What else is new, we're in Europe

Mix 40: Superstar toddlers, the long shadow of Rihanna, more Francophone African pop in bold primary colors, and Ren and Stimpy's baile funk ethos.

Feliz feliz alegria alegria

No musical discourse to rehash in the intro this week, just a few links:

• Joe Muggs has a nice piece on the burgeoning amapiano scene in the UK that makes a link between amapiano and UK funky, something I finally grokked about a year ago. Here’s a Bandcamp primer from 2020 on the ongoing relationship between South African and UK dance music.

• Leah Isobel has a fun interview with UK group Heavenly about riding the success of left-field TikTok virality.

• Tom Ewing has been writing up his Uncool Music Challenge selections (here’s the most recent installment). If I hadn’t just finished the 1962 writing, I might have done something similar. But maybe my next project’s not far off: my accidental mis-posting of “Into the Groove” as a 1983 song (it’s 1985) has led me to think that ‘83 will be the next year I tackle.¹

• A few former Pitchfork staffers have started a new music criticism site, Hearing Things, in a bit more of a standard old school webzine format than a writer’s collective newsletter like Flaming Hydra. I’m pretty ambivalent about what profitable music writing bundles could or should look like these days (says the guy who’s been writing for free for 20 years) but if these folks can figure out a way to make it sustainable, power to them. I just hope there’s a decent archive—that’s one thing that really worries me about the newsletter/Patreon models.

• And speaking of archiving, Frank Kogan has preserved a few of my early mash-up projects that I assumed were lost to a hard drive crash a decade ago. Here’s the first mash-up project I completed before I made my teenpop albums, scrambling up the Singles Jukebox’s most controversial tracks of 2010. (You can see the ongoing TSJ Controversy Index here.)

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Previous 2024 mixes

MIX 40: WHAT ELSE IS NEW, WE’RE IN EUROPE

1. LISA: Moonlit Floor

I won’t pretend that this “Kiss Me”-riding song by BLACKPINK solo breakout LISA (my second-favorite all-caps Lisa by some distance) is anything but lazy, but I do keep returning to it because it is very much an A-pop song in spirit (it’s another shameless “Say So” clone). The more I inhabit A-pop as a bit, the more I think there’s something to it. But rather than go on about that, I will just note that it is amusing to me that this is being released at the same time Sixpence None the Richer is putting out their first new material with their original line-up in 20 years.

2. XG: IYKYK

I inaccurately referred to XG as K-rap in their last appearance, so this enjoyable middle-of-the-road effort from them is a good time to belatedly fact-check myself: XG is a Japanese group based in Korea. Patrick St. Michel’s newsletter provides more background on the decline of the Avex media conglomerate as a tastemaker in the J-pop ecosystem. It also includes his contention that “Woke Up” is “probably still the worst thing I’ve heard in 2024.”

I’ve mostly stopped keeping track of songs I don’t like (I very much do like “Woke Up”!), so I only end up hating on songs that go out of their way to stick in my craw for some reason. This is how I ended up being the lone voice of dissent in the write-ups of “Hot to Go!” over on the Jukebox.

3. Ashna Lweri: Uma Oma Ayi

A four-year-old “rising superstar” born in the DRC and now going viral from Kampala. This put me in mind of the even younger infant star of Champion DJ’s “Baako,” a Côte D’Ivoire Autotune experiment from 2009, which I was surprised to find was no longer (easily) findable on YouTube. So I made it available again — of course, that baby would be at least 15 now.

4. Sho Madjozi f. Gemini Major, Ntando Yamahlubi: Kadigong

The first Sho Madjozi single of 2024, and what a difference a year makes — the Afrobeats/amapiano blend that “Chale” signaled is so ingrained across African pop and beyond that it feels like years since it was released. This song aims lower but it hits its marks.

5. Pabi Cooper, Focalistic, Thebuu f. Lajere man & DJ DADAMAN: Pabi Jo

Meanwhile, this amapiano song might be the closest thing to what I had in mind when I said, back in early 2023, that Rihanna should make an amapiano album, even though Tyla released something closer to the album that Rihanna actually might have made. At any rate, Rihanna is quickly approaching ten years of retirement and I still sense her presence (absence?) everywhere.

6. Thakzin, Brenden Praise: Njalo

Thakzin is decisively out of the limelight/zeitgeist in a scene that ages in dog years and where three or four years of success is like having a legacy career, but everything he puts out has something to recommend it. In this one I like the soft whistle punctuation throughout.

7. Darshan Raval: Jeeja

The popularity of Indian pop remains a bit of a black box for me, likely due to my ignorance about the broader entertainment ecosystem there. Every so often I come across something that sounds massive like this and it has the millions of views to back it up, but I’ll also come across much worse songs on various “viral” lists that have hundreds of millions of views, or songs that sound just as massive and only have a few thousand views. Would need to have more than a passing fondness for the music I do end up liking to explore any further, though.

