HI: Chit-Chit-Chat
9. ASHS: A Million Voices
10. Rayana Jay f. ESTA.: Real Something
11. Kailee Morgue f. Hayley Kiyoko: Headcase
12. Otoboke Beaver: Don’t Light My Fire
13. Nadia Rose: Airplane Mode
14. SUNMI: Noir
15. JUJU: Read My Lips
16. Nura: Habibi
17. Tank and the Bangas: Nice Things
18. Tierra Whack: Clones
19. Ashra the Ghost: Woo Wee
20. Tommy Genesis: You Know Me (MadeinTYO remix)
21. Cordae: Have Mercy
22. Destiny Rogers: North$ide
23. Suzi Wu: Highway
24. R3AB, HOTi: Up All Night (Skytech remix)
25. Hael: Limited Edition
26. Momoland: I’m So Hot
27. Heize: Her Fine Weather
28. Approachable Members of Your Local Community: One I Need
29. Markus Hasselblom: 14 år
30. Matmos: Silicone Gel Implant
I’m working on YouTube playlists for those of you not on Spotify—I’ll share it in my next letter.
Spotify’s algorithms, playlist curators, and possible low-key deals with various labels to promote unknown talent on playlists (I don’t know the literal mechanics of these deals, but the relationships seem clearly there) have created a kind of parallel universe of pop, where also-rans are triumphant and nobodies are somebodies. I get names in all caps like INNA, SAULT, UPSAHL, AMA. Names that seem to come out of a random word generator: Cards, Call Me Loop, Approachable Members of Your Local Community. I can google the provenance of most of this stuff—who's up and coming, who's nonexistent even online—but it seems sort of beside the point.
And I also get lots of popular-seeming music from other countries—lots of K-Pop, though not as much as my friends who follow K-Pop are aware of, the occasional Scandinavian track (Sweden’s playlists tend to distill each trend in American pop I dislike to its essence), Francophone and Spanish-language stuff that could be from any number of countries.
My music feels a little like a simulacrum of some other world’s pop music. My picks get close to but don't quite touch the alt-leaning global-ish pop music that dominates over at The Singles Jukebox, which I’ve started writing for again. It has very few intersections with the Billboard charts. It's as if I am the character in a movie about pop phenomena. I like it; it feels very close to a beaten path but just off it.
Occasionally something that is breaking through to some other real world will break into mine, too. I just wrote about Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” easily my favorite song of the year so far. In the review, I say that it’s “what it sounds like when you discover, or simply stumble into by accident, the path beyond the bounds of territory you presumed exhausted, territory that can always get bigger, always invite whole new parties to the party. It's a real party party; you can get in.”
The last line there is a reference to “Slide,” a song by FBG Duck and a favorite with my students about a year ago. “Slide” was remixed again and again, each new person taking the challenge: “it's a real _____ party, you cannot get in” to set the bar for entry. If you go back to the 60s, the only thing to fill the blank is often the speaker—effectively, you cannot get in, period. A paradoxical community where everyone is nonetheless trespassing together. But Lil Nas X is generous; everyone is invited, and the only question is whether or not the party “counts” as a party—but then here we all are, partying, so I guess it is one. I don't follow country music well enough to name its antecedents, which I assume there are, or talk about the ways in which the ambivalent treatment of Lil Nas X says something or other about something else or other. I don't really care; the proof is in the party.
April 13, 2019: Maddie and Dex
To follow up on last week’s bit on Lil Nas X (a whole bunch of words were written about the song at the Singles Jukebox), two more songs that play around with or in genre from my April keepers so far.
Maddie Poppe - “Made You Miss” sounds a little like c. 2005 Rachel Stevens, hooray! I’m surprised I don’t find more of this sort of country/Popjustice crossover—there are more genre exercises coming at country from the outside (Kylie Minogue's album last year was good on this front). From actual, consistent country music artists I tend to connect more to things coming from either the Pistol Annies axis or Americana. Usually the ones I find who are doing something like this come from television or are moonlighting in country music—Jana Kramer, a few songs on the Nashville soundtracks. So no surprise, Google sez this is an American Idol winner.
Famous Dex - “Rockstar Lifestyle” takes the piss so sloppily that Famous Dex phases in and out of sync with the beat, seemingly performing without headphones. A lumbering mess of a goof—it is incredibly annoying. Not “noise,” but din, a bunch of sore thumbs groping around in the dark. This is a mode going back to “Party Like a Rockstar,” but here it's not clear that the allusion to rock is aspirational. It’s almost a commentary on how empty rock is for inspiration; I even like the weirdly fussy title; “Rockstar Lifestyle” sounds like the title of a bad term paper.
My listening these days is so rootless and capricious that I’m struggling to make much of a narrative out of what I’m hearing, and maybe that’s a good thing—pop is pointillism, you get little sparks and have to do your best to imagine the bigger picture. I’m also pathologically incurious about background information these days, usually Googling information as an afterthought, as I did for Maddie Poppe, whom I assumed was Scandinavian. My lack of interest in research is a subject for future research.
April 29, 2019: April Mix
Hello! It is time to say goodbye to April!
1. Lil Nas X: Old Town Road
2. Amber Mark: Mixer
3. Linia Nocna: Hulajnogi
4. Lolo Zouaï: Ride
5. Big Z, Poorchoice, Ben Fox, Veronica Bravo: Wednesday
6. Karol G: Punto G
7. Bunglon, Monita Tahalea: Dulu
8. Salt Cathedral f. Jarina De Marco, Big Freedia: Go and Get It
9. Specktors, Nonsens: Unz Unz
10. Maddie Poppe: Made You Miss
11. IZ*ONE: Violeta
12. Lydia: Slow Clap
13. Latifah: Bounce Back
14. Simon from Deep Divas: Chuchu Chuchu Papà
15. Love Guru f. Steinar Fjeldsted, Cell7: Mér er Boðið
16. GEO: It Never Rains
17. Twin XL: Good
18. OOHYO: Tennis
19. Sofi Tukker: Fantasy
20. A-Trak: Work It Out
21. The Get Up Kids: The Problem Is Me
22. Las Aves: You Need a Dog
23. Cuco: Hydrocodone
24. Aiming for Enrike: Ponzu Saiko
25. Famous Dex: Rockstar Lifestyle
26. NonaRia: Jadi Wanita
27. Tenile Townes: I Kept the Roses
This one has fewer songs on it than March, and Jan/Feb doesn't really count because I didn’t have the listening format down. You can now access all of these mixes on YouTube, too—will add April to the ongoing list shortly.
Trends in the month—fewer and fewer American tracks, more tracks coming from unexpected places, literally—an Indonesian disco hit remade in the smoother register of sophisti-K-pop (“Dulu”), Polish electro (“Hulajnogi”), Danish dorks (“Unz Unz” and “Slow Clap”), Icelandic dorks (“Mér er boðið”), Colombians who landed a Big Freedia guest spot ("Go and Get It") and a fantastic country ballad by a Canadian. (“I Kept the Roses” by Tenille Townes closes out the mix.)
I’m getting through growing playlists—now averaging about 900 tracks per week—faster and faster (usually in two days of speed dating) and it's becoming easier to sort the wheat from the chaff. My back of the envelope stats tell me I kept a whopping 1.1% of the music I listened to.
Only two of these songs come from outside the Spotify-curated playlists and assorted algorithms (their Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists, the only algorithm-generated tracks among dozens of New Music lists, which are curated). One of them I heard on the radio of all places—Twin XL’s “Good.” Another is from the Singles Jukebox, “Fantasy,” a millenial Europop throwback by Sofi Tukker (technically released last year but got an unnecessary R3HAB remix this month) that does some Toy-Box cosplay in the video but is otherwise on the sleeker end of 2001 mall-trance.
I’m also really letting my ears do the driving, which is how I ended up, surprisingly, with a Get Up Kids comeback and, unsurprisingly, with a phoned-in A-Trak song. There are a few jokes—“You Need a Dog” by Las Aves is probably the funniest one, but I’m still partial to Famous Dex's “Rockstar Lifestyle,” which I wrote about in my last letter. The Korean tracks are fairly sleek —"Violeta" by IZ*ONE and “Tennis” by OOHYO.
Simulacrum-pop is alive and well, with, most obviously, a VERY fake Carly Rae Jepsen track that is better than the CRJ tracks I’ve heard this year. The song is "Wednesday," by someone called BIG Z (the Carly soundalike is Veronica Bravo), and it is so shamelessly derivative that YouTube categorizes it, wrongly, as “easy listening.” Something I assumed was shillwave (i.e., artificially Spotify-boosted tracks) got a warm review in Pitchfork of all places—“Ride” by Lolo Zouai, whose profanity-laced bridge was a surprise after my son had already fallen in love with it in the car (woops).
(Oh, and one last thing, that melody in “Mixer,” the Amber Mark song that sounds a little bit like Jamiroquai, is just “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran. It took me FOREVER to figure it out.)