8. Anna Sofia f. LZee: Monaco

Speaking of unpredictable audience metrics, I can’t make heads or tales of Canadian artist Anna Sofia, whom I featured in 2023 with what I called “light hyperpop” (did not have the “landfill hyperpop” descriptor yet!), only to find that since then that track (“Achoo!”) has racked up 300,000 views. Meanwhile, this video has a little over 300 views. It deserves more, though: the ending might be the most annoying thing I’ve heard all year, and is somehow the most irritating use of the phrase “I love it” in a year that already includes Camila Cabello’s “I Luv It.”

9. NLE Choppa, Whethan f. Carey Washington: Slut Me Out 3

“Slut Me Out” is now a trilogy, but I’m not sure which film trilogy to compare it to: each version is leaps and bounds better than the last.² The first is practically a dirge, the second is still dark but has some brighter house elements in the beat. But this one is in a different category altogether — a day-glo hipster dance party that finds NLE Choppa rapping like Dorrough on “Ice Cream Paint Job.”

10. Niniola f. Pheelz: Formula

Naija pop star makes bulletproof Afrobeats sound easy. Helps that she seems genuinely bulletproof.

11. Bims: Lamba

Naija pop also-ran also makes bulletproof Afrobeats sound easy, even without the kevlar.

12. Renard Barakissa, Kadirov Mania: Mon combat

13. Bass Thioung: C’est Dieu

14. Nova Binks f. Tazeboy, Renard Barakissa: 1 cui

The coupé décalé and Senegal playlists I found a few weeks ago have started to pay out, though several of them mix in older songs, which makes them impossible to permanently integrate into my playlist system.³ They led me to Renard Barakissa from Côte D’Ivoire and Bass Thioung from Senegal, two finds to keep tabs on. (I wonder if you could create a video search for Senegalese music videos that just searches for the brightest primary color palettes?)

15. DJ Blakes, Mc Nem Jm: O Retorno do Palhaço das Trevas

Baile funk track of the week is not the best one I’ve heard this week (for one thing, have finally gotten around to checking out more music by Ari Falcão based on Frank Kogan’s post on her). But this one got the nod for the maniacal laughter throughout.

The laughter got me thinking about the formative childhood experience of obsessing over Ren and Stimpy, a show I didn’t even think of ever showing, or even mentioning, to my own kids. Ren and Stimpy reminds me of some of what I like in baile funk — giddy madness, punchlines that aren’t funny but take the wind out of you, sudden pathos either underlined or undercut with the most disturbing thing you’ve ever seen, and all of it in the service of something that’s supposed to be a real hoot, and sort of is, but is also…something else.

Unlike baile funk, Ren and Stimpy was always hemmed in a bit by its dead-end irony (even though as a kid I didn’t really pick up on this, and there are moments that transcend John K.’s sneer). Baile funk has both the grotesqueness of Ren and Stimpy and the sincere rascally anarchy of Looney Tunes.

16. Gabry Ponte f. AVAO: Fuera

I mostly know Gabry Ponte from his work with Eiffel 65, so was surprised to hear such a hard techno track. But I suppose this is exactly what a novelty Eurotechno song should sound like 25 years later.

17. Nídia & Valentina: Mata

Príncipe artist Nídia has paired up with composer Valentina Magaletti for an album of lush experimental pop, Estradas. The whole thing is great.

18. Mother Mother: Oh Ana (Mother Version) [2005]

One minor subplot of my dedication to the People’s Pop polls is that I got very into Canadian band Mother Mother, to the point that I’ll now listen to every new release, or old one. This is a track from their 2005 debut Mother, recently re-released as an EP of songs previously unavailable on streaming.

19. lily: アイボリーの街

Lily gets tagged as “Vocaloid Lily” in a google search, but it’s a “no the other one” situation—she’s real! Sweet, slight.

20. Lou-Adriane Cassidy: Dis-moi dis-moi dis-moi

Choral pop from a Montreal singer-songwriter that stretches out for almost two minutes of wind-up before going (mildly) disco.

20. Chiminyo, Pouya Ehsaei, Sam Warner: Avalon

Improvisatory post-rock of which there is an endless supply churned out from music programs like unemployable humanities PhDs in a woefully oversaturated academic market, but having seen something like this performed in person recently after a long time avoiding the general public not attending live music, I get it — looks fun to play and sounds great in an attic.

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That’s it! Until next time, improvise with your friends in an attic whenever possible, especially if you are overqualified for the position.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Anna Sofia f. LZee’s “Monaco.”

1. I had a different Madonna song from ‘83 slotted in, but replaced it with “Groove” in the same chronological spot in my playlist. Woops! This led me to take a closer look at the Acclaimed ‘83 singles list, and my gut-level aversion to almost all of it told me there was some work to do.

2. Mad Max? No, would need to go straight from Road Warrior to Fury Road. John Wick? No, the first one’s too good. Maybe the Leone Dollars trilogy?

3. One annoying feature of curators gaming playlists for attention is their tendency to copy and paste the same 50-100 tracks into a playlist each week so it looks like the playlist has been recently updated. Those playlists often mix in popular songs from the past 1-5 years, but present them as “new music” updated weekly — I can’t keep them in the rotation of my c. 100 playlists or I’ll end up manually weeding out hundreds of older tracks and things I’ve heard before.