Anyway, this was a lot of fun to make. I hope you enjoy 95% of it, as one dear friend of mine said of last month's mix. (She did not clarify which 5% she did not enjoy.)
June 5, 2019: May Mix
Hello, all! I just got to make my favorite joke of the year that no one thinks is funny (*NSync voice: "It's gonna be June!") which means it is time for the MAY MIX.
1. Marie Davidson: Work It (Soulwax Remix)
2. Ciara: Thinkin Bout You
3. Teenear f. Lil Baby: I Like It
4. Louis Cole: Doing the Things
5. Quarry: Whit Wishy Washy World
6. Thomas Azier: Strangling Song
7. Eli Rose: Carrousel
8. Nya de la Rubia, Juan Magán: No Se Puede Tener To
9. will.i.am f. Lady Leshurr, Lioness, Ms. Banks: Pretty Little Thing
10. Anna Lunoe: 303
11. Wongo, Blak Trash: Tic Toc
12. Discotron: You Know My Name
13. Carla Prata: A Malta Brilha
14. Dyo: Arena
15. Cruel Santino: Sparky
16. London On Da Track, G-Eazy f. City Girls & Juvenile: Throw Fits
17. Bree Runway: 2ON
18. Bhad Bhabie: Lotta Dem
19. YG: In the Dark
20. Temi Oni: BGM
21. NFA: ue Bolá
22. DaBaby f. Offset: Baby Sitter
23. Blac Youngsta: Cut Up
24. Anna Linares: Juguete Viejo
25. Whethan, Jeremih: Let Me Take You
26. Jonas Aden, RebMoe: I Don’t Speak French (Adieu)
27. Dmitri Vegas & Like Mike Mike f. Paris Hilton: Best Friend’s Ass
28. Blanco Brown: The Git Up
29. Generationals: I Turned My Back on the Written Word
30. Flying Lotus f. Little Dragon: Spontaneous
31. Girls Tape Store: To the Dizzling You
32. Cosmo Gold: Drown the Fly
33. Asako Toki: Flame (mabanua remix)
34. Lana Del Rey: Doin’ Time
35. Annie Lux: I’m in the Mood 4 Honey
36. Philip Bailey: Once in a Lifetime
This one is a bit overstuffed at 36 tracks. There are an easy five or six I'd probably nix on a different day, but I figure for cannibalization purposes it's better to overstuff than under-stuff.
I'm settling into an oddly tranquil relationship with my weekly playlists, which now average a healthy 1000 per week—my intuition around nixing or pausing on certain sounds and vocals and words has really sharpened. I was playing a few songs for my brother-in-law after he mentioned the weird baseball-themed Lonely Island side project, the Bash Brothers, which I'd heard on my Spotify lists. Each time my prediction of what was about to happen actually happened (you're going to hear an Autotune sing-moan soon; the singer here will sound like they can't open their mouth all the way; someone is about to start rapping clumsily in a language that isn't English).
That said, I can't say that I'm finding a ton of songs I hate, either—most songs rate between a 4-6 on a scale of 10. Songs on my "revisit" playlists are usually 6's that are tilting toward a 7. Also interesting, in listening to the Singles Jukebox songs that aren't in my Spotify lists, I find the ratio is about the same, with a bit of weight away from the 4's.
So who's in this bunch?
I start with a song that's been kicking around my "revisit" playlist for at least a full month, the Soulwax remix of Marie Davidson's "Work It," a very dorky electro track that is somehow even blunter than Britney Spears's "Work Bitch!" This is one that flirted with a special list called my WACK TRACKS, songs that I have a viscerally negative reaction to but nonetheless listen all the way through. These tracks are worth some analysis in their own right, but "Work It" is not really one of them. Then I realized if I was going to put it anywhere, it had to open, and if I wasn't OK with that, then damn it, I wasn't OK with the song at all. So there it is.
Then a one-two summertime vibes punch, one from a Ciara song that sounds like an idea for a chorus repeated ad nauseum, as though it was created for the end credits of a movie. One of my students told me, with firm certainty, that this was the case, that they never wrote verses because it was just created for the movie, and this was not true, but it was true in spirit, I guess. The other is an artist I've never heard of, Teenear, riffing on what sounds like "I Can't Wait."
A few weirdos messing around with bedroom-pop production—Louis Cole, a drummer who is Thundercat adjacent and sounds like he fit a whole marching band into a dorm room; Quarry, whose sloganeering and fussy arranging reminds me a little of White Town; Thomas Azier, some kinda Scandinavian whose bad lyrics and good bass line reminds me a little of Cake—2019 is definitely channeling the mid-to-late 90's—there is even a Sublime cover on here by Lana Del Rey that is, er, sublime, and that's to say nothing of the Spice Girls and TLC I left off the list ("Spicy" featuring Charli XCX and "Don Walk" by Rymez f. Stefflon Don).
And then it's all around the world again—French-Canadian "Carrousel" is a circular confection, "No Se Puede Tener To" somehow grabbed me from a whole mass of Spanish-language pop that I'm probably underrating, will.i.am steps out of the way to put the spotlight on a few British rappers ("UK in this bitch!"), Australians Anna Lunoe and Wongo quote Eminem and spruce up some tired come-ons with clock noises, respectively.
I particularly like the rap stretch in the middle: G-Eazy just barely doesn't sink a mammoth London on Da Track production, YG and DJ Mustard are up to their old tricks, Bhad Bhabie is up to her new tricks, DaBaby finally makes me laugh, Blac Youngsta continues to make me laugh, sort of.
Others: Paris Hilton is back. Back! BACK! featured on yet another club ennui track, this time with a bit more coke, and Blanco Brown rides the "Old Town Road" wave to a line dance that seems so perfunctory that at the end he actually says "you can just do what you like here" but nonetheless captures my attention.
After that it's all question marks for me outside of Flying Lotus—whose whole album seems pretty good but whose short and sweet "Spontaneous" with Little Dragon is the best thing Little Dragon has done in a long time—and the aforementioned LDR cover. Some of this stuff appears to be benefiting from Spotify playlist curation preferential treatment. Biggest offender: a group called Generationals, which has been forced into my eardrums at least SIX times this month from different playlists, even though their official video has about 4,000 views on YouTube. I relented. Also Cosmo Gold with "Drown the Fly," which is Talking Headsesque enough to bounce nicely off the closer here, an Earth Wind and Fire member's smooth jazz (but is it Smooth Jazz?) take on "Once in a Lifetime."
Funny, both in the Philip Bailey version of "Once in a Lifetime" and in my own head, the existential despair has really shifted more to observational exclamation—who ever woulda thunk! I just listened to an episode of This Is Not Your Mixtape, maybe my favorite music podcast out right now, and the interviewee made the observation that his father, who got him (the interviewee) into "Once in a Lifetime," seemed to misunderstand the song along these same lines. But that's the understanding that I'm settling on, relating less and less to the water every day. I'm on the top, for now, riding the current, enjoying myself.
(I've been writing a bunch about media and my mom and my past. I might share some snippets of it here if there's interest.)
Jukebox reviews this month that I liked writing and hope you like reading:
(1) A very long sentence in the style of Eminem and Logic.
(2) Reflections on parties and music and party music, f. The-Dream.
(3) In which I coin the phrase Electronic Dinner Music, I hope, even though Christgau probably coined the concept in his Kid A review from 2000.
(4) The Chemical Brothers and severe back pain.
June 19, 2019: Freestyle Solo
Lately, rappers have been singing as a default mode. There's always been some singing and sing-song cadence in rap, and there have been a few different ways of doing it, but the typical modes included either dancing around one or two notes, a la Bone Thugs n' Harmony (think Krayzie Bone on "Ridin' Dirty," say), or repeating a hook melody ad nauseam, a la Nate Dogg or, later, T-Pain.
But starting a few years ago, rappers started doing something a little different. I identify it as modal singing, the use of a particular scale rather than a specific melody built around chord progressions. I do modal exercises with my sons on the piano. I play a D-minor figure in the bass, and tell them to hit any of the white notes in any order they want. The white notes are all included in the Dorian mode scale in the key of D-minor.
Rappers are singing a minor pentatonic scale, five notes that have long been used in rock music—if you listen to a thrash metal guitar solo, you'll hear the guitarist go up and down those five notes at warp speed. PnB Rock, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Lil Durk—some of the most popular rappers are basically singing guitar solos in most of their songs.
This is a little different from either hitting a pop melody repeatedly or singing one or two notes rhythmically. Modal singing provides more flexibility than both of these techniques. Because the underlying chord never changes, any note the rapper chooses to sing sounds like it "belongs," but at the same time you don't have the kind of harmonic resolution or strong hooks that pop uses in the interplay between melody and chord progression. There is a droning quality to it, and not an unpleasant one. Occasionally you'll have a repeating pattern that approximates a pop melody (PnB Rock specializes in this), but more often you'll just have rappers improvising, never quite hitting the same sequence of notes but appearing to be singing a discernible melody.
What you're hearing isn't a pop melody, but a solo—long, improvisatory solos on a limited template and a single chord. So it all starts to break down when you introduce pop chord progressions, though A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie did an interesting compromise in "Look Back At It," where a few of those modal figures appear, but there is also a clear pop melody that fits the chord progression. (More on that song at Koganbot here.)
July 2, 2019: June Mix
Welcome to July! It's very hot!
An appropriately summery mix this month I hope.
1. Cordae f. Chance the Rapper: Bad Idea
2. Clea Vincent: N’dis rien
3. Salt Cathedral: Muévelo
4. Emil Stabil f. Gucci Mane: En Sang
5. Jvcki Wai f. Yanghongwon, Osshun Gum: DDING
6. Steve Void f. Louisa Johnson: Ain’t Got You
7. A Boogie Wit da Hoodie f. Capo Plaza: Look Back at It (remix)
8. Nourishe: The Deep
9. Chilla: Jungle
10. KIRINJI, YonYon: Killer Tune Kills Me
11. Kiara Simone’: I Got N*ggas
12. Big K.R.I.T. f. Lil Wayne, Saweetie: Addiction
13. Capo Plaza: So cosa fare
14. Kash Doll f. Lil Wayne: Kitten
15. Kesha: Rich, White, Straight Men
16. Rodney Crowell, Randy Rogers, Lee Ann Womack: Flatland Hillbillies
17. Erykah Badu, James Poyser: Tempted
18. Rema: Iron Man
19. Caterina Cropelli: O2
20. Anna Takeuchi: SUNKISSed GIRL
21. Ucca-Laugh: Monday Sandwich Boy
22. Róisin Murphy: Incapable (Extended Mix)
23. Camo & Krooked: Loa
24. Provinz Posen: Moje źycie
25. Maudy Ayunda: Kamu dan Kenangan
That's half a year down and there are so far no signs of "Old Town Road" NOT being the song of the year. There are also no signs of me having a grand total of two album candidates: YO by INNA and Is an Island by MaHaWam. I have a few draft playlists of interesting trends that nonetheless contain a lot of music I don't like all that much—a playlist of 90's-indebted tracks (samples, covers, or references, stretches from c. 1987-2000 but who's counting) and one called Anything But Country, which are songs that for the most part use country signifiers in hip-hop as opposed to vice versa. The 90's one gets a few new songs each week; the country one has about 10 so far.
This month I poached a few tracks from Koganbot's list of singles of the year so far— coincidentally, there was a pretty remix in my new music lists of "Look Back at It" by A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, featuring an Italian rapper, Capo Plaza (presumably from the Italia New Music playlist). Spotify is hit or miss with K-pop, so I appreciated finding "DDing" from his list —it has little flourishes of the modal rap style—though on this mix the purest form of it I found was in Italian in a song by...you guessed it, Capo Plaza, in "So cosa fare." And then there's "Iron Man," a woozy club lullaby from Nigeria that reminds me, in its minimalism and intimacy, of Santi's "Sparky" from my May list.
The mix opens with a song that I probably wouldn't have rated quite so highly if I hadn't recently read Hanif Abdurraqib's collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, specifically his 2016 essay on Chance the Rapper. YBN Cordae is, surprisingly, making a play for rapper of the year according to his frequency in my mixes, and here details about ramen flavoring syrup sandwiches really got me for some reason. (Sandwiches appear later, in a more abusrdist bent, with a Sandwich Boy, who I imagine has some relationship to the Sunkissed Girl.) Abdurraqib's writing on Chance's evolution between Acid Rap and Coloring Book helped me appreciate his rubbery dexterity here— YBN Cordae grounds the song in the neighborhood and then Chance bounces around the world looking for a new condo for his art.
Some airy summer stuff—I pitched "N'dis rien" to the Singles Jukebox as "ASMR by the Ocean," and Salt Cathedral returns sans Big Freedia and Jarina DeMarco (Spotify is REALLY pushing Jarina DeMarco, but her "Identity Crisis" hasn't got its hooks in me yet). The most unexpected airiness is from Gucci Mane, who has a fantastic verse—maybe the most well-realized storytelling I've heard from him in years?—on a Danish pop song by Emil Stabil. Unknown-provenance-pop keeps the lemonade coming—if you have any idea who Steve Void, Nourishe, Chilla, or Kirinji are, you know much more than I do about them.
Another rap stretch—I cluster the most explicit stuff together so that it's easier to skip in case I'm playing this stuff in the car with my kids. Lil' Wayne has two verses here, both reminders that Wayne in second gear beats most rappers at full tilt, and I particularly like his free associations on dogs—Nate Dogg, shaggy dog, Westminster Dog Show, "roof"-less, Baja Men—in Kash Doll's "Kitten," which is...weird. I am a sucker for fake-sounding dog barks in novelty rap.
Kesha throws a mad, woke carnival in "Rich White Straight Men," Rodney Crowell does some class analysis and throws Leann Womack on at the end in "Flatland Hillbillies," and Carla Geneve continues a streak of Australian singer-songwriters whose lyrics I like just enough to stand out. It's almost impossible for me to pause on songs from my Spotify lists based on words, so there needs to be a previous association or a killer opening line. (Hers isn't killer, per se, but it got my attention.)
Then things get longer and slower, sunsets stretched out past 8:30PM, to be enjoyed from our roof for the last month we're in our place in Philly proper—we're moving to the quasi-burbs at the end of July. Erykah Badu messes around with Squeeze. Robota Bot (Roisin Murphy) was a hit over at the Jukebox. "Loa" and "Moje zycie, from Austria and Poland, respectively, take sounds associated with folk music from Haiti and, er, Poland, respectively.
And then I end with credit music from an Indonesian threequel, which put me in mind of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which we just finished binge-watching, as much as you can binge-watch for an hour a day. (I guess that used to just be called "watching"?) CXG was a tough sell to my wife, who groaned and eye-rolled her way through the uneven first season and almost bailed, but I'm glad we stuck it out. I have a lot of thoughts about some of the songs, and about the way (some of) the songs do things for the show that dialogue alone couldn't. Maybe later.
Things I wrote and liked:
Rehashed old thoughts on Aly and AJ but had little to say about their new stuff.
Took another crack at defining "modal rap." (I'm thinking about making a little YouTube video about it, so you can hear what I'm talking about.)
The 90's! (And good writing all around on this one.)
July 24, 2019: My Song Is Also Named Bort
Over at the Singles Jukebox, Edward O coins an ingenious phrase, "100% pure bort," to describe classic choruses that have been ground into diamond dust for the sake of some brute industrial repurposing. He's referring to Kygo's remix of Whitney Houston covering "Higher Love," in which the original's chorus serves as a mere bridge to a keyboard hook made from mangled bits of Whitney Houston's 1990 vocals taking the place of a chorus.
This tangled mess of syllables and sounds is sometimes referred to as a "post-chorus," and its structural purpose in modern pop music is related to the drop—the part where the bass comes in (or should come in) and everyone loses their shit and starts dancing. It can be hard these days to distinguish between a chorus and a post-chorus. In "Never Really Over" by Katy Perry (produced by EDM artist Zedd), there is an obvious bridge, then a sort of fake-out chorus ("Two years and just! Like! That!"), and then a post-chorus that is BETTER than the chorus. The part of the song that from c. 2005-2015 might have been the actual chorus—the kind of soaring, or in this case practically screamed-out, climax that Max Martin and Dr. Luke specialized in—is dampered by dropping out the beat all together at the beginning, then letting the drums creep back in for the next part, the post-chorus, which in this song is a sing-patter that approximates a sequencer ("Just-because-it's-over-doesn't-really-mean-it's-over"—it's like if Donna Summer was singing along to Giorgio Moroder's snyth instead of singing her own melody).
But true drops are few and far between these days as dubstep has morphed into EDM-pop. Songs consist almost entirely of verses and clumsy keyboard hooks. A friend of mine once said that he didn't like Annie's "Heartbeat" as much as other people did (this was back in 2004) because it sounded more like a keyboard hook than a proper chorus. I disagreed, but I do understand now how annoying it would be if every chorus sounded instead like a keyboard hook—because now all choruses are keyboard hooks.
I find bort an interesting concept for a few reasons. As an intellectual exercise, it is fascinating to me to see how ruthlessly one can drain the vibrancy of songs you have known perhaps since childhood. See, for example, DJ LEAD's remix of "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5, using the original's chorus as the build up to a truly unremarkable three-note musical figure built from an atonal exhalation. Grinding down that particular diamond of a chorus even requires DJ LEAD not only to drop the beat altogether at the start of the chorus ("Oh baby give me one more chance") but to actually fade out the last musical phrase altogether ("but now since I see you in his arms" literally disappears).
Bort, despite blooming from the same evolutionary branches of dance-music-as-pop, is almost the exact antithesis of bosh, a phenomenon where DJs of c. 10 years ago or so would excerpt choruses and turn them into a fireworks display, with a mercenary ear for the essential hook and zero shame. Scooter—bosh royalty—balloon original choruses or iconic melodies to almost cartoonish excess, like in "Ramp! The Logical Song," where the vocal melody is jackhammered in synth along with a chipmunk-voiced sample. Perhaps the hedonism and abandon of that era—like Girl Talk transforming "don't bore us get to the chorus" from an ethos into a pathology—finally curdled and left us with a reactionary sobriety, austerity even, where even the hint of a proper chorus is unfashionable. It's ironic, though, that the chopped up grunts and gibberish and synth sounds replacing those choruses often sound so desperate to get bodies on the floor moving, and so ineffective in that singular aim. Do these DJ's think they are gods—able to take "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls and somehow improve it with a few twiddles of their fingers? (I kind of like the resulting song, but it strikes me as less inventive than it is arrogant.)
I'm wondering what role "Gold" by Kiiara has here, a song so perfect that I'm somewhat surprised it never even cracked the Top Ten, and the song that comes to mind first when I think of random syllables spliced together successfully. A few key differences—most importantly, the chopped up syllabic mush in the chorus comes from inside an original song itself, giving the song an integrity and artistry that bort-pop lacks. It feels like a real chorus was constructed in careful decoupage. Also, technically the chorus scans: she's saying "Roof was fallin', let me, love me, fallin', I just know"; there's a thematic coherence that matches the sonic coherence. (But I think that's mostly post hoc justification. The song, as they say, slaps.)
But maybe the explanation is simpler—we've just fallen into a kind of gray area, where it's not quite OK to do a full-on EDM drop in lieu of a chorus, but traditional choruses seem passé. This has also created a weird little lane for "Old Town Road" to stay on top of the charts indefinitely—maybe kids love shouting along to it so much because there just aren't any damn CHORUSES anywhere to sing along to anymore? They're gonna take their chorus from "Old Town Road" and gonna ride until they can't no more—that is to say, until they have to listen to whatever replaces it at the top of the charts eventually.
August 13, 2019: July Mix (belated)
Hello all! Big changes afoot lifewise—new job, new house, new YOU. Well, maybe not that last one.
So not a whole lot to say about the July mix, which I managed to throw together before falling behind already on August—1800 songs across two weeks to check out...
There was a long Facebook conversation a year or so ago about what song would be that year's "Sexual," in reference to the peak Spotify-inflated trop-house-inflected Perfect Pop single by NEIKED and Dyo. I thought it was "Obsessed" by Maggie Lindemann. Others named "Disco Tits" by Tove Lo.
But this year it is most certainly "Harder" by Jax Jones f. Bebe Rexha (that's RAY-juh, just looked it up!!), which opens this mix. It is perfect, which is not necessarily to say it is GOOD, though I think it is. My son's favorite Bebe Rexha is "Last Hurrah," a song I reviewed over the Jukebox in reference to this whole Spotify listening project thingy way back when. (He also stumps for Avril's "Dumb Blonde," which is good, but not as nearly as good as "What the Hell," which is my vote for her most underrated post-"Girlfriend" single.)
[MIX]
REXHA
( )
CASSIE
Assorted thoughts in reverse order:
Cassie is back!
If anyone knows anything more than I do about Miss Platnum, do let me know. German Spotify has been putting her into my earbuds a lot and she finally got me with a truly lugubrious take on the old "Double Rainbow" Youtube video.
"Time Loop," a skit from a new IFC show that looks a bit like Documentary Now in terms of historical/genre fidelity, was very funny before I knew it was from the show. (I think the song scans funnier without the video!)
I seem to like every cover version of "Boo'd Up." Here's a bossa nova one.
To be written: a description of marshmallow mouth, as my sister calls it, a sort of vowel stew currently plaguing pop music that, like so many things that bother me in music these days, seems to come from Sweden maybe? Listen to how Laraw pronounces "cops" in "I Should Call the Cops." "I should call the ca-uw-oo-lps." What is that?? But the song's good.
LightSkinKeisha—funny!
Shygirl—less funny, but I like the sample! Pitchfork calls it a "blood-curdling scream" but it reminds me more of the Madeline Kahn gag in Young Frankenstein when she finally, er, makes it with Frankenstein.
Cubby—starts funny, then gets less so!
"Marakaka" reminds me of "Jungle Drum" by Emiliana Torrini.
I still didn't quite figure out what that melody is in "Arawa" by Electric Youth. It's super famous.
I am a sucker for a good Mozart sample, so "Ditch" by Empara Mi hits the spot.
McCartney!
Brubeck via Jarreau via Nas!
"Kiss My Fat Ass" is Trainor-esque, but much better than the 99.9% of Meghan Trainor songs that are unlistenable.
My wife will probably not appreciate that I am still writing impenetrably and now even MORE so because the URL links aren't working. Oh well—Tinyletter tells me very few people click through anyway, so Google if you want. Happy listening!
Wrote one thing I liked last month, a little riff on some of the personal writing I've been doing, in reference to a New Kids on the Block comeback (comeback-comeback?) single.
September 10, 2019: August Mix
Hello, all! This one's late not because of life reasons, of which there are some, but because there were a bunch of songs released on August 30 and it took me forever to get through them—I ended up keeping one from the whole damn batch, a new low, the ridiculous "Arriba" by Clean Bandit.
The meh-ness of this crop—nothing too far above a [7] in the ratings—gives me reason to reflect a bit on the Lost World of iPop, the commercial-ready indie-leaning pop that soundtracked Apple commercials (and others) from 2004 to c. 2016.
This is on the heels of a strange article making the rounds about a so-called "forgotten era" of music from 2002-2012 in Esquire. It's weird, because this was my most active period of critical listening and music buying, and I have many (many) of the CDs specifically called out as forgotten in the article!
It's more likely that streaming era songs will be forgotten, since the streaming infrastructure is built on both the market dominance of a single streaming interface (right now that's probably Spotify) and the fragile agreement of record labels to participate. Monopolization of said labels makes it more likely that once they agree, lots of songs will be available—but the flipside of this is that when songs are NOT available, they can be hard to find in permanent ways, and any song that originates but then disappears from Spotify is, for all intents and purposes, gone.
I've been keeping Spotify lists since 2011, and according to those lists, a sizeable chunk of songs have already disappeared completely. I can see that they used to be on Spotify, because they appear in grayed-out text. But it's not easy to find them elsewhere—occasionally a YouTube link, but rarely little else.
So perhaps the culmination of this project will be something like the Hard to Find 45s series, the digitization of one-hit-wonders and non-trendy but popular styles from the 60s and 70s. Call it Hard to Find Spotifies.
Here's August:
[MIX]
BAKER GRACE
( )
MOON PAW PRINT
So, iPop! Not infrequently in my work as a high school teacher, I would perk up when music coming from computer speakers or loudly from headphones would get my toes a-tappin', and invariably it would be the soundtrack to an ad playing before the real song started.
I don't think that, say, JoJo or Cassie's self-titled debut is "forgotten" by any stretch (I heard "Me & U" in a cell phone store a week ago!) but these commercial soundtrack songs will almost certainly fade into ether, and at their height, iPop probably reached a lot more ears than a given non-blockbuster pop song.
Fittingly, I have given much of my playlist this month over to the heirs of iPop, several songs that sound like they must come from a Target commercial or something but most assuredly do not (yet).
No semi-cryptic descriptions this time out, just lots of Back to School Sale Tunes, including Kesha's contribution to the Angry Birds movie sequel and at least one group that reminds me of Persephone's Bees, a "forgotten" act that I still remember fondly, having long kept my promo.
Enjoy-ish!
September 17, 2020: Tomorrow Is a Hypothesis
Hello everyone! This is your occasional reminder that I am a person who exists, no big whoop. Been holding down the fort for a year—still working, family's OK, etc. etc.
The main thing that might interest YOU (I think?) is an ongoing playlist of songs of 2020 and some links to my writing. I have songs through Q2 and will have Q3 up there at the end of September.
My Spotify trawling has been about 25% as successful this year as it was last year, despite hearing MORE songs per week. So it's losing its appeal as a new music radar.
I am also doing some more writing with what I think is some personal/professional harmony as opposed to the two personas I've kind of developed in parallel in music and education. That stuff is all here:
https://medium.com/@dcoopermoore
A few pieces I really like from it:
Reading Heidi During the Pandemic (Heidi was SO GOOD. We're on to LOTR after a brief diversion in Green Gables)
Rainbow Connection (rainbows, kids, grief, "Inside Out" revisited)
Grief and mourning rituals during COVID
Hope you're doing OK